MILLINOCKET, Maine — Plans to allow Lee Academy officials to assume operation of Millinocket’s public schools are dormant but not necessarily dead, officials said Thursday.
The private high school’s headmaster, W. Gus LeBlanc, said there has been “little or no communication” between Lee Academy and Millinocket officials since Superintendent Frank Boynton assumed office in July.
“The last review I completed found there to be financial issues that would need to be resolved in order to make any resolution feasible. It appears to me that the [Millinocket Town] Council and school committee came to some kind of a financial agreement that allowed the school department to arrive at an operating budget,” LeBlanc said in an email on Thursday.
Boynton said that with everything he has had to deal with since replacing the proposal’s main proponent, Superintendent Kenneth Smith, he hasn’t taken up the idea and would need to discuss it with the school board to see if it is still a possibility.
“That one is completely foreign to me at this point,” Boynton said Thursday. “We have been so busy with other things that we really haven’t addressed it. We have to make some contacts to see where that fits in.
“That is something that I would say we are going to explore,” he said.
Millinocket School Committee Chairman Michael Jewers did not immediately return a telephone message seeking comment on Thursday.
Lee Academy and Millinocket officials said in February that such a merger could result in a large number of international students living in Millinocket to enrich the school’s academic offerings. It would keep Millinocket children educated locally and bolster the town’s sagging economy with an influx of students whose families can afford to send their children to Lee Academy for $32,000 each.
The concept would follow the model established by Lee Academy, kept afloat by its international program, which features satellite schools in the Philippines and South Korea, while giving Lee Academy more room in which to expand its international program.
Millinocket and Lee Academy officials met with state education leaders in Augusta and found no immediate legal or administrative obstacles to the plan, which they hoped to implement as early as September 2015.