School Reorganization Committee & AOS Budget Proposal Highlights of Meeting

Nov 15, 2023

BAR HARBOR—The AOS School Board meeting began Monday with no public comment and quickly segued to the superintendent’s report, but the highlights of the meeting were the draft fiscal year 2025 budget and a quick discussion about the system’s potential reorganization.

BUDGET

The budget was hot off the presses, Zboray said, of the draft, which will be revised for the AOS December meeting.

“We have some time to look at it,” Zboray told those gathered.

The proposed budget is $2,839,177 in revenue, a difference of $307,721 or 12.16%. The assessment total and difference is $231,162 or 10.33%.

Student and staff support (office of curriculum) increases by about $21,000 (4.73%) to $468,909.
Student and staff support (technology) increases by about $83,951 (26.59%) to $399,766.
System administration increases by about $143,770 (15.87%) to $1,049,916.
Special education increases by $308,721 (12.16%) to $2,839,177.

Then there are the assessments:

The budget has a new position for a human resources coordinator to support the business office and also support the principals. The salary for that position is currently estimated in the budget at $62,400. Health insurance is an additional $25k.

“That’s one of the major pieces of the budget,” Zboray said.

“The HR department is much more than a payroll person and that’s our current arrangement,” Conners Emerson Principal Dr. Heather Webster said. “I do spend an inordinate amount of time with the hiring process.”

She said sometimes more complex human resources questions end up going to legal services, which can be costly, and wouldn’t be necessary if the AOS had its own human resources officer. She also said that having a human resources person would improve her relationship with teachers’ unions when there are questions or issues.

REORGANIZATION COMMITTEE

Superintendent Zboray also gave a quick update on the AOS’s reorganization efforts.

In August the Maine Commissioner of Education gave the okay for the MDI Regional School System to create a Reorganization Planning Committee. That committee would create a proposal to restructure the school system.

That committee formation is just one step of many for a school restructuring to take place. 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. That board would be elected by the voters of the towns involved (Bar Harbor, Cranberry Isles, Frenchboro, 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.

The committee itself must have members that represent each school, the towns, and the public.

The original reorganization committee members are reaching out to their municipalities to find additional members to be part of the committee. At the end of the month, they hope to have the entire team named, Zboray said.

At the same time, the staff are organizing more information for the public to increase its awareness. That information on the website (look to the right upper corner where there is a drop-down menu) includes:

POTENTIAL REORGANIZATION OPTIONS

The options are not set in stone, but the the possibilities that currently stand out are detailed in the images below.

OTHER DISCUSSION

Superintendent Zboray said that there are 1,412 students registered in the school system and that they are slowly chipping away at staffing needs. They are still in need of education technicians and long-term substitutes.

During his comments, Zboray gave a shout-out to the RSS Crisis Team that serves at a moment’s notice when there is a need in any of the schools. The team rose to the challenge and supported one of the schools for both its own event and then for the events in Lewiston in the past month, he said. The team is made up of guidance counselors and social workers at all of the schools.

“They are a tremendous group,” Zboray said.

He also told board members that the bus routes for the high school are being rethought for next year

Julie Keblinsky said that one of the greatest challenges for standardized testing is the timing of it in the fall. Testing in late October and looking at students’ data in November isn’t as helpful as it could be because the information comes back so late in the year. The school is giving feedback to the state about this, hoping that the dates of testing can be changed so that the results can be more actionable. Teachers and staff take that data and then apply it to each student’s learning as well as looking at the schools and system as a whole.

According to a brief given to AOS members,

“Cindy Lambert has crafted a letter titled "Feedback to Krista Averill at the DOE about the MTYA" on our behalf to address your concerns. We are committed to working together to improve the MTYA for the benefit of our students and educators,”

The system hit the 80 percent mark for reading scores. For math, the high average was 76.7 percent.

The AOS’s next meeting is Monday, December 11, 2023 at the MDI High School Library. Meetings typically begin at 6 or 6:30 p.m.