Last June, Damien DuMont put on a cap and gown and strolled across the graduation stage at Washburn High School alongside his 15 classmates.
Ten months later, he is in a position to hash out the school’s budget and policies with people double and triple his age.
In March, DuMont won a write-in campaign to fill a three-year school board seat in MSAD 45, the central Aroostook County district that also includes the towns of Perham and Wade. He received three votes.
DuMont decided to run on Election Day, when he went to the town office to vote and noticed there were vacant seats.
“I was actually thinking about running for town council, because I’ve always been super into politics,” he said. “I realized it was too late [to run] and I saw no one was running for school board …I thought it would be a good entry-level job, the way to get into something political.”
At 19, DuMont joins an exclusive club of teenage elected officials in Maine. No organization compiles data on the youngest legislators in the state, but those of DuMont’s age or younger are few and far between.
Nineteen-year-old Keagen Roberts, who won a seat on the South Berwick Town Council in 2019, is the only other teenager in the state reported online to have won a general election.
Many Maine school boards have non-voting student advisory members, but DuMont may be the youngest voting board member in the state.
“I’m not really surprised by it,” said Terry Cummings, Washburn District High School’s assistant principal and athletic director. “Knowing him, that’s kind of his personality. I think he’ll be a good fit.”
On a national level, at least 34 teenagers have won seats in U.S. state legislatures, 20 of which were in New Hampshire, where candidates only have to be 18 to run for the House of Representatives.
The eligibility requirements to compete for Maine’s legislature, which mandate candidates be 21 to run for a House seat or 25 for the Senate, make that an impossibility.
But DuMont, who said he’s been invested in politics since he was 10, has political ambitions to reach the State House — once he’s old enough.
“That’s probably as high as I’d want to go, because I feel like once you get above the state level, you’re really not impacting nearly as much,” he said.
DuMont described himself as having “typical conservative viewpoints,” among them lowering taxes.
“Now that I work and see how much taxes are, I get why everyone is so passionate about that,” he said.
That’s a position he’ll have to weigh against his own experience in the district and the burgeoning cost of education that those like MSAD 45 are reckoning with across Maine.
The district’s budget has risen by more than 23% since the 2021-22 school year, pushing an additional $400,000 in taxes on its roughly 2,100 residents.
DuMont grew up in the school district, playing basketball, soccer, baseball and volleyball. He was in the band, National Honor Society and the woodworking club. His 16-year-old brother still attends the high school.
“I have an insider view of how the school goes, [with] just graduating,” he said. “It’s a unique perspective on everything.
“I think I’m very open to new ideas. A lot of the people at the school board meetings, you can tell they’re ‘Oh, we’ve always done things this way, we don’t like to change things.’ Maybe I’m just too naive, not all jaded yet.”
In his day job, DuMont is a firefighter and EMT at the Presque Isle Fire Department. He’s also a volunteer member of the Washburn Fire Department, where he began working when he was 16.
“It’s much more fulfilling to be involved in public service,” DuMont said.
Washburn’s population, like most of Aroostook County, has declined since the 1980s, as has the number of children in its school district. MSAD 45 had 366 students when it began the school year in 2015. Last October, the district had just 261 students, split between its elementary and high schools, according to data from the Maine Department of Education.
That presents challenges for the district that DuMont will have to face on the school board. But Washburn’s small-town charm is part of why he likes where he’s from, and why he doesn’t plan on leaving.
“Everybody knows each other. I know everyone says, ‘small school, family environment,’ but it really does feel that way,” DuMont said. “I don’t plan on going anywhere. I’d imagine one day I’ll have kids coming here.”
