A plan to restructure the Mount Desert Island region’s public school system that’s been under discussion for years failed in multiple member towns Tuesday.
AOS 91 includes Bar Harbor, Mount Desert, Southwest Harbor, Tremont, Trenton and the offshore islands of the Cranberry Isles, Frenchboro and Swan’s Island. If voters had approved the new structure, it would have become a more conventional, centrally organized school district with one board — a regional school unit, or RSU.
Bar Harbor, Mount Desert, Southwest Harbor and Tremont all voted against the plan, according to results collected by the Mount Desert Islander newspaper.
“The vote showed a need for continued conversation,” said Superintendent Michael Zboray, who was surprised by what he called tight margins showing some support for the plan.
Maine towns generally adopted AOS systems, or alternative organizational structures, in an effort to retain local control over their schools while following then-Gov. John Baldacci’s 2007 school consolidation law. An AOS includes multiple committees, boards or even smaller administrative units governing their local schools, plus a larger board.
Almost all of them have since split apart, reorganized or considered doing so, often seeking more efficiency than the administrative load of numerous budgets and duplicated work in business offices. Only eight AOS systems remain, according to the Maine School Management Association.
That operational redundancy was a motivating factor in AOS 91, which has to pass 10 budgets each year, according to Zboray. An RSU would consolidate those boards into one unit with weighted votes.
In materials presented before the vote, school officials also said the reorganization would make access to education more equitable and provide specialized services that are hard to staff in small schools, give more support to teachers and staff, and save money.
Major reservations Zboray heard included how member towns would have voting representation on a regional board and whether the plan went far enough to reorganize students across school buildings, such as by creating a middle school.
It also would have spread out the debt for a new elementary school under construction in Bar Harbor, which some pushed back on, Zboray said.
He said local boards have worked well together and thanked participants, saying the process also provided data about local priorities that could inform any future reorganization discussion.
A reorganization process would have to start over again from scratch if elected officials chose to try again, and he would work with them in that case.
