MILLINOCKET, Maine — Education officials in three neighboring towns have for the second time since 2013 rejected an offer to send students to Millinocket schools, according to the local school superintendent.
The undated letter from East Millinocket, Medway and Woodville Superintendent of Schools Quenten Clark, which Millinocket Superintendent Frank Boynton said Wednesday he had received within the last few days, is brief.
“The school boards here have asked me to write to you in response to your letter offering to educate their students. At this time, they are not interested in sending their students to Millinocket. They very much want to keep schools open in their own communities,” Clark said in the letter.
Boynton, who began work as the town’s superintendent in July, said he is disappointed at the response and the lack of communication between Millinocket’s school board and those of the other towns.
“I would at least liked to have had some dialogue about it. We didn’t have any,” Boynton said Wednesday. “I think there was some disappointment there [with Millinocket’s school board], too. I haven’t seen any interaction. Everything has been by letter.”
Boynton said he has discussed the matter with Clark several times.
The latest rejection appears to leave Millinocket out in the cold when it comes to consolidating with its neighbors to save money. School officials have considered having Lee Academy officials administer the school system but have said that their geographic isolation makes finding a partner difficult. The three other region towns, meanwhile, have added superintendent’s responsibilities to two administrators’ workloads to save money when Clark retires in April.
The offer to accept 191 East Millinocket K-12 students for $1,579,000, or $8,267 per student, went to East Millinocket and Medway selectmen and school boards and Woodville’s school board in October. That is about $4,500 less than the school system’s $12,800 in per-pupil expenditures in 2012-13, the most recent fiscal year available at the Maine Department of Education website.
The tuition offered to Medway and Woodville was not specified in the two-page letter, but it would have been comparable with East Millinocket’s, Millinocket School Board Chairman Michael Jewers has said.
Medway school officials didn’t take the offer because they didn’t want to break their contract to send town students to Schenck High School and the interconnected Opal Myrick Elementary School in East Millinocket in exchange for accepting East Millinocket and Woodville students at Medway Middle School. That contract lapses in 2016, Medway School Board Chairman Greg Stanley said, so the school boards will probably discuss it this year.
Medway school officials also seem to like the education offered at Schenck, which includes several college-level courses not offered elsewhere, Stanley said.
“There is no one [in Medway] that doesn’t want to work with the three towns. I don’t think it is an issue of not wanting to work with each other,” Stanley said Wednesday. “It would be nice to work with the three towns on something.”
Millinocket officials previously offered to accept East Millinocket students at Stearns Junior/Senior High School and Granite Street School for $1.5 million in February 2013. East Millinocket rejected the offer.
The school boards of East Millinocket, Medway and Woodville sent a proposal in February 2014 to Millinocket offering to combine the Katahdin region’s two high schools, which Millinocket officials refused.
Meanwhile, the enrollments of the Katahdin region’s schools continue to decline. According to statistics compiled by the state education department, Medway Middle School has 109 students this year, down from 166 students in the 2007-08 school year.
Department of Education statistics show that Opal Myrick, which had 175 students in 2006-07, has 142 students this year, up from 127 in 2013-14. However, that uptick might have occurred because this year is the first that the Department of Education has counted 4-year-olds enrolled at a preschool program there. There were 19 in that group.
Schenck High School’s enrollment is 126 this year, compared with 198 in 2006-7, according to the Department of Education.
Stearns, meanwhile, has 248 students this year, down from 275 the year before, but an increase over the 244 logged in 2006-07 and the all-time low of 190 reported in 2011-12. Granite Street has 254 students this year, up from all time low of 213 in 2008 — the year the town’s paper mill closed – according to the Department of Education.