WOODLAND, Maine — Members of the Woodland school board touched base with town selectmen on April 21. Board members Wanda Anderson and Travis Prashaw stopped by Tuesday’s selectmen’s meeting to discuss current negotiations with RSU 39 and about being approached by the Washburn school district to send student there for high school.
The current contract Woodland school has with RSU 39 is based on a set amount of students. Written into the contract is a stipulation that states if Woodland lost a fair number of students it could renegotiate.
“We’ve lost a lot of kids in Woodland,” Anderson said. “We’ve asked Caribou to renegotiate and we’d like to go away from a set amount back to individual amount.”
Woodland school and Union 122 held a meeting on April 9 with Washburn school board representatives at the New Sweden school. Woodland and Union 122 walked away from the meeting with the realization that if they sent their high school students to Washburn they would be saving a substantial amount of money.
“What they’re offering compared to what we’re paying Caribou is a significant difference,” Anderson said. Anderson then suggested holding a possible town meeting to discuss the idea of switching to Washburn in the near future.
“Do you think they’d get the same quality education at Washburn?” Selectman Tom Drew asked.
“I think they would get the quality education,” Prashaw said.
Drew asked board members if a parent objected to the idea of sending their child to Washburn if they could still send them to Caribou.
“Right now they still go through the superintendent,” Anderson said. “If we don’t feel it’s in the best interest of the child, if it’s just a parent’s choice, we tend to say ‘no’.” Anderson did state Woodland school isn’t making any major moves at the moment.
“If the bottom line tells you this is the best thing economically for all communities involved it might be the time to move on that,” Drew said.
After discussions of a potential shift in students, Anderson brought up that Woodland school was considering not asking for an increase to their budget, “We’d like to try to keep the budget where it is,” Anderson said. “We’re still waiting on our final numbers from the state, we’ll probably have to make some cuts like we have the past few years.”
Typically the Woodland school board refrains from asking for an increase for a few years and then approaches town selectmen for some help. Anderson asked selectmen what their preference was when asking for an increase. The idea of a 1/2 percent increase every year was proposed to prevent larger requests down the road.
“This would be the year to ask,” Drew said. “I believe we’ve saved half a mil here already if that helps you in your negotiations. Don’t be afraid to ask if you need a little because we’ve done a good job on this side of the road. We’re all in this together.”
Selectman Carl Grant suggested small increases seem to work easier than trying to hold back and ask for a large increase later on.
In the end school board members asked for a .5-mil increase in the town’s share of the Woodland school budget. Since selectmen can’t approve an increase in school funding, the proposal of raising the mil rate will be on the town meeting agenda.
