Report of April 3, 2021
Maine school superintendent crisis hits home; Volunteer fire fighting in decline but not in SWH; talk on birding at SWH library; new feature 'Lincoln's Log'; puzzle
Maine’s superintendent crisis hits MDI; new governance proposal in the works
SOMESVILLE, April 3, 2021 - Three weeks ago, Marc Gousse lost a 62-year-old family member to a heart attack.
The tragedy prompted Gousse to take stock. The 60-year-old MDI superintendent of schools has his own health issues (he’s had three bouts with Lyme disease). Last week, he announced he would retire in 2022.
The shot clock we all face in life was the final decider for Gousse. Nothing else was a consideration in his decision, he said.
Others wondered if there was more.
“He has an impossible job,” said Keith Laser, superintendent of the Boothbay-Boothbay Harbor school district who is also retiring and who also heads an AOS (alternative organizational structure), which are “very, very, very hard to run.”
“I have four budgets. Marc has what, 11? That’s a management nightmare,” said Laser. “MDI has the most complicated school system in the entire state.”
Layered on top of that last year was the pandemic. There was no letting up on the pressure placed on school administrations as they battled shifting changes in scheduling, openings and closings.
“The interactions were vitriolic and unsettling,” said Falmouth’s Andrew Dolloff, Maine’s superintendent of the year in 2020, in reference to the anger directed at school administrators. “It came from everywhere - parents, staff, communities, teachers,” Dolloff said. “Every other situation we’ve faced in the past, we’ve been able to reach common ground.
“We were being asked to do something other than our jobs,” Dolloff said. “There have been times in the past when I thought about doing something else, but I’ve thought about it much more this past year.”
Eighteen superintendents in Maine have either resigned or announced imminent retirement since last year. Gousse has given MDI the option for him to complete the 2022 academic year or release him Jan. 1, when he qualifies for retirement.
Gousse approached his job locked and loaded in fast forward, leaving little time for much of anything else. He was not one for cruise control. He attended meetings he didn’t have to, eager to handle every question. He answered every phone call humanly possible. He can’t remember the last time he had a night off.
Now he’s going to make sure his family gets most of his time remaining.
A 23-year Navy veteran, he will have two pensions. “I am blessed that I’m able to do this.”
Gousse is proud of his work. “We’ve aligned teaching and learning. Everyone has the same curriculum. We all now use the same calendar. We had eight sets of policies before. We now have one. We had eight different insurance ratings. We now have one.
“I am really proud of what we accomplished with sustainability. The high school is totally self-reliant on its own power. Tremont is moving in that direction.”
Gousse also pointed to the work done by the anti-racism task force and the awareness raised about racial injustice.
So what advice does he have for the system going forward?
“The towns really need to look at the structure and decide what is the best way to deliver education,” he said. The current system “takes its toll,” as the superintendent reports to 11 entities.
“And it’s not just the superintendent,” Gousse said. “It’s the entire administration - the director of curriculum, the business manager, the director of special services …”
“The system is crazy,”said Ingrid Kachmar, chair of the MDI High School board and a strong advocate for streamlining the bureaucracy. A subcommittee she heads will present to the K-8 AOS board a proposal April 12 to lighten the load on the administration.
A gander at the following chart demonstrates the challenge. Even identifying each board with the right name is a task. There is a school board for each town (left), a high school board and trustees (in green) and the AOS board for K-8 schools administration (yellow).
Grafting more transactional overhead on an over-burdened business manager like Nancy Thurlow, who has to prepare 9, 10 or 11 different budgets every year robs her of the ability and time to think and strategize ways to benefit the system.
Ten or 11 budgets mean two or three budgets meetings per budget. It means 10 to 11 different cost centers to manage, and it means 10 to 11 audits a year. The same is true for other administration functions from granting applications to tech support.
Each school also has its own collective bargaining unit even though they share a master contract.
Why does Maine have an extraordinarily complicated secondary education system?
“Local control,” said Boothbay’s Laser.
“Local control,” said Falmouth’s Dolloff.
“Change is glacial here. People demand local control. They feel it’s their birthright,” Dolloff said. “Population growth which results in change elsewhere is not happening here. Phoenix probably gets 40,000 new residents a year. That brings change. We just don’t have that here.”
Maine’s small communities are its essence but also its burden. How to protect that identity without choking on its own dysfunction?
Frenchboro has as many school committee members as students - three. Cranberry Isles has 11 students and its own school board of three.
In 2005, MDI towns, not wanting to be forced by the state into an alignment with Ellsworth and other towns that didn’t share its sensibility, created the current system.
