AURORA – Fired SAD 63 Superintendent Louise Regan is working again as superintendent for Community School District 8.

At their November meeting CSD 8 board members asked Regan to fulfill her contract, Joe Lacerda, school board member, said Monday.

“SAD 63 hired an interim superintendent and didn’t involve us,” he said. “We had to have one. We asked her to fulfill her contract with us, which goes to the end of the [school] year.”

Regan’s contract with CSD 8 ends on June 30.

Until this summer, Regan had been the joint superintendent for CSD 8 and SAD 63 with both school districts sharing central office staff in a long-running agreement. Under the agreement, a joint board composed of representatives from both school districts would meet annually to review the superintendent’s performance and discuss the central office budget.

In July, however, the SAD 63 school board and the SAD 63-CSD 8 joint board fired Regan, though no representatives from CSD 8 were present during the joint board’s vote.

The CSD 8 board had voted not to attend any joint board meetings concerning Regan in order to avoid any legal liability, since she is suing SAD 63 and five of the eight school board members who were on the SAD 63 panel a year ago.

Regan is claiming defamation and violation of her rights related to actions taken at an Oct. 22, 2007, SAD 63 meeting, and the subsequent investigation into her conduct and her firing.

“They were the ones who let the superintendent go, not us,” Lacerda said. “We did not want to get involved in the lawsuits.”

Lacerda said searching for and hiring a superintendent mid-year would cost his district “an arm and a leg” and added that “it didn’t cost us any more” to have Regan come back on board.

“We offered her the money we would have paid her anyway,” he said.

The agreement to share the cost of central office staff between SAD 63 and CSD 8, which Lacerda says has been going on for “something like 30 years,” continues.

“We still share central office personnel,” he said. “It’s just the superintendent we don’t share.”

The two districts share a transportation and operations director, a secretary and a business manager.

This year, CSD 8 paid just over $48,500 to SAD 63 for its portion of the central office budget. Lacerda said Regan received about $11,000 of that amount in past years.

Before being fired in July, Regan was placed on administrative leave in April pending the conclusion of an investigation into her conduct. In materials posted on the SAD 63 Web site, the school board stated that it “lost confidence in Ms. Regan’s trustworthiness and has lost confidence in her ability to lead the district.”

CSD 8 serves the communities of Aurora, Amherst, Great Pond and Osborn, while SAD 63 serves Clifton, Eddington and Holden.

nricker@bangordailynews.net

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