Schools 'reorg' forum leaves Southwest Harbor yearning for more answers

Committee's vague promises failed to assuage attendees with concerns

PEMETIC SCHOOL AND HARBOR HOUSE COMMUNITY CENTER FORM A GEOGRAPHICAL AND PROGRAMMATIC HEGEMONY. PARENTS WORRY IT WOULD BE COMPROMISED BY THE CURRENT REORGANIZATION PROPOSAL. QSJ PHOTO BY ARIELLE KOUYOUMDJIAN.

SOUTHWEST HARBOR, July 5, 2025 - Natasha Johnson grew up in a house on Clark Point Road a quarter mile from Pemetic School. The house was built by her great-grandfather, the town’s first selectman Stanwood King.

“I love the town that I live in. My roots go incredibly deep. And generations upon generations of my family are from Southwest Harbor,” she said in an interview in 2022 when she ran for the select board. “I deeply care about our community and want to make sure decisions are being made that will serve our community for future generations in the best way possible.”

Her parents commuted to work in Bucksport and Bangor. They were grateful for her ability to walk to school. So are many parents for whom the K-8 Pemetic School is a unique asset and the reason they chose to live here.

At the time, Natasha Johnson hadn’t heard of “place-based learning.”

She now is a living model of that educational concept which centers learning around the unique characteristics of the student's community, including its environment, culture and history. PBL has received strong support from the Maine Department of Education.

Natasha Johnson was re-elected to her second three-year term on the select board in May. She is seen as an important bridge between the last generation of “good ‘ole boys” and a new future with younger members on the select board.

She is also one of the most reliable sounding boards in town on matters with potentially bad consequences if not done right.

So when Johnson spoke out in an interview against the proposed consolidation of regional schools which would require that elementary grade kids here be bused to other towns and its own Pemetic School turned into a regional middle school, she carried a lot of influence as the vice chair of the select board and as a parent of a child attending Pemetic.

Southwest Harbor is the only town designated by the the Reorganizational Planning Committee to give up its elementary school and bus those kids to the school of parents’ choosing.

But what if most of the parents choose to bus their kids to nearby Tremont, which would not be able to handle the crush. Who would decide which family wins that lottery?

What if most of the parents choose Bar Harbor and Northeast Harbor with their new and improved buildings? How will they handle the after-school activities, including sports? Will parents who work an hour away be expected to pick up their child or will the schools provide transportation?

Johnson said the presentation by the RPC at the forum last week “wasn’t exactly canned, but it wasn’t personalized for the community.”

Johnson is a local business owner and parent of children who matriculated through the same school she attended.

She said towns on MDI are not interchangeable.

Southwest Harbor has a center of gravity lacking in other towns - its school, library, pharmacy, two banks, a church, municipal office, police station, two food pantries/soup kitchens, coffee shop, medical office, hardware store, shops and restaurants, marinas and the seventh busiest harbor in Maine are all within walking distance.

So are many homes with school-age children.

Unlike Northeast Harbor, where kids are bused in from Otter Creek, Seal Harbor, Somesville, Pretty Marsh, Hall Quarry and elsewhere, Southwest Harbor is actually a community, not a collection of villages conveniently fused together to support a single municipality. In fact, Northeast Harbor, the seat of the local government, is actually losing more year-round residents than any of the other villages.

Many Mount Desert residents, like me, who live in Somesville, Beech Hill, Hall Quarry, Pretty Marsh, do most of our commerce in Southwest Harbor.

So do residents of Tremont, which has no center, unless you think Gott’s gas station is a proxy for a village green.

And what about the town’s 60-year-old community center Harbor House, which is about 50 steps from the entrance to Pemetic School, some asked? Harbor House is an adjunct of the school (or perhaps the other way around.) It has a Pre-K program, a children’s center, youth center, a sports program and an after-school program.

There is nothing else comparable on the island as an institution so closely aligned with the school and so geographically centered in the village.

The Neighborhood House in Northeast Harbor comes closest. But it has a much broader agenda.

The RPC’s failure to answer questions about the future of Harbor House at the forum was yet another detail lost in translation, some said.

One business person who attended the forum Monday night which did not have remote access said she worried that RPC members were not listening and that they were so confident their plan was the only right one.

She said she could not lend credence to any claims of financial savings when the RPC has no idea what the cost of transportation would be in the various permutations being discussed.

Johnson leavened her criticism by praising the volunteers who agreed to sit that that committee to perform an important task to improve education on the island.

She said she hoped there will be proper acknowledgement and appreciation of their work.

Director of the Harbor House, Ingrid Kachmar, agreed. She said whatever the decision on schools reorganization, Harbor House will adapt.

“We'll make it work however it plays out, but I personally think there are way too many unanswered questions, and based on the responses on Monday, those answers could not come until after another committee sat down and figured them out after after the vote in November.”

