SPECIAL REPORT: Why Jessica Stewart is hiding school reorganization data, information

MOUNT DESERT, Jan. 17, 2022 - Imagine if each of the current 497 students at MDI High School was still attending his or her town high school as in 1968?

How would you staff teachers to perform the minimum state requirements such as?

A. English--4 years or the equivalent in standards achievement;

B. Social studies and history, including American history, government, civics and personal finance--2 years or the equivalent in standards achievement;

C. Mathematics--2 years or the equivalent in standards achievement;

D. Science, including at least one year of laboratory study--2 years or the equivalent in standards achievement; and

E. Fine arts, which may include art, music, forensics, or drama--one year or the equivalent in standards achievement.

The answer: You wouldn’t be able to, not with the current enrollment numbers. Some towns don’t even have 75 high school age students.

You also wouldn’t be able to field teams in most sports or put together a reasonable choir or band.

MDI is a consistently top 10 Maine high school owing to its consolidation and creation 54 years ago.

So why is it so difficult for some to re-imagine the same, inexorable consequence for the elementary and middle schools?

Is it because the younger children tug at a different emotional node?

The MDI School Reorganization Debate 2.0 to determine the future of how we educate this cohort has begun with a whimper, instead of a bang. Whatever the recommendation from the subcommittee studying reorg, every town affected will need to approve it at its spring town meeting or November ballot.

The MDI school board under the chair of Jessica Stewart of Tremont has decided to tip-toe into the shallow end of the pool instead of facing off on the issue, as if it’s some big secret. Who can blame her? School reorg on MDI is one of its third-rail topics, along with cruise ship caps and affordable housing.

She made some cryptic remark at the MDI AOS school board meeting last week about the need for a Reorganizational Planning Committee as mandated by the state, and then submitted an opaque statement in the Islander about next steps.

She and her reorg subcommittee are doling out the information in piecemeal, and meeting with selected stakeholders one at a time, starting with the prickly group of teachers for whom consolidation is a four-letter word.

The teachers had a big hand in the demise of a similar reorganization effort in the fall of 2021, when the chairs of both the MDI school committee and the reorganization committee resigned after the teachers union’s filed an unfair labor allegation. Even though the contract negotiations was a separate issue, their resignations, along with the resignation of a third member from Mount Desert, had the effect of killing any talks of reorganization.

That previous effort actually produced a solid recommendation as reported by Dick Broom of the Islander in April 2021.

It laid the foundation for a regional unit instead of the current structure of having separate school committees for each town and one for the high school and another uber committee of all the towns.

Rob Liebow was the superintendent in 2008 when the current Alternative Organization Structure was implemented largely in defiance of then governor John Baldacci’s scorched earth campaign which reduced Maine’s 290 school districts to 160. Liebow left in 2012 for a job in Massachusetts, but in an interview April 24, 2021 with the QSJ he called the AOS structure “crazy.”

“Just in the high school, you have the high school board, you have the board of trustees … you have the overall AOS board and then you have a Trenton school board and you have a Southwest Harbor, a Mount Desert, a Bar Harbor, a Tremont, a Swans a Frenchboro, a Cranberry.

“So that's 11, 12, every two weeks, all year round, all re-inventing the same issues over and over and over again. And they're all separate employers, which to me is crazy.

Under a more centralized system, “If you had like a rogue teacher that was causing unrest, you could reassign him … ‘You're going to fifth grade in Bar Harbor, dude. You're not going to destroy this place. I'm reassigning you.’

“And they could transfer easy. They wouldn't have to go to the bottom of the hiring.”

As opposed to the current system. “They're all separate units. So if you were working in Southwest, it would not be in your best interest to go to Mount Desert because you'd be at the bottom of the totem pole. And therefore if times got tough and they had to cut somebody or the enrollment dropped, you'd be the first person cut. So we'd be stupid to do that.

“Southwest Harbor would have its own board, but they'd be the same people who were on the big board, they would just sort of splinter off to have one meeting a month or whatever when necessary. And the principal would advertise for a staff member interview and hire. And that little local board would say, yes, we approve. And then hand it up to the bigger board to rubber stamp it.

“But the person would be a central unit employee with central insurance and the same pecking order that everybody else has. So that it would be much smoother, but you still have some local control. You decide locally who your principal is.

“When it comes to firing the person ... I'm not sure they've talked about the way out the door. The way in the door is one thing, the way out the door is one question they'd have to wrestle with, but they could do that the same way the local group could say, hey, we don't want this principal anymore. And maybe they get transferred by the big superintendent, transfers them to a place where there are a better fit. Well right now you can't do that.

On Payroll:

“One huge payroll. Yep. Yep. Because you have one contract. They're all employees of that bigger unit. Just the hiring of them was local, but their payroll is just one big operation. So that central office doesn't need three and four different people handling different payrolls. And there may now even be different days of the week. And it's just crazy, you know?

Liebow wasn’t done. On the subject of sharing teachers, he said:

“If you're a Spanish teacher in Mount Desert, you might be an 0.8. And if you're a 0.8 and you're only four days a week, well then you could be lent to the Island who then fills out the person's full employment status. But that's really messy. I'd rather have it be that you're a central employee and you get on the MailBoat two days a week and you go out to Islesford and teach Spanish and we’ll shift the schedule around at Mount Desert.

“So your Spanish classes here are at the different time, and you're just going to two different schools, not two different employer locations.

