Staff Writer
The effort to form a consolidated school organization for several central Aroostook County schools, including Caribou and Fort Fairfield, restarted last week.
However, most participants meeting May 14 in Woodland appeared frustrated and confused regarding the latest changes made by the recently concluded session of the Maine Legislature. “If the lawyers can’t figure it out and the (state) Department of Education can’t figure it out, what are we doing here?” asked Patricia Anderson, a consolidation member from Westmanland Plantation.
The comment came after nearly two hours of explanation and discussion with Mary Jane McCalmon, an educational consultant working with the state education department on consolidation.
The panel, known as Regionalization Planning Committee 2, is composed of boards in Caribou, Fort Fairfield, Limestone, Caswell, Stockholm, New Sweden, Woodland and Westmanland Plantation.
McCalmon said that that changes to the school consolidation law allows communities more flexibility regarding cost sharing and offers alternative organizational structures.
“The department has been trying to figure out what this AOS might look like,” said McCalmon.
According to a diagram she distributed, McCalmon said that each town could develop its own budget, which would be passed up to a regional board for final consideration. It would not be similar to a school union, where each member town can decide its own financial plan.
“All this is preliminary thinking at the department level,” McCalmon said.
The group had several questions regarding budget structure.
“It’s important to understand how they take information from schools and what the subsidy check will be,” said Dan Foster, Fort Fairfield’s town manager. “Some districts are more efficient that others.”
Art Thompson from Limestone inquired as to how reserve funds will be treated. McCalmon said that the funds would be carried over to the new organization, but could be used to offset a member community’s share of the cost of the new school committee.
“It’s up to us to use our Aroostook County creativity to come up with something that works for us,” said Stev Rogeski, a board member from Fort Fairfield.
The consultant offered to get the answers to the panel’s questions “to the extent that anyone has them at this point.”
A suggestion was made by Michael Sandstrom of Stockholm that the superintendents develop a plan that can be considered by the entire board. One superintendent, Marc Gendron of Fort Fairfield, responded that the school executives might not able to do better than attorneys who have working on the new law.
Caribou City Manager Steve Buck said the panel needs to focus on what will work for the region, noting that four months have been lost while the Legislature has been changing the law.
“We should be talking about what works for us,” Buck said. “If the state can’t answer questions about their law, they need to lengthen the timeframe until they can answer the questions.”
A plan for consolidation must be submitted to the state by Dec. 15, while the communities are scheduled to vote on their towns’ proposal on Jan. 30.
Co-chairman Sam Collins of Caribou called for and received a consensus on having the superintendents address the issue and report back at the next meeting on Tuesday, June 3 to be held in Caswell.
In other business, the board also decided to apply for a $10,000 grant to conduct a facilities study from the state.
