Waldoboro to Elect Two New Reps to RSU 40 Board

On Tuesday, June 9, Waldoboro voters will elect two new representatives to the RSU 40 Board of Directors.

Vying for the seats, both of which carry a three-year term, are Seth Hall, Sonja Sleeper, and Robert Smith. Also on the ballot is incumbent Melvin Williams, a longtime board member who died suddenly on Sunday, May 17.

Waldoboro posted a notice on social media announcing William’s death and stating his name would be appearing on the printed ballot, as his death occurred after the legal deadline for reprinting the election material. However, no votes cast for him would be counted.

Emily Trask-Eaton, the second incumbent, is not running for reelection.

The RSU 40 Board of Directors is made up of 16 representatives from the towns in the district, with five of those seats going to Waldoboro. In addition to the positions up for election, Waldoboro is represented by Leah Shipps, Benjamin Stickney, and Chair Danny Jackson. Shipps and Stickney are up for reelection in 2027. Jackson is up for reelection in 2028.

RSU 40 includes the towns of Friendship, Waldoboro, Washington, Warren, and Union.

Polls will be open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesday, June 9 at the municipal building, at 1600 Atlantic Highway, or by absentee ballot. For more information, go to waldoboromaine.org or call 832-5369.

Seth Hall

Hall has lived in Waldoboro since 2009. Before that, he worked a variety of jobs including managing research computer systems at MIT.

He is semiretired and owns both BugTussle Annex, a coworking space in downtown Waldoboro, and S & J Llama LLC, a building reconstruction business.

Hall said one reason he was running for election to the RSU 40 Board of Directors was to be involved with the community. He said he likes to participate in municipal boards and interact with the public.

“I’m a participant in community activities,” he said.

Hall said he is also running for the position because he disagrees with the way national politics, partisanship, and culture war issues have made their way into the board.

“In my view, the board started losing track of their mission a little bit,” he said.

Hall described himself as a longtime member of school boards, both since moving to Waldoboro and life before then. He is a current member of the Region 8 Mid-Coast School of Technology School Board and was a member of the RSU 40 Board of Directors from 2016-2017.

Hall was previously the chair of the Waldoboro Planning Board, a member of the broadband subcommittee, and a member of the renewable energy subcommittee of the Waldoboro Economic Development Committee.

Hall said his view of public education is that a community owes its children the best possible opportunities for a happy and fulfilling life. Hall said he does not think this is happening in RSU 40 due to budget constraints.

“The students, I don’t think, are receiving the maximal possible benefit our school system could deliver them mostly for financial reasons,” he said.

Hall said one issue is the district has been very focused on hiring new teachers, and then will not pay them enough to stay in the district.

“We just have this turnstile of bright, young, ambitious (teachers) who come here for a little while and then move on because they want to raise their families, they want to buy a house, and we don’t pay as much as we should,” he said.

Hall said the state of the district’s buildings is also a major problem.

“Our buildings leak through the roof; you can’t breathe the air in them. The toilets plug up,” he said.

While he did not support the $81 million capital improvement bond, which was voted down in November 2024, Hall said it was still unfortunate the bond did not pass, as it just delayed the repairs.

“It basically kicked the can down the road another couple of years,” he said. “Which is really too bad, because we can’t afford to kick the can down the road.”

Hall said the RSU 40 board will have to address other large issues in the near future, including declining enrollment and what it meant for the other schools in the district.

“What do we do with all these extra schools that there are no kids to fill?” he said. “As long as we maintain them, we’re paying considerable money, and I would say it’s not efficient money.”

Hall said if elected, he would represent the people of Waldoboro by really listening to others. For his first few months on the board, he said, his biggest objective would be to listen.

“I think if you listen carefully, long enough, you start to hear people,” he said. “You start to hear not just the comments they make, but what informs them, what might be going on in their neck of the woods.”

Hall said not enough members of the board are really listening to others and facilitating conversation. Instead, he said, they just want to complain without offering any real solutions.

Hall supports the capital improvement bond “with qualifications,” he said. He disagrees with the choice of a biomass boiler and would like to see the schools installing heat pumps instead.

“You don’t put even a somewhat efficient biomass boiler into an old school,” Hall said. ‘That’s just not dollar efficient, it’s not lifetime efficient. So we’ll be visiting this again.”

In his spare time, Hall likes to sail and likes to fly gliders. He has been involved with Midcoast Conservancy for a long time, and enjoys spending time outside.

Robert Smith

Smith has lived in Waldoboro since 2019. He is an electrical engineer who grew up in Central Maine and then moved away for work. As soon as his work could be fully remote, he moved back to Maine with his wife and three children

His oldest graduated from Medomak Valley High School and just finished a year of AmeriCorps with the forest service, the middle child will graduate from MVHS this year, and the youngest will attend Medomak Middle School in the fall.

Smith said he decided to run for the RSU 40 Board of Directors in part to serve the community and gain support for the schools.

“I’m hoping to increase the public awareness of what great people we have working in our school system and the great work that they’re doing as well as continue to help build support for the work that they do and for our kids to see that they have the resources they need,” he said.

