MDI schools reorg plan still sketchy as clock ticks down on votes in 5 towns

Southwest Harbor to bear the heaviest load; Mount Desert charting its own path

MOUNT DESERT, May 14, 2025 - April came and went. Now, with only days left in May, the committee charged with reorganizing the lower schools on MDI, Trenton and surrounding islands has yet to hold a single public forum as promised. And it wants a vote by November.

MDI High School opened in 1968 by combining Bar Harbor High School, Pemetic High School and Mount Desert High School (which previously merged with Gilman).

It took 20 years of discussions, meetings and three consolidation votes - 1949, 1959 and 1965 - before it finally won approval.

The high school was a cautionary tale. The Reorganization Plan Committee ought to take heed.

Reorg committee failed to meet its own published timeline

It’s already had a major misstep when it tried to prod Hancock County’s giant ATM - aka, the Town of Mount Desert with its $3.2 billion war chest - to help pay for Bar Harbor’s new $113 million school.

Elected officials in Mount Desert did not mince words. “Don’t even try,” they told the school RPC.

My article on Feb. 25 was the first public disclosure of that fissure. The $113 million included borrowing cost over 25 years for the school. (Politicians rarely mention the cost of borrowing in public discussions, only the principal, $63 million.)

The reorg committee then pivoted to a new plan:

“The RPC proposal is to leave capital debt (new construction or renovations) with the town that assumed it before the formation of the RSU; the RSU assumes operational debt,” according to the RPG web page posted on April 11.

There was already much buyers’ remorse in Bar Harbor. The recent rupture at the MDI Hospital over its closing of its birthing unit shined a light on the reality that MDI is not making enough babies.

Folks began asking how the school board and Town Council came up with enrollment projections to justify the most expensive project in town history.

Since the current school district, AOS 91, was rebranded in 2009 when Trenton joined, total district enrollment has fallen from 1,056 to 918. Bar Harbor went from 436 to 347.

Now that the debt is all Bar Harbor’s to settle, the RPC has less than six months to engage the public in what still is a daunting task with more moving parts than the number of planes circling Newark Airport at any given minute. This reorg involves twice as many grades as the high school, not counting preschool.

So what’s the RPC doing? It is enmeshed in minutiae, debating how to account for the small reserves some towns may have accumulated in their coffers and other trivial matters.

Dear voter and/or parent: Has anyone reached out recently to seek your view? How familiar are you with the current plan?

The RPC-posted FAQs online are opaque, out of date and filled with unanswered questions.

Example:

To the question, “What if a town votes not to join the RSU (Regional Schools Unit)?” The RPC answer?

"The ultimate goal is for all municipalities to approve the plan.

Supported option

• Yes votes. Trenton, Bar Harbor, Southwest, Tremont, Mount Desert

• No votes. One or more of the outer island towns. We want the outer islands to be part of the RSU, but their no vote will not stop the RSU from forming. “

(Did they hire a Jesuit to write that?)

Here is the answer: If one of the Big Five votes no, the RSU is dead. The island towns have virtually no say.

In another section it stated, “SWH families will also have the option of school choice without guaranteed transportation.”

Superintendent Mike Zboray said that was incorrect. There will be transportation provided.

The reorg committee is going down a disturbingly similar route as the Chapter 50 fiasco in Bar Harbor last year when the town manager, town attorney and Town Council spun tales bordering on prevarication. (Remember the confusion around whether citizens could change the agreement in two years or five?)

Chapter 50 was the failed attempt by the Town Council and town manager to repeal the second citizens’ vote to cap cruise ship visitation and allow cruise ships a generous five-year deal. They fast-tracked the proposal allowing little time for vetting as Town Manager James Smith was making up details on the fly deep into the weeks before the vote last November. They even hired a College of the Atlantic professor as a moderator for a forum who was quoted by the Bangor Daily News questioning whether citizens fully understood what they were voting for in 2022, the first vote to restrict passengers. (This guy teaches government at COA).

The schools reorg is even more complicated and involves five towns.

Here are the major items remaining for voters to consider:

• Should member towns create a Regional Schools Unit with one board instead of nine to replace the current Frankensteinish AOS 91 (Alternative Organizational Structure)? The administration now must prepare nine budgets, attend 10 school board meetings every month, including the uber AOS board, and manage nine account centers. The presence of Zboray - a class guy and top-notch administrator - is required at every annual town meeting. As of this writing, he still had four to go. The RSU is the only slam-dunk, must-have change by voters, reducing the total number of board members from 34 to 15. It would allow educators to educate more and spend less time juggling calendars and shuffling spread sheets.

• If approved, the RSU would consolidate Grades 7 and 8 at Southwest Harbor’s Pemetic School, which will no longer be PreK-8. Most of their elementary school children will be bused to Mount Desert - the “default option” - with the caveat that some students may attend other elementary schools. The details of this remain sketchy. This will be the most contentious topic.

• Should the new RSU copy the high school funding mechanism with one third of a town’s assessment based on enrollment and two thirds based on valuation? That always has and will continue to disadvantage Mount Desert.

