Schools reorg in question as some balk at Bar Harbor's $113 million price tag

Superintendent also worries busing of young kids may be 'too much to chew off'

MOUNT DESERT, Feb. 25, 2025 - The proposed K-8 regional school district is doomed to fail by default, if this town and others can’t be convinced they should pay part of the $113 million cost of Bar Harbor’s new school.

Brian Henkel, chair of the school board here, told the eight-town Reorganization Planning Committee (RPC) at its Feb. 12 meeting that the current funding formula would be a “difficult sell” to taxpayers here, according to concerns expressed to him by residents and elected officials.

Town Manager Durlin Lunt confirmed that Henkel represented the thoughts of many in this town.

(In addition to Bar Harbor and Mount Desert, the other towns considering the district concept are Cranberry Isles, Frenchboro, Southwest Harbor, Tremont, Trenton and Swan’s Island.)

If Mount Desert votes against the reorganization, then the ball game is over. It takes only one of the four towns on the island to say no for the initiative to fail.

“Over the years we’ve invested in our school in Northeast Harbor. Why should we bail out Bar Harbor, which ignored proper maintenance of its school for decades,” said one elected official here.

Another decision by the RPC also rankled some who thought Bar Harbor was getting an unfair share of benefits.

The RPC adopted a model to turn Pemetic School in Southwest Harbor into a regional middle school for Grades 7 and 8 and bus K-6 students from there to Mount Desert.

Under the approved model, Bar Harbor’s new school would be K-6 solely, consisting mostly of its own kids. They wouldn’t be bused anywhere but stay to enjoy the confines of their new school paid for partly by the district.

Moreover, some Mount Desert parents are concerned about busing their middle schoolers to an untested Pemetic middle school.

All of this has MDI Superintendent Mike Zboray admitting that “this might be too much to chew” and that a reorganization of just the administration side of the current district might be a better logical first step.

Zboray met recently with John Macauley, chair of the Mount Desert select board, and said he came away with a full understanding of Mount Desert’s concerns.

Discussions to replace the current district, which has a central administration but nine separate school boards and budgets, started well before Bar Harbor voters approved by a 2-1 margin in June 2024 to build a new $60 million school. Adding interest payments, the total cost is $113 million, according to the Bar Harbor finance department.

Discussions started around 2019, well before he became superintendent, Zboray said.

Henkel said he had expected some consolidation of operating cost and debt such as repairs and maintenance but nothing like taking on a new multi-million dollar building over which local taxpayers had no say. That building is still under construction and isn’t expected to open fully until the 2027 school year.

At the start of the discussion, the proposed district had a relatively low debt, he said.

Bar Harbor parents, school board members and council chair Val Peacock were fiery in their rhetoric in the spring of 2023 as they lobbied for their new school. They were in a hurry. Some, like councilor Joe Minutolo, urged residents to hold off until the dust settled on the reorg discussion.

That’s when Peacock big-footed the conversation.

"There's a reason why we have schools in each community and that's because those are the kids of our town, of our community. Like that's Bar Harbor, those are Bar Harbor kids. And when you consolidate, yes, there's advantages, but there's also a loss of that, and I personally feel like that's a real loss.

“And I think we're already struggling with that loss in this town, right? Like, what does it mean to grow up here? Do our kids even stay here? Do they want to stay here? Can they even stay here? Like that's a question and that's not a question we talk about very much in, in anywhere in this town. That's real and that's a real thing for us to think about and our futures.”

Bar Harbor clearly decided to build its school without any strings attached.

So why did the RPC decide to change that expectation?

No one has even developed a financial analysis of what each town would pay in the current proposal. Zboray said he hopes to have some preliminary numbers later this week.

Zboray also said that “we got over our skis a bit” when the RPC pushed an aggressive timeline for a vote by towns this June. That has been pushed back to November at the earliest.

The RPC offered no financials and no color on the give-and-take in any of its meetings, which are not recorded and have no minutes. It has no detailed explanation on why on Aug. 14, 2024 it made a decision for a funding formula similar to the one adopted for Mount Desert High School, according to a published summary.

“The group discussed the various funding models and the time periods laid out in each. Consensus was reached on a cost-sharing model that would start with the high school’s current formula of 67% valuation / 33% enrollment the first year and go to 80% valuation / 20% enrollment the second year.

“This would achieve the goal of taxpayers paying similarly for the cost of education regardless of the town they live in,” stated the summary.

Is that really true?

For generations, Mount Desert’s year-round residents have enjoyed all the benefits of its extraordinary $2.78 billion valuation - moderate taxes, 24/7 police, fire coverage, trash pickup, exceptional schools, winter snow-plowing and road maintenance, water and sewer for most dwellings - while most of its wealthy taxpayers shut their “cottages” and skedaddle after Labor Day.

Mount Desert’s wealthy summer people are the reason why MDI has its own hospital, more than 300 non-profits and charities doing good work and a robust adjunct baying at the command of Acadia National Park, Friends of Acadia.

This town has a higher valuation than the entire county of Pistacaquis, which has a valuation of $2,557,100 for 18 towns.

But all that masks the true burden of year-round residents.

As a percentage of their income, property tax increases hit them disproportionately hard, as opposed to the wealthy summer residents.

Those year-round residents also index higher as a percentage of the voters. So when they sound the alarm, folks like Brian Henkel and John Macauley pay attention, as they should.

Mount Desert Elementary School is a jewel in the midst of much dysfunction in education. The building was once a high school, built to withstand the abuse of seventeen year olds. The town has maintained it ably. Its grounds and playing fields are well-manicured and fecund, right in the center of the village of Northeast Harbor.

This is year it reported the highest enrollment - 161 - in five years. Southwest Harbor and Tremont each has 122 students.

With any luck, the state supreme court will rule in favor of the six proposed affordable housing units at Heel Way. Other units being pursued by the non-profit MD 365 could bring as many as 30 families to Northeast Harbor.

That would be a material change to the village population and potentially to the enrollment at the school.

So why would taxpayers vote to bus their middle schoolers to an unproven school and pay an extraordinary premium to do so?

Henkel said there has been no other serious proposal, only that the RPC is willing to amortize the payment over 10 years.

In addition to the funding formula, Zboray acknowledged that the busing of school children, some as young as 6, is another potential deal breaker.

He hopes a round of community meetings before November will air out the issues.

Jessica Simpson, chair of the district wide school board, did not return two messages seeking comment for this article.