SEARSPORT, Maine — Voters this week in Stockton Springs and Searsport approved a $10 million budget for Regional School Unit 20 by a comfortable margin.
The 299 to 166 vote in favor on Thursday felt pretty good to Tony Bagley of Searsport, the chairman of the RSU 20 board of directors. Those two towns are the only survivors of the original nine-community school district that was formed after the controversial 2008 school consolidation law. Over the last few years, Belfast, Belmont, Frankfort, Morrill, Northport, Searsmont and Swanville have withdrawn from the district. The next school year will be the first that the district is down to Searsport and Stockton Springs.
“Everybody’s excited,” Bagley said Friday. “We’ve pretty much built a whole new team — new superintendent, new principal, new business manager. We’ve pretty much set up a brand-new RSU ourselves, aside from the name. Now we’re onward and upward, as Superintendent Chris Downing likes to say.”
The budget includes some changes, Bagley said. The district has increased class sizes in the elementary school, which resulted in the elimination of three probationary teaching positions. Also, the district has cut one physical education teaching position and removed 2.65 teaching positions from the middle and high school levels, for a total of 6.65 teaching positions that have been eliminated. The district also has pared a bus driver off the employment rolls and has saved money on the administration by reorganizing its central office.
Additionally, RSU 20 has added a half-time foreign language teacher at the high school and turned a part-time music teaching position into a full-time one.
The new budget does mean some additional costs for local property taxpayers, Bagley said. Compared with last year’s RSU 20 budget, the local appropriation for Searsport will increase by 5.4 percent and it will jump by 7 percent in Stockton Springs. Bagley said that dollarwise, the increase is about $340,000.
With 544 students in the school district, the $10 million budget means that the per-student cost is about $18,000. That per-student sum apparently is much more than the statewide average education cost, which was $10,021 per student in 2012-2013, the most recent year listed by the Maine Department of Education.
Bagley said he wanted to thank everyone who voted on the RSU 20 budget. Searsport saw nearly 9 percent of the 2,241 registered voters go to the polls. Stockton Springs had a larger turnout, with more than 20 percent of the 1,285 registered voters casting ballots.
“It shows that people really do care,” he said.