It had the opportunity to chose a less complicated system but ended up with an AOS instead.
The six-member governance committee headed by Ingrid Kachmar has to work within the confines of state law to ensure its recommended proposal is legal.
It can recommend a regional school unit (RSU), for instance, with one school board and one budget. “The member municipalities share the RSU costs based on a formula that may factor in state valuation and/or the number of pupils as specified in their voter-approved reorganization plan.” Or it can recommend a hybrid.
“Rob Liebow didn’t have a problem managing an AOS,” said Liz Rabasca, who teaches English at Tremont Consolidated School. She was referring to the beloved MDI superintendent from 2004 to 2012 who was instrumental in choosing the AOS structure. Liebow resigned in 2012 to take the superintendent’s position in Rockport, Mass. QSJ could not reach Liebow in time for this article.
“They had the opportunity to pursue it (RSU) in 2005 and actually went to great lengths and had to fight a lot of legal battles in order for us to become an AOS,” said Rabasca, who is Tremont’s negotiator for the teachers union. “A lot of that had to do with local control.”
There are other flavors allowed by the state. You may check out the schmorgasbord here.
On April 12, we will learn which flavor is being proposed.
How Southwest Harbor doubled its fire fighter force at a time of declining volunteerism
SOUTHWEST HARBOR - Tommy Chisholm drives to Bangor every week and turns in a 24-hour shift as a paramedic for the Bangor Fire Department. He then takes the next 24 hours off. Sort of.
That’s when he puts on his other hat as this town’s fire chief.
SWH has a fire department consisting of 30 volunteers who are “paid” $20 per call. A handful of officers under Chisholm get $1,000 stipends a year. The department also has four “junior” fire fighters.
It’s an impressive number given the drastic decline of volunteerism across the country and questions about whether such fire departments can survive. The Bangor Daily News this week did a good article on the decline in Maine. A 2019 national report documented the rise of career fire fighters versus the rapid decline of volunteers in the country.
How has SWH been able to develop such a devoted cohort - that instead of losing volunteers, it has doubled them?
Possibly because SWH welcomes volunteers from neighboring towns with open arms, and that SWH has a culture of sharing knowledge and training. “There is a group of folks doing good things here that they want to be part of,” Chisholm said, citing a Trenton resident who works in Southwest Harbor and joined the department and two fire fighters from Northeast Harbor - Tom and Ben Wallace - who wanted the additional training and experience here.
“We have three career fighters volunteering in our town, boat captains, machine operators, a lifelong paramedic - that’s a wealth of knowledge.”
Chisholm is particularly proud of the junior fire fighter program, which he believes is the only one on MDI. Several current fire fighters are graduates of the program. The departments also provides coverage for the Coast Guard station and benefits from several CG members as volunteers.
The 30 fire fighters responded to 145 calls in 2020 with an average response time of 8:23 minutes. They were able to save a building at Hinckley Yachts which was struck by lightning. SWH also had only 25 false alarms, as opposed to 50 percent of the calls in Mount Desert, where a higher percentage of homes have automatic smoke alarms that trigger a call to the station.
Chisholm is looking forward to the town of Mount Desert’s proposed full-time staffing of fire/ambulance staff at Northeast Harbor and Somesville.
Both towns will benefit immediately from emergency service for Rt. 102, one of the busiest roads on MDI, where there are frequent accidents in the summer, Chisholm said.
“The worst car accidents on Mount Desert Island are from the Somesville fire station to the Southwest Harbor line,” Chisholm said. “That Echo Lake stretch? There’s been almost a fatality every year ... you absolutely could have the Somesville crew and the Southwest crew converge.”
Also, there are occasions when the Somesville ambulance could reach Seal Cove before Southwest Harbor’s equipment, Chisholm added.
But there are some questions, too, about the unintended consequences of a full-time 24/7 professional staff on the Quietside, which is what is being proposed in Somesville.
Chisholm said before Northeast Harbor staffed an on-call crew during the day, the volunteers responded much more quickly and in greater numbers.
“When they started putting people on during the day, you get the people that were on duty to get in the fire truck and respond within a two-minute time frame, so it’s getting out of the door much, much faster …
“However, those other three or four people that also used to respond were staying at their place of employment, staying at home, and they were just listening because they knew they couldn’t make it to the station to make it onto the apparatus and even if they tried, chances are the call will already have been taken care of …
“So they got a service quicker but maybe not in the same amount.”
The challenge of the Quietside has been with the SWH/Tremont ambulance service. Chisholm said last year it went dark for 37 straight hours once without anyone on duty.
