The costs for Wiscasset to operate its own standalone school district remain unknown following the Dec. 6 meeting of the Wiscasset Withdrawal Committee.
The committee had planned to release those costs at that meeting, but educational consultant Raymond Poulin said he and fellow consultant Norm Higgins needed to give the numbers associated with the costs another review before they were released to the public.
The costs of remaining in Sheepscot Valley RSU 12 also need to be calculated using the new cost sharing formula that passed in November, Poulin said.
“We want to be closer to what actuality may be” and need to be able to defend where the numbers come from, Poulin said.
Cliff Hendricks, the chair of the town’s Budget Committee, asked the consultants whether the cost they’re calculating is for just the first year, or for future years.
Poulin said they will be trying to estimate the costs for that first year and can project for future years using that estimate, but actions of the would-be school board can affect the projections.
Gene Stover, one of Wiscasset’s representatives on the RSU 12 Board of Directors, voiced a number of concerns at the meeting, including his feeling that the Wiscasset Withdrawal Committee is responsible for forming a budget, a curriculum, and coordinating transportation for the proposed school district.
Higgins said the transition period between a vote to withdraw and the election of a new school board would only be a few weeks.
The current representatives to the RSU from Wiscasset would serve as the transition team during that period, as they are the elected representatives from the town, Poulin said.
The transition team would do the detailed planning work for the upcoming school year, Higgins said.
“You’re putting them in a position they had no anticipation of being in” since they ran to be on the RSU board, Stover said.
Sharon Nichols, who was a member of the Wiscasset Educational Research Panel, which researched educational and school district options for the town and petitioned to for Wiscasset to withdraw from RSU 12, spoke at the meeting.
“We do not have enough students [in Wiscasset] to offer comprehensive education” at the high school and could offer better education by joining with AOS 93 or 98, Nichols said.
Because of the low number of Wiscasset students at the high school, the school couldn’t afford to offer a wide variety of courses to its students if it operated on its own, Nichols said in a phone conversation on Dec. 12.
Only 18 of the 32 graduates from Wiscasset High School last year were from Wiscasset, Nichols said at the meeting.
It looks like the three schools in Wiscasset have more capacity than is needed and doesn’t look like there will be a influx of students in the near future to fill them up, said Higgins.
As a result, Wiscasset will face a lot of difficult decisions, such as whether or not to keep the high school, join an AOS, or offer school choice, Higgins said.
All those decisions have financial ramifications and aren’t questions for the withdrawal committee, Higgins said. The public needs to be involved because of the long-term implications, he said.
The would-be school board will face two major decisions, Higgins said: the future of the high school, and how many school buildings the new district will keep open.
If Wiscasset considers letting the RSU continue to send students to Wiscasset, it will limit what buildings could be closed and affect staffing levels, Nichols said.
“It would definitely be a problem because it would limit the future school board,” Nichols said.
Hendricks said people in the town may vote differently if the plan was to keep three schools open, or just two, and if different costs were associated with the plans, Hendricks said.
The process for closing a school takes between six months and a year, Higgins said. The new school board should decide early on whether or not to close a school as people want to know how it will affect their children, he said.
