Portland’s three public high schools. A consortium of coastal schools led by Ellsworth. Wiscasset and Boothbay. These are some of the schools competing for capital funding to build a first-of-its-kind regional high school in Maine.
Eight groups of school districts, career and technical education centers, colleges and businesses submitted the first part of a funding application for a Maine Department of Education pilot program last fall.
The Bangor Daily News obtained all eight applications this week through a Freedom of Access Act Request, revealing the scope and ambition of eight consolidation efforts that have largely remained below the public radar. You can read them here.
District leaders view the program, which will fully fund the construction of an “Integrated, Consolidated 9-16 Educational Facility,” as an opportunity for school systems battling rising costs, declining enrollment and aging buildings to reshape the future of local education without asking local taxpayers to raise the necessary capital.
The newly built school would merge at least two high schools with a regional career and technology center, include a higher education center for high school students to take college classes and space to support industry training programs in partnership with local businesses.
Only one of the eight projects will be funded. The initial application, due last October, only required basic information. A second, more detailed application is due this October.
This table shows the high schools and tech centers involved in each consolidation effort and the collegiate and business partners each detailed in their Part I applications.
Some proposals, like the merger between Wiscasset and Boothbay high schools and a newly created tech center, were discussed locally as the application deadline approached, but have remained largely unknown statewide.
Others, including consolidation efforts in all three major regions of Aroostook County and a plan between districts in Dexter and Guilford, have been widely publicized by the school systems in an attempt to heed public concern.
In Portland, the city’s board of education and district leaders have spoken on and off for the last seven years about some form of consolidation. This latest proposal would combine Portland, Deering and Casco Bay high schools, which have a total enrollment of about 2,000, with Portland Arts & Technology High School, the city’s tech center.
“This redesign is not just a logistical change; it’s about reimagining the role of the community
at large in preparing students for success,” Portland Public Schools wrote in the application.
Two groups did not meet the Department of Education’s criteria in their first applications, but are moving forward anyway.
Ellsworth High School seeks an exemption from the requirement to consolidate two high schools because of its distance from the next closest schools. It would instead combine with the nearby Hancock County Technical Center, which is also in Ellsworth, and would continue to bring students from Deer-Isle Stonington, Bucksport, Sumner and Mount Desert Island high schools to the tech center.
The school boards of each sending school voted in support of Ellsworth’s application.
“The city of Ellsworth is the largest city in the state of Maine, in terms of land mass,” Superintendent Amy Boles wrote in the application. “There would not be a second high school to close that would be in the best interest of students to consolidate with.”
An hour down the coast, Waldo County Technical Center in Belfast submitted its application without any high school partners. The tech center, which opened in 1975, commissioned a facilities analysis last year that found it would cost $22 million just to get the building up to code.
It’s pursuing the grant to avoid the cost of renovations falling on local taxpayers. Center director Travis Wood brought the proposal to Belfast, Mount View and Searsport high schools and the Ecology Learning Center in Unity, all of which send students to the WCTC.
None have agreed to partner so far. If at least two don’t, the center will not submit the second part of the application.
“We’re not trying to bend anybody’s arm behind their back to join,” Wood said in an interview. “We’re just saying that there’s money on the table that the state will pay to build a state of the art school, or we’re going to have to spend at least 22 million to fix what we have … we don’t have an option to not do anything here.”
That’s a sentiment expressed by nearly every school district pursuing the funding. Many are grappling with how to deal with aging school buildings amid declining enrollment and the skyrocketing cost of construction. And it’s become increasingly difficult to receive state funding to replace them.
Districts can periodically apply for the Department of Education’s Major Capital School Construction Program, which rates and approves a select number of school construction projects to subsidize.
In the 2010-11 rating cycle, the state funded the construction of 16 schools. In 2017-18, that number dwindled to nine. In the most recent rating cycle, finalized last year, 71 schools applied. Just two, elementary schools in Bath and St. Agatha, were approved. Both were ravaged by fires.
“That’s what started the conversation,” Ben Greenlaw, superintendent of the Presque Isle-based MSAD 1 said in December of the district’s consolidation effort with Caribou and Fort Fairfield high schools.
Presque Isle High School, whose original wing was built in 1948, finished 14th in the last rating cycle. It was an improvement over the building’s previous ranking, but alarmed district leaders, who believe it could be decades before the aging school can be replaced through traditional state funding. To them, consolidation is the answer.
“I honestly don’t know if this will come to fruition,” Greenlaw said. “But I think the three communities are at least doing the right thing [and] exploring the opportunity to say ‘Can we do a better job of educating our kids together than we can separately?’”