“You could even do that with a principal. There's no reason why Islesford needs to have a principal, or why Swans needs a principal. They could share … the principal of Tremont could do Swans, even though right now, I think they've got a pretty good setup because they have a teaching principal. So that works pretty good. But a Frenchboro a one day a week principal is crazy. Paid $40,000 or whatever for one day, a week or $30,000, whatever, they built into it.

“And with all this sort of remote stuff that's going on, they could do some Spanish classes out to Frenchboro. They really mastered that. I mean, we have in Massachusetts, so there's a whole new world of maybe sharing advanced kind of courses. If you have some kids on the Island that are, really accelerated in math, maybe they zoom into that classroom at Mount Desert where there's the algebra 2 class for eighth graders or whatever. So rather than that, rather than have to get on a boat, come across and wait for the next boat, they just zoom into it. Like now that's what we do down in Massachusetts. We have some kids that don't come in because of COVID. So they zoom into the classroom live stream and the teacher has some live kids there and has a bunch of zoom kids on a screen. And there's one big class and it works just as slick as can be. “

Howard Colter, who both preceded and followed Liebow as superintendent, told the school board in 2012, “If the (superintendent’s) position is going to be as it’s always been, I think you will have fewer top candidates. I think there needs to be some talk about how to make it more streamlined, efficient and manageable.” 

His successor, Marc Gousse, made no effort to hide his disdain for the current AOS structure.

So it is assumed that the current superintendent, Mike Zboray, is of a similar mind since he was the one who initiated the contact last August with Liebow to hire him as a consultant to jump start the current reorganization effort under a subcommittee whose work is now largely complete. Zboray did not return a call last week. Stewart has not responded to multiple requests for interviews, so the QSJ gave up.

Liebow’s first job as the consultant was to model the economics of the various options, starting with mashing up nine school boards and their budgets into one, eliminating duplicate efforts such as a dozen different meetings in one month and hewing to state law in considering such issues as:

• Size, composition and method of voting of the new governing body and duties of local school committees if any.

• Disposition of real & personal school property and existing debt such as bonds enacted to pay for existing infrastructure.

• Assignment of school personnel contracts and collective bargaining agreements.

• Disposition of existing school funds and financial obligations.

• Development of a budget for the first school year.

• Explanation of how units that approve reorganization plan will proceed if one or more units do not approve the plan.

• Estimate of cost savings to be achieved.

And then there is the issue on what is the fairest and most equitable way to pay for this. The current system is grossly inequitable with “separate and unequal budgets that lead to disparities in educational programming and opportunities,” Stewart stated in her article. “It is also redundant and costly to taxpayers.”

The high school uses an assessment formula of one third based on a town’s total valuation and two third based on attendance. Mount Desert has the highest valuation but one of the lowest in attendance.

It should surprise no one that Liebow’s models are consistent with his views when he was the superintendent - that MDI should not succumb to its tribal instincts to make life easier for the parents against the interest of the kids.

Consolidation of the elementary schools and middle schools is a big part of his model, sources say. He favors two middle schools and two elementary schools to serve MDI, they say.

Yes, it may be more convenient to drop off your tot as you head to work, but if you have a special needs kid, or a gifted kid, a musically inclined kid or a socially awkward kid you’re dooming your child to a system which is guaranteed to provide sub standard education as enrollment collapses and qualified teachers harder to find.

“I think the inability to find employees is going to force creative thinking and drive consolidation. Simply because if you can't find a teacher, you know, at Tremont for fourth grade, maybe you then need to merge,” said former Trenton school committee member Tom Reeve, who runs the Bar Harbor Food Pantry.

“Just looking at it holistically, I think we're going to face a major teacher shortage just because no one can afford to live on this island.”

Geoff Wood, Mount Desert select board member and a math supervisor at Pemetic School in Southwest Harbor, is not optimistic about the chances the current AOS towns will accept a new reorganization plan.

“I don’t see the Town of Tremont as interested in having their kids potentially sent somewhere else,” he said. “The towns that are interested primarily are Bar Harbor and Mount Desert, who are in general more affluent and who are in general more educated.”

Reeve agreed.

“I don't have high hopes that it's (reorganization)) going to pass a town vote in any of the towns,” Reeve said. “There is a very ‘us versus them’ mentality between the towns.”

His views are colored by the battle in Trenton last year to repel an uprising by a small group of residents who wanted to withdraw from the current AOS and go it alone with its elementary/middle school.

One of the unknowns is whether Bar Harbor and Mount Desert have enough heft to create their own regional unit. That would require a dissolution of the current AOS first.

Tremont has 118 kids in K-8 and Southwest Harbor has 144, according to the latest enrollment report. In 1998, they had 206 and 244 respectively.

There is no reason to believe any of the MDI towns won’t suffer a 40 percent decline in enrollment the next 20 years as it has the past 20.

If the tourism industry has its way, it will continue to hollow out year-round housing on MDI for its seasonal workers and drive more school age families out of MDI.

Jessica Stewart is playing a dangerous game by hoarding information until she’s ready for a larger discussion. Rob Liebow’s models should be made public, so that the discourse of this important topic is conducted without guesses, myths and local prejudices.

And then there is the matter of the ticking clock. Any reorganizational effort will need to be sold to the towns. Questions to be placed on warrants for town meetings in early June face an early May deadline.

When I was 6 years old in Taipei, Taiwan, my single mother scraped enough together to hire a pedicab driver who would take my brother, sister and me on a 45-minute ride across the city to the highly rated Fuxing Elementary School where we had classes six days a week. The one thing the dictator Chiang Kai-shek refused to compromise on was education which fueled the growth of Taiwan into a major modern economy.

The greatest public service a town can provide is to ensure our children have options we didn’t have.