MILLINOCKET, Maine — The school superintendent and board chairman should resign because their leadership during the town’s fiscal crisis shows the two are more interested in protecting school jobs than educating children, a school board member said Friday.
“They don’t want to tick anybody off,” committee member Matthew Farrington said of Chairman Michael Jewers and Superintendent Kenneth Smith. “The time has come now so that if we don’t want to harm the kids’ education, there are places we can cut so that the kids can have the quality education that they deserve.
“I don’t want to see any teacher’s positions cut when we can go into the budget and cut other nonessential items,” he added.
Jewers did not return messages left Friday.
Smith, who announced several months ago that he is resigning on June 30, said board members have told him that they plan to meet with Farrington as soon as possible. No date is set. They will discuss how they believe Farrington’s conduct violates board members’ ethics agreement, Smith said.
“He actually acts like a Town Council member,” Smith said Friday. “He is promoting what he thinks the Town Council wants and the town manager wants. He is not supporting what the majority of what the school board wants.”
Farrington described his statements to the BDN on Friday as a violation of rules allowing only the chairman to discuss policy publicly outside a board meeting. Farrington said he wanted to offer ideas on how town schools can weather the expected loss of $2.3 million in tax revenues that will come when Great Northern Paper Co. LLC auctions its machinery at the Katahdin Avenue industrial site in a few weeks.
In describing Farrington as acting like a councilor, Smith was attempting to inflame anti-council prejudice among teachers and parents who view councilors as anti-education, Farrington said.
Smith said that board ethics guidelines require individual members to comply with majority decisions, and to refrain from criticizing them, once a decision is made. Farrington said he took his ideas public because he feels other board members ignored them when he discussed them previously at meetings.
Farrington has a right to speak publicly and wants to be sure that residents are exposed to his ideas, he said.
“I am tired of banging my head against the wall. They [school board members] keep hemming and hawing. They are worried about hurting teachers’ feelings when they [teachers] work for us. We work for the kids,” Farrington said. “They would actually rather fight with the council than get along. I want to work together with councilors. They have lived up to their word; we haven’t.”
Farrington said that in a memo Smith issued to the board just before its meeting Wednesday, Smith advised closing a town grade school and eliminating town extra- and co-curricular activities when Smith knew that cutting school department retiree benefits, long a council goal, would make better economic and educational sense.
Smith recommended closing Granite Street Elementary School by September and shifting its population to Stearns High School to save $202,403. The rest of the $300,000 savings would come from laying off a school secretary, freezing teachers’ wages, and eliminating extra- and co-curricular activities, according to the memo.
Votes to close the school and issue pink slips to school workers failed at the meeting.
School board members said they wanted time to consider their options. During the meeting, several parents and teachers questioned the need to close Granite Street, challenging town officials’ grasp of the numbers. Town Manager Peggy Daigle explained the numbers to about 250 residents at a meeting the night before. No one offered criticism of her numbers then.
Smith said that closing the school would be the most expeditious cut. Farrington said he believes that Smith’s offers to close Granite Street and cut extracurriculars were intended more to arouse public sentiment than promote school efficiency.
“I am totally against closing Granite Street,” Farrington said. “And I don’t want to cut extracurricular activities at this point. When we can cut other places that don’t harm children, it is important to do that first.”
Board members, Farrington said, can cut the health insurance the town pays for Millinocket School Department retirees instead. Town Council members made that suggestion in August 2013, saying that the cut would save $324,000. It was unclear whether the same savings would apply to the 2014-15 fiscal year.
Farrington said he believed that if made this year, the cut would save most of the school system’s half of the $600,000 town and school budgets cut that town leaders hope to implement by July 1, the start of the 2014-15 fiscal year.
Town leaders recommended the $600,000 cut last week after learning from an Internet advertisement that Great Northern Paper Co. LLC would be auctioning its papermaking equipment from its Katahdin Avenue industrial park next month. The $600,000 is part of a $3 million cut meant to offset the loss of the $2.3 million in property tax revenue the equipment draws to the town. That loss will affect the 2015-16 fiscal year.
Millinocket’s total school budget for the 2013-14 fiscal year is $6.5 million. The municipal budget town leaders approved for that year is $6.2 million.
Board members have repeatedly rejected cutting retiree benefits and, in accord with the council, began negotiations with retiree representatives over the last month to see if concessions were possible, Smith said.
“Mr. Farrington is honestly talking up something that is being formally addressed through the proper channels,” Smith said. “To speculate on how much money could be saved is interfering with negotiations” — a violation of school board ethics.
“There is no negotiation to be done. If the town can do it and it goes through the courts and it stands up, then we must have a leg to stand on,” Farrington said. “They did it. So can we.”
School board members said Wednesday that planning a $3 million cut for 2015-16 might be more sensible because it would give them time to plan properly, but a $3 million cut might have to come as soon as this year. The town filed the first of two liens addressing GNP’s delinquent $2.3 million tax bill for the 2013-14 fiscal year on Tuesday.
When the idea was first offered a year ago, other school board members opposed the $324,000 health coverage cut as unprincipled. Farrington said that the town’s unprecedented fiscal crisis makes cutting the decades-old retirement deal necessary, and regrettable.
Town leaders “didn’t know this was going to happen 30 years ago,” Farrington said.
Farrington believes that present school workers can shift their health insurance package to one the town uses to save at least $150,000. School leaders can also fold the town library into the library at Stearns, he said. Farrington plans to make these and other suggestions when the board meets at Stearns at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday.
Farrington admits that he is sometimes unsparing in his criticism. The town firefighter drew criticism last year when he argued with East Millinocket school board members over their past opposition to school consolidation, a move that school leaders felt undermined consolidation efforts.
“I say it like it is,” Farrington said. “If there is a problem with that, I am sorry for it, but I speak the truth.”
The council and its followers and the school system and its followers represent two distinct groups in town that have opposed each other for years, Farrington said. Millinocket, he said, needs to shake free of its old attitudes to meet its crises.
“The old boy network dried up a long time ago,” he said.