• All future funding decisions will be decided by the new board. If Tremont wanted an addition, for example, it would be decided by the RSU board. The upside is that cost would be spread over all the members.

How will this affect your child?

Politicians like Val Peacock, chair of the Bar Harbor Town Council, played the parent guilt card hard when she campaigned for the new school.

No doubt the reorg committee will do the same.

Already, Zboray is pitching the pedagogical benefits as the core rationale for the consolidation of a middle school.

“It's pretty well documented that is good in terms of project-based and place-based learning,” Zboray said. “It would provide some common experiences for seventh and eighth graders prior to coming to high school as a cohort, that idea of when students have transitions at certain key points of their lives.

“I think that provides them an opportunity to sort of reinvent themselves. They are coming out of elementary school and they might want to explore something different in terms of their interests, academically and socially and sports wise and all of those areas.”

I told Zboray I could cite numerous studies which have argued the opposite, including one by the Rand Corporation in 2004 which concluded:

“The history of reform indicates that a separate middle school has become the norm more because of societal and demographic pressures than because of scientific evidence supporting the need for a separate school for young teens. In fact, there is evidence suggesting that separate schools and the transitions they require can cause problems that negatively affect students' developmental and academic progress.”

The latest enrollment numbers in the chart below is illuminating. Southwest Harbor is clearly the poster child for consolidation. Bar Harbor is in good stead numbers-wise. (Conners Emerson also consistently ranks as the No. 1 elementary school in the state in standardized testing.)

So why not move those 20 Middle School kids in SWH over to Bar Harbor’s new school which will have plenty of room? (I’m using Grades 6 and 7 as a proxy for next year. Depending on the actual consolidation, it could take many years in the future. SWH’s Grades 5 and 6 have eight and nine kids respectfully. Placing them in Bar Harbor when they reach Middle School seems like a no brainer, without disrupting all the other grades.) And you don’t need five towns to approve it.

Last week, voters in Mount Desert approved a bond issuance of $6 million to make needed repairs to its school, playgrounds and infrastructure. Over 20 years with borrowing cost of about 5.5 percent, the total should be about $9.5 million. (Was the borrowing cost ever explained fully to Bar Harbor voters when they approved $63 million for a new school? Remember the kerfuffle when the construction bids came in at $11 million over budget?)

Town Manager Durlin Lunt said Mount Desert prefers to maintain its infrastructure before they become a costly burden - an indirect shot at how Conners Emerson became an unsupervised orphan in Bar Harbor. How else do you explain leaky roofs which went years without repair?

Mount Desert School was once a high school. It is across the street from the most endowed library on the island. It has ballfields which are the envy of all the towns. It certainly can absorb the 17 middle school kids from Tremont and 28 from Trenton who would be traveling about the same distance as they would to Southwest Harbor.

That would give the island two small middle schools with no need to disrupt any elementary school.

I proffer this scenario only to illustrate that there are options to consider that don’t require island wide approval.

Unfortunately, the summer is not a good time for community engagements to properly flesh this out. Once schools start in September, teachers, parents and administrators will be too busy to give consolidation its proper vetting.

On an issue of this magnitude, the RPC should work hard to win not just approval but overwhelming approval.

The Chapter 50 vote in Bar Harbor last Nov. 5 was decided by a 3 percent margin, or just enough to piss off half the voters.

Does the RPC want to start consolidation with only a razor-thin approval?

It would be extremely deflating if the consolidation vote were not a strong mandate.

I suggested to Zboray that the RPC should go after the low-hanging fruit: Get the RSU approved first and say goodby to the inert AOS structure.

It will take another two years for everything to settle, so use that time to fashion a truly equitable consolidation, instead of rushing matters through this summer. (Each town will need multiple forums to vet this properly).

If I were to handicap the proposal on the table, I would put Southwest Harbor as the unhappiest outlier. It has the only school to have to transport their little kids to another school.

And will parents in Mount Desert want to see their middle schoolers carted to Southwest Harbor after having spent $9.5 million to modernize its own school yet still be on the hook for capital projects in other towns if it signs up for consolidation?

Trenton will be the only true winner. Its high schoolers will still have the option to choose either Ellsworth High School or MDI. Its middle schoolers will attend Pemetic in SWH, leaving the town with much less cost schooling only its elementary kids.

If I were the RPC, I would make it a condition that Trenton must make MDI its default high school so that MDI gets the out-of-town tuition and not have to split it with Ellsworth.

Zboray is an excellent listener. He said, “You're definitely sharing the thoughts and concerns that members of the RPC are talking about and continuing to talk about. It's something that they're paying attention to as they listen to their neighbors, or hear people that they're coming into.”

One final thought. Secondary education in the US is in crisis, with American students falling behind many first- and second-world countries in basic skills. That has given the Trump Administration fodder to dismantle the Department of Education.

There will be much upheaval the next few years. Does MDI really want to lock and load old assumptions amid this chaos?