Unlike fire fighting, EMT workload is high and there is no “adrenalin rush,” Chisholm said.
Whether the current non-profit model is sustainable remains to be seen. Northeast Harbor Ambulance announced recently it was closing its non-profit operation and will be part of the town’s public safety department starting in 2023.
Like other public safety officials on the island, Chisholm is a fan of consolidation. Having three different dispatch centers “is the most wasted amount of money there could be."
“If you look at Mount Desert Island from Trenton bridge at 2 o’clock in the morning in February, there are maybe five cops patrolling Mount Desert island and three 24-hour dispatch centers.
“If we have an emergency in Southwest Harbor it’s a disadvantage to have those three separate centers because my dispatcher has to start playing telephone tag while talking on the radio … so they are making multiple phone calls and that could add four to five minutes to get the word out that we need help.”
SWH Library offers talk by local birder Craig Kesselheim Tuesday
Island ornithologist Craig Kesselheim will give a talk Tuesday at 5:30 for all levels of birders. Register here. The following is an article I wrote last year about my first real experience with bird watching.
SOMESVILLE, June 6, 2020 – It’s not possible to ignore the ubiquity of creatures, insects, plants and vegetation which we humans encounter on this island daily. Sharing my morning coffee with a hummingbird at the feeder, avoiding a field mouse scurrying across our dirt road, stealthily clipping some beautiful lupine flowers and hoping no one catches me defiling nature, and trying mightily to commune with the owl before it takes flight at dusk.
If you live here, you are an accidental naturalist whether you like it or not. The tag of serious naturalists belongs to a devoted community of people called birders.
I was introduced to this special fraternity last year when I entered and won a silent auction at the Southwest Harbor Library’s annual dinner for a guided birding tour led by local ornithologist Craig Kesselheim. In mid September we trekked through Ship Harbor Trail and enjoyed the sighting of various shore birds. As a lifelong sailor I was equipped properly with adequate binoculars.
Suddenly, at the point, Kesselheim’s demeanor shifted into high animation, and he exclaimed and pointed, “Black Skimmers!”
I turned to where he pointed and saw four birds flying about 15 feet above the water heading south. They were like the F-15 fighter jets I saw at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada when I was a young reporter in 1977. They were in formation as precise as the Blue Angels. They were purposeful. And they were fleeting.
“That made my month,” Kesselheim exclaimed.
At that moment I understood birding.
On Friday night May 29 Duane Braun saw an unusual yellow throated bird at his feeder on Beech Hill Road and consulted his guide. Could it be? These birds just aren’t seen in the Northeast. Braun went across his street and consulted Tom Hayward, a more serious birder who confirmed that this indeed was a black headed grosbeak.
Conversations ensued, especially with Craig Kesselheim, because the discovery of an exciting species where it doesn’t belong could bring out a hoard of birders.
The next day, my wife and I are on our daily walk. We are on Beech Hill Road when we pass a house with many cars parked on the roadside and many folks with cameras and binoculars.
I knew what it had to be .. I could not help my journalistic impulses. “What did you see?” A Black headed Grosbeak, I was told. A western bird almost never seen in the Northeast. Okay. Is that it? How did it get here? What does it say about migration patterns? What does it say about climate change?
But that’s the entire point, isn’t it? Unless we observe and document the data, we’ll never know.
Craig Kesselheim was kind enough to point out that this was an extraordinary week of birding, including his sighting of a pink-footed goose, the first sighting on MDI and Hancock County.
I am humbled by the life here. I abhor the use of the word “wildlife.” As human civilization disintegrates before us, I am eager to learn more about how species around us can help save our own.
Lincoln’s Log …
SOMESVILLE - Erich Reed, head librarian at SWH, introduced me to David Foster Wallace’s essay Consider the Lobster. That and Shipping Out, a hilarious take-down of the cruise ship industry, are in his collection of essays which may be purchased for as little as $1.59 on Amazon (used copy).
The Los Angeles Times called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years.” He is best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which Time magazine cited as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.[
He committed suicide at age 46 in 2008.
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She is my favorite singer at the moment. Read the recent NYT review of her book and go view Brandi Carlile’s virtuosic performance at the 2019 Grammy’s, striking a blow for all of us who don’t fit neatly into someone else’s expectation.
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I got tired of “On Point” on NPR and found this alternative each weekday morning at 10 on WERU, a Blue Hill FM station at 89.9 and the extraordinary journalist Amy Goodman. She is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize' for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.” She is the author of six New York Times bestsellers. Her latest, Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America, looks back over the past two decades of Democracy Now! and the powerful movements and charismatic leaders who are re-shaping our world.