MDI School Reorganization Could Potentially Go Before Voters This June
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by The Witham Family Hotels Charitable Fund.
BAR HARBOR—A vote on whether or not the schools in the Mount Desert Island region might reorganize may be as soon as June 2025, according to a tentative timeline on the MDI Regional School System’s website.
A committee has been meeting with representatives from the system and multiple towns. Prior to the vote, there will be community meetings in each town to share the plan and hear feedback. These are tentatively scheduled for April. In May 2025, the plan will be revised and then sent to the Maine Department of Education for review.
If the reorganization is approved by the towns, the schools will continue to function as they are now for 2025 and 2026 with the goal of creating a budget in 2026 and 2027. Teachers would be assigned to schools. Contracts would be negotiated. The 2027-2028 school year would be the first under the new plan.
The restructuring would have to eventually be approved by voters of each town that is impacted. It also means that if approved there would be just one budget for the schools and just one school board for the system rather than Bar Harbor having its own board and Trenton having another and so on. That board would be elected by the voters of the towns involved (Bar Harbor, Cranberry Isles, Frenchboro, Town of Mount Desert, Southwest Harbor, Tremont, Trenton, and Swan’s Island). Similarly, teachers and staff would not be employed by each school but by the district.
Currently the schools are in AOS 91, which allows each town to have a separate budget. According to the documents shared at an earlier meeting, the reorganization effort “is to reorganize its current structure from a collection of individual schools into a coherent and more equitable model to better serve our students and educators. It makes sense to look at how we can provide the best education for everyone with our collective resources.”
WHAT WILL IT LOOK LIKE?
The Reorganization Planning Committee (RPC) chose Model 5B out of multiple options. This model creates a middle school for all seventh and eighth graders at Pemetic in Southwest Harbor. Southwest Harbor students in pre-kindergarten through sixth grade would head to Mount Desert Elementary School.
Then, Southwest Harbor students could also chose between Trenton, Tremont, Bar Harbor, and Mount Desert, but there would be no guaranteed busing. This means that Trenton, Tremont, Bar Harbor, and Mount Desert would all be pre-kindergarten through sixth grade schools.
For high school students in Cranberry Isles, Frenchboro, Swan’s Island, and Trenton, the choice of high school would still be theirs.
WHAT HAPPENS IF A TOWN SAYS NO?
The voting piece is still a bit under development, School Superintendent Mike Zboray told AOS Committee members, Monday night.
At the February 12 meeting, the RPC will be talking about voting and when it comes to the referendum: will it be an all-or-nothing referendum or will it move forward if a certain number of towns vote in favor?
That’s something the RPC gets to decide in its process, Zboray said.
If a town says no but the referendum passes, then that town would choose and pay for its own superintendent, special education services, and financial services.
HOW WOULD THE SYSTEM BE GOVERNED?
The RSU would have a board. Each town would send members to this board. Those members would be voted on by the voters of the entire district, not just the voters of the town. This is called “at large representation with residency requirement.”
The board would create the budget, policy, and future planning.
It would make decisions for each school.
Each school would have its own advisory council as well. That council’s job would be to advise.
WILL SCHOOLS CLOSE?
In preparation for some public worries, there is a fact sheet that states that schools will not be closed unless it has been “replaced with a new one with approval by the voters of that residing town.”
Similarly, a district can’t sell or close a building without offering it to the town. If a school building is not used as a school, the district can lease it. The process of how to close a school is mandated by state statute.
TRANSPORTATION
Students will travel to school on busses or personal vehicles as they do now. According to a fact sheet put out by the system, students in high school and middle school will travel the farthest.
“Their estimated bus ride would be a maximum of 40 minutes. Southwest Harbor PK-6 students would have a 30 minute bus ride or less, depending on the option chosen,” the fact sheet states.
HOW IT MIGHT WORK FOR BUDGETS AND DEBTS
According to a summary of minutes from an August 14 meeting, “The group discussed the various funding models and the time periods laid out in each. Consensus was reached on a cost-sharing model that would start with the high school’s current formula of 67% valuation / 33% enrollment the first year and go to 80% valuation / 20% enrollment the second year. This would achieve the goal of taxpayers paying similarly for the cost of education regardless of the town they live in.”
Debt was discussed at an October 9 meeting. There were multiple options that were narrowed to two possibilities. The first has the new RSU assume all debt before the RSU formation. The second has the RSU assume “only a negotiated portion of the debt assumed before the formation of the RSU over a scheduled period of time.”
POWERSCHOOL HACK
There has been no new news on the recent Powerschool hack. A data breach for the Mount Desert Island regional school community has prompted the school system to offer free credit monitoring for adults and identity protection services for minors, School Superintendent Mike Zboray said last week.
If you have any immediate questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Luis Jones-Rodriguez, AOS 91 Technology Coordinator at luis.jonesrodriguez@mdirss.org
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
https://www.mdirss.org/page/aos-reorganization
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