A northern Penobscot County school reorganization committee will pursue dividing the area into two school districts, but proponents for the Katahdin region portion doubt the idea will fly with their towns, they said Wednesday.

Under new state laws passed during the last legislative session, East Millinocket, Medway, Millinocket and Woodville could form a school unit because the towns have 1,000 or more students, about 1,175, and because Millinocket has no municipality to its west, said John Neel, a committee member and chairman of the SAD 31 board of directors.

The other possible new school unit would include SADs 30, 31 and 67; Unions 110 and 113; the communities of Greenbush, Lowell, Seboeis Plantation and Grand Falls Township in Penobscot County; and possibly Bancroft and Glenwood Plantation in Aroostook County; and Medford in Piscataquis County.

“It’s highly likely that we will go that route,” SAD 67 Superintendent Michael Marcinkus said Wednesday. “We have to get a plan in. If we don’t have a plan in on time, every district will face a penalty, and that penalty could potentially include the state withholding its state subsidy for the current year in January.

“That’s huge,” he added.

According to the new state law, consolidation efforts must be ready for voter referendum no later than Jan. 30, 2009. During a meeting Tuesday night at Region III Vocational School in Lincoln, committee members agreed to try to get a two-unit plan ready for communities’ review by Nov. 14 – which does not give them a lot of time, Neel said. The committee has many members familiarized with consolidation from last year’s efforts, but many details must still be attended to.

“We have to move fast,” he said Wednesday.

Education Commissioner Susan Gendron and the Maine Department of Education must also approve consolidation plans before they can go to voters or municipalities.

Millinocket School Committee Chairman Thomas Malcolm recognized the deadline pressure and other arguments for splitting the proposed RSU 17 into two smaller districts, and believes in them, but doesn’t see much hope of their success.

He, his school board and other Millinocket officials have pursued the same basic idea with East Millinocket, Medway and Woodville for more than a year without success. And Woodville officials objected to a Katahdin consolidation again during Tuesday’s meeting.

“They do not like the whole idea,” Malcolm said Wednesday, calling the new law’s new permissiveness “just what we have been trying to do for all this time.”

Yet Millinocket in particular, Malcolm said, must convince the other Katahdin towns to join the smaller school unit or Millinocket will be forced to join the larger, more southern unit – an unwieldy proposition.

“We cannot afford to do it [operate a school system] by ourselves,” Malcolm said. “We have to partner with somebody. We’re like a lot of other school systems around the state in that way.”

The good news, Marcinkus said, is that municipalities and school units that make a good-faith effort to assemble consolidation plans won’t face severe penalties under the new state law.

The committee’s vote does not necessarily prohibit other efforts to create smaller school units within the proposed RSU 17. The committee meets again at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Region III. The public is invited.

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