Because his children attended school in the district, Smith said he has seen a lot of what is happening in those buildings. He said he is impressed by the staff’s professionalism and dedication, and what they are able to do with very little, so he wants to make sure others know as well.

“I feel like in this community, there’s a real disconnect between the schools and the rest of the community,” he said. “Like if you don’t have kids in the school yourself, people really don’t feel connected and don’t know what’s going on. And I think that’s a real problem, and it’s part of the reason we have the challenges we have.”

Smith said is also running to be an advocate for public education.

“I feel like we’re in a time and a political climate where there are a lot of people trying to tell us that public education is not important,” he said. “I couldn’t disagree with that more strongly. I think you don’t have a democracy if you don’t have the opportunity to have an educated populace.”

Smith said he fully supports the capital improvement bond.

“I like a lot of what I’ve heard from the folks who have presented on this,” he said.

Smith has been following the bond issue for a while and has attended as many meetings of the board as he could the past few years. He said he thinks the school board and the administration listened to everyone’s feedback, worked with professional designers, and focused on the real and immediate needs in the district.

“They’ve really cooked it down to the key things that we need to do to make this building serviceable for the next 20 or 30 years,” he said. “Because it’s unlikely that we’re going to get a new high school any faster than that.”

Smith said that to him, the bond is about extending the life of the MVHS building.

“I think that the high school is at an age and a level of degraded condition that it really is becoming critical,” he said.

While he has not served on any boards or committees in government, Smith has been on the board of trustees for his church a number of times, which also operates under Robert’s Rules of Order.

Smith said this gave him experience in how groups like RSU 40 run their meetings and how to participate in that format. It has also given him experience in listening to people that he disagrees with, and reaching a compromise.

If he is elected, Smith said he would like to be more involved in the budget process to understand where the money is going and have a dialogue with the public to help them understand it as well.

“We can have conversations around what are our priorities, what does it mean to us as a community to have these schools to support our young people and is what we’re spending aligned with our priorities and our goals for the future of the community,” he said.

In his free time, Smith has been fixing up the old farmhouse where his family lives, and they have started raising sheep and chickens.

Sonja Sleeper

Sleeper has lived in Waldoboro since 2019. She moved to Maine in 2011 to care for her mother. She purchased a fixer-upper home in Waldoboro with the intention of cultivating a vegetable garden and entering semiretirement.

Sleeper is currently a member of the Waldoboro Economic Development Committee and was previously a member of the South Thomaston Planning Board.

Sleeper, who ran for the RSU 40 Board of Directors in 2025, said she decided to run again because she does not like what is going on in the world. She wants to have an impact, she said, and thinks she can bring effective change to the school district.

“I think the system is a failing system, not for lack of dedication and trying,” she said. “I mean no disrespect to the people in the system, but … it needs something new.”

She said she would bring a fresh perspective to the board and she has researched the legislation to learn what actions a school board can actually take in Maine.

Sleeper said she has a lot of life experience she would bring to the RSU 40 Board of Directors, including from different jobs.

“I’m a skilled administrator,” she said. “I’ve got about 17 years of experience as a program administrator so I can bring that expertise to the role of the school board.”

Sleeper said part of that expertise includes working to balance a budget while still meeting program parameters.

“As an administrator I have an X amount of budget,” she said. “You make decisions based on needs.”

Sleeper said her work often involved teaching herself about detailed topics and performing independent research. She said she has learned how to make difficult decisions based on priorities and look at problems from a different perspective to find a solution.

“I don’t do things like everybody else would do,” she said. “I look at stuff, I think about it, and I say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, this might work more than this.’”

If elected, Sleeper said she would like to reduce the budget, though she knows that will not be easy, and may not be popular.

“We really have to address the cost of education,” she said. “I can understand the schools (are saying) ‘We need this, we need this,’ … but we can’t afford to give you that.”

Sleeper said she knows that many parts of the budget cannot be changed by the board, but she would take a close look at what can be changed in the budget and what the district really needs and find ways to reduce those costs and still get children what they need for an education.

She said part of this process would involve finding ways to “get more for your dollar.”

“Don’t equate cutting the budget with cheapening out,” she said. “It means making better choices for better results.”

Sonja said she would represent the people of Waldoboro by considering the different needs of all the people in the community, even if they do not have children in the schools.

“Anybody who has an issue can bring it up to me for discussion on the board,” she said.

As a member of the board, Sleeper said she would collaborate with her fellow board members professionally, with good manners, and following Robert’s Rules of Order.

“Everybody has a say, and you can respect everybody’s voice, or you can respectfully disagree,” she said.

Sleeper said she does not support the capital improvements bond. She said the bond was too big and didn’t like how it was presented to the public.

Sleeper said in particular she still has concerns about the biomass boiler system and questions if that was the best choice.

“When they were picking a boiler system, did you do a comparison?” she said. “What type of boilers? How big is this? How long is it supposed to last?”

Sleeper said she also did not like the idea of the revolving loan the district received, even though it was presented as a grant that would be partially paid back with no interest.

“They shouldn’t have to pay it back to the state at all,” she said.

In her free time she likes to garden, and this year is focused on potatoes and corn. She likes to travel and paddle around in her kayak. She also does genealogy research.