“Particularly because I think our community is the most impacted by this decision that I don't see it passing.” It takes only one of five towns - Tremont, Southwest Harbor, Bar Harbor, Mount Desert and Trenton - to vote no for the initiative to fail.

Kachmar is another voice of authority, as a former school committee member who worked on a previous schools reorganization effort.

Kachmar served 13 years on the Southwest Harbor School Committee, the MDI High School board – including five years as chair – and the school-wide AOS 91 system board.

Both she and Johnson said they favored breaking matters into two questions - should the towns first consider replacing the current Alternative Organizational School system with an RSU, Regional School Unit, so that instead of having nine different school boards, there would only be one.

The superintendent’s office now must prepare nine different budgets and attend nine different school board meetings. Also, the system discourages transfers of teachers in the system because they lose seniority status going from one school to another.

“I think restructuring the district makes sense, but I don't think it should be tied to reorganizing school buildings,” Kachmar said.

Kachmar was one of three members of a schools contract negotiating team who resigned in 2021 after the teachers union filed a “prohibited practice” complaint against the school board with the Maine Labor Relations Board. The school board then filed a counter complaint.

The work done by Kachmar, Todd Graham and others on reorganization was suspended until the current RPC was constituted in 2022.

“So at that point, we were never thinking about anything other than doing a change in our school district structure from an AOS to an RSU,” Kashmar said.

“There are 10 components that that define an RSU, and we already do seven of those 10. So there were three items that we needed to tackle, and that's what we were going to do at that point. When we resigned, there was a period where stuff wasn't happening.

“And then they started up the work again a year and a half or two years ago. And at some point during that work, they decided that they needed to present something more substantive to the voters.

”There was a lot of positive response to an island-wide middle school. So I think they were trying to make that happen in a way that I think ultimately people are not going to want.

“So I think they were kind of trying to take the work that had been done by the by the island-wide middle school subcommittee and the work that we were doing on the the restructuring, and I guess maybe they blended them together.

“I don't agree with that approach, but I’m not on the committee.

“While I was still on the board, we were being told, and I'm sure it was accurate, that everything needed more space than it used to - special ed, reading.

“And so I don’t know how you walk away from having K through 6 or pre-K through 6 schools in your communities.

“Harbor House will adapt, and we'll figure out what parents and families need from us in whatever configuration comes out of this.”

Kachmar said the majority of the about 80 attendees attending the forum Monday raised their hands to oppose the consolidation when asked by the RPC.

“I think it sent a pretty clear message to the committee members that were there that this is going to be a very, very hard sell.”

These are perilous times for villages on the island. The handful of businesses keeping Northeast Harbor afloat may not be there another winter - Kimball’s, Pine Tree Market, Brown’s Hardware Store. That leaves the gas station and McGrath’s.

Meanwhile, Southwest Harbor is gaining momentum as the island’s most active thriving year-round community with the school, Harbor House, the Common Good Soup Kitchen, several restaurants, Carroll’s Drug Store, McEachern & Hutchin’s Hardware Store and the library forming a core which no other MDI town can rival.

Looming over all the sturm and drang is the disturbing trend of enrollment declines.

Tremont and Southwest Harbor engaged in bilateral discussions in 2011 on merging their schools, but in a non-binding straw poll in 2012, Tremont residents voted 157 to 84 to keep the current structure and defeated a proposal to bus Grades 7 and 8 students to Pemetic.

Thirteen years later, is it worth another discussion? Tremont also repeatedly rejected out-sourcing its police to Southwest Harbor preferring the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department. But it changed its mind last year and partnered with SWH. It recently renewed that relationship.

FOOTNOTE: After my article in February when I reported that Mount Desert officials made it clear that they would not subsidize Bar Harbor’s profligate $130 million school (including borrowing cost) as part of a proposed cost-sharing formula for the new RSU, the RPC removed that requirement.

I wrote an article May 14 on the lack of urgency on the part of the RPC. It’s already July and it’s held only two forums.

Some Tremont parents attended Monday night’s Southwest Harbor forum. AOS Board Chair Jessica Stewart stated in a text that the RPC will schedule forums in every town before the vote in November.

“Yes, there will be forums in every town. Most likely multiple forums. They just have it been scheduled yet. I would encourage anyone in Tremont who has questions to reach out in the meantime.”

She also said she would respond to a question on what percentage of students are bused to school in each town.

Superintendent Mike Zboray did not respond to an email for comment.

Bar Harbor Music Festival tickets

Long-time Bar Harbor regular Christopher Johnson will play Chopin 2.0 and American Fireworks for Piano including Rhapsody in Blue Sunday at 7:30 PM at St. Saviour’s Episcopal Church, 41 Mount Desert St., Bar Harbor.

Tickets may be purchased online.