ELLSWORTH, Maine — Would-be secessionists in Hancock County’s largest city have a tight timeline if they’re going to put their bid for withdrawal from Regional School Unit 24 on November’s ballot.
The Ellsworth withdrawal committee met Friday afternoon to elect its chairman and set an agenda and timetable for negotiating withdrawal from the RSU.
The city clerk must have the ballot language in hand 35 days before the Nov. 7 election. Before that, the commissioner of the state’s Department of Education has 60 days to review and rubber-stamp the city’s proposal. So newly elected Chairman Mark Rosborough gave the committee an Aug. 1 deadline to complete its herculean task.
“It’s extremely tight,” Rosborough said Monday. “We’re going to have to meet a couple times a week in order to get this thing done.”
Voters in Ellsworth, Hancock and Lamoine each approved a June 12 referendum to leave the RSU, which formed in 2009. Residents in each of the three towns have expressed dissatisfaction with the RSU and gathered signatures in order to put the question to a vote.
In Ellsworth, secessionists say they have seen increased costs for Ellsworth’s share of education since the RSU was created. Rosborough also said residents have “lost control of the education of our own Ellsworth students.”
On Monday, the committee — Rosborough, Ellsworth City Councilor John Moore, RSU 24 board member Michelle DeWitt and resident Ken Shea — requested a slew of documents from the RSU, items such as employee contracts, enrollment figures, inventories of real and personal property and other data.
It’s all part of the effort to negotiate what Ellsworth gets if withdrawal is approved. Presumably, that would include a return of control over Ellsworth High School and Hancock County Technical Center, which the city owned before the RSU was created. The city already owns its new elementary-middle school.
DeWitt said it might be hard to get a handle on some of the data the committee is seeking, especially personal property that doesn’t really stay at any one school.
“For example, lawnmowers are shuffled from school to school,” she said. “So a lawnmower in Ellsworth might not be ‘Ellsworth’s lawnmower.’”
The three towns seeking withdrawal are expected to band together to form an Alternative Organizational Structure, such as the one on Mount Desert Island, but that’s not a foregone conclusion; it’s still possible that Ellsworth goes it alone.
“We’ve had informal meetings with the other towns, but nothing’s set yet,” Rosborough said.
What happens in Ellsworth, Hancock and Lamoine will undoubtedly affect students and their parents in the rest of RSU 24. If the three withdrawal bids are successful, students in the remaining RSU 24 municipalities — Eastbrook, Franklin, Gouldsboro, Mariaville, Sorrento, Steuben, Sullivan, Waltham and Winter Harbor — could end up paying tuition to send their students to Sumner High School in Sullivan or to EHS.
Hancock’s withdrawal committee will convene Monday. Lamoine will follow suit Tuesday night.
Follow Mario Moretto on Twitter @riocarmine.
Good. The planned penalties were dropped (and weren’t even applied evenly, this was the incentive) and the RSU’s are costing the larger towns a greater share of the education costs in each merged district. Having towns play the role of the State and subsidize each other is bad policy.
Really small towns/schools may eventually dissolve and tuition their kids to larger districts if the dissoultion of districts takes place and costs are too great. This doesn’t end up costing the bigger towns money to maintain the smaller schools.
Any Ellsworth citizen who was on the fence about getting out of the RSU needs only to be at the last board meeting…The majority of the board (as summed up by Supt. Lukas and printed on the RSU 24 site) “the Withdrawal Committees from the various towns must be the ones to pursue any information needed.”
That’s a nice way of saying that even though Ellsworth voters sent a loud and clear message that it wanted out of the RSU, the majority of the RSU board decided it should stall, drag its feet, and do nothing to assist the procedure…and why should they? Ellsworth taxpayers are footing the bill to keep their the tiny schools in the RSU open! Of course they want to make it difficult for Ellsworth to withdraw.
Know what else a majority of the board directed the Supt. to do? Keep on “doing business as usual.” Well, as anyone who was at the last board meeting knows, the Supt. ambushed the board with massive raises for certain members of the Supt. office (as opposed to the 2% across the board raises which the board had been prepared to vote on). Some of these amounted to over $10,000 over two years. This is the same RSU which fought with teachers over several years over contracts. Looks like certain members of the RSU are going to try and fleece Ellsworth as much as they can before the RSU goes away. Kudos to the two of three Ellsworth members of the RSU board who voted against this. What the third one was doing is a mystery to this Ellsworth resident!
As for my vote, I vote Ellsworth goes it alone…MAYBE joins up with Hancock!