Year in Review: Is the RSU unraveling?

And the saga continues.

In 2010, RSU 21 faced a myriad of challenges, including the merging of three towns into one RSU, a battle over cost sharing, and a host of facilities issues.

It seems things have become even more difficult this year as controversy has formed around the potential withdrawal of Arundel from the RSU, cost sharing is again up for debate, and voters could soon see more than $50 million in facilities improvements.

"It's definitely tough because there's a certain lack of clarity," said Norm Archer, chairman of the RSU 21 Board of Directors, of the RSU's current situation.

This past May, the district's $35.7 million budget was rejected by voters, as were the proposed new cost-sharing formula and the Thornton Academy Middle School contract buyout — which would have involved the district spending $1.2 million in surplus funds. Both the budget and proposed cost-sharing formula passed in Kennebunk and Kennebunkport, but failed by wide margins in Arundel.

The voters' sentiments continued an ongoing debate that has continued to brew over the past year, causing animosity and resentment within the community as Arundel resident and parent Paul Raymond said.

"Words were slung. People were called names. That's the politics, but the reality is that I think the school board needs to understand it's not the status quo that it used to be years ago," Raymond said. "People are starting to be more concerned about how they spend their money."

It seems the controversy will soon hit a head. As of Jan. 1, Arundel residents can start the process of withdrawing from RSU 21 by creating a petition signed by 10 percent of those who voted in the last gubernatorial election.

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Interesting Meeting and Discussion Regarding School Renovation & Master Facility Plan and Cost Sharing Formula

Kennebunk Board of Selectman  Meeting as posted by Town Hall Streams 22.DEC.2011

http://www.townhallstreams.com/locations/kennebunkport-maine/event/bos-meeting-12-22-11?start=201112221900&end=201112222100&tz=EST

Go To Video Start Time  of 24:12 School Renovation
Go To Video Start Time  of 54:58 Cost Sharing Discussion

RSU withdrawal process on Monday, January 9, 2012 at 7:30 PM in the ML Day School

 The Arundel Board of Selectmen will be holding a public information session on the RSU withdrawal process on Monday, January 9, 2012 at 7:30 PM in the ML Day School Gym.  The purpose of this meeting will be to discuss the process as described in State of Maine statutes.  

Please click on the link for the full text of the pertinent statute, 20-A MRS § 1466.

http://www.mainelegislature.org/legis/statutes/20-A/title20-Asec1466.html

Residents renew push to leave RSU

By Kristy Wagner

Staff Writer

 The school board recently reopened cost sharing negotiations for Regional School Unit 21, but Arundel residents said they still want out.

The regional school unit was established in January 2009 and includes Arundel, Kennebunk and Kennebunkport.

The regional school unit school board voted to reopen the cost sharing issue in early December after Arundel selectmen sent a letter to the board requesting that it reexamine the cost sharing formula. 

Arundel selectmen said debt from improvements to school buildings would place the bulk of the cost load on Arundel taxpayers. State Sen. Nancy Sullivan (D-Biddeford) in January submitted a bill to legislature on behalf of Arundel for permission to withdraw from the regional school unit. The bill was voted “ought not to pass” and never made it out of committee.

Residents of Arundel on Dec. 12 ap-proached the Arundel Board of Selectmen to discuss their wish to begin the process to withdraw from RSU 21. Residents said they are ready to draw up the necessary petition to fulfill the first step of the process. 

A total of 189 registered voters who participated in the last gubernatorial election must sign the petition in order for the town to vote on whether they approve of the withdrawal petition and want to move forward with the next steps. 

Once residents collect the required 189 signatures, residents must vote to approve the petition to withdraw. The petition must pass by a simple majority vote.

After the petition passes, the question of whether the town actually wants to withdraw from the school unit must pass by a 2/3-majority vote of town residents.

“We’ll have no problem meeting the number of signatures,” said resident Paul Raymond. 

Raymond said he represents a group of residents who are anxious to begin the withdrawal process. He said residents want the board of selectmen to educate the general public about the process, not just the small percentage of residents with school-aged children.

“The issue is where my taxes are being spent,” Raymond said. “We’re talking about a huge tax burden to build a high school that we may not even go to.”

Town Manager Todd Shea said residents don’t feel the regional school unit’s board members hear their voices. He said Arundel’s complaints stem from more than just money concerns. Shea cited “control issues” as one area residents feel they are experiencing problems within the school unit.

“The residents feel that we don’t have the representation on the RSU board and the voice of the town of Arundel hasn’t been heard,” Shea said.

Three Arundel residents sit on the RSU 21 school board along with three from Kennebunkport and six from Kennebunk.

Shea said he hadn’t spoken with Maine Department of Education Management Information Systems Team Leader Jim Rier about Arundel’s potential withdrawal. He said a workshop on the withdrawal process is slated for Jan. 9.

“I want everyone to be on the same page and know what we’re dealing with as we move forward,” Shea said.

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The Town of Arundel ~ Economic Development Committee

The Town of Arundel is currently accepting volunteer applications for the
Economic Development Committee. 

Bylaws for the committee can be found @ www.arundelmaine.org.

If you are interested, please complete the application and send it to Town Hall, attention Town Manager.

Charter schools: Wave of the future?

http://schoolsofthought.blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/15/charter-schools-wave-of-the-future/

By Steve Kastenbaum, CNN Radio

(CNN) More students are attending class at charter schools across the U.S. than ever before, and the number is expected to continue growing in the coming years.

Listen to CNN Radio's podcast on charter schools from Steve Kastenbaum.

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools recently released a report saying that more than 2 million children are enrolled in public schools this year. The nonprofit resource for charter schools said that more than 500 charter schools opened their doors across the country in the 2011-12 school year.

In speech after speech, President Obama has said the charter schools play an important role in his education policy. His administration hopes to double the number of charters that were existence when he took office.

“We’ll encourage states to take a better approach when it comes to charter schools and other innovative public schools,” Obama said in a recent speech on education reform.

read more...or listen to the pod cast

Cost-sharing change won’t keep Arundel in RSU 21

Thursday, December 15, 2011 12:05 PM EST

http://www.journaltribune.com/articles/2011/12/15/editorial/doc4eea06abd1656795187684.txt

It was about one year ago that a committee of Regional School Unit 21 board members decided to put in months of work to develop a new proposal for a cost-sharing agreement between Kennebunk, Kennebunkport and Arundel.

In the end, they moved forward with a plan to base cost sharing 100 percent on property values, but voters in June chose instead to keep the old system of 60 percent on property value and 40 percent on pupil count.

Now, the board is talking about revisiting the cost-sharing agreement once again, in response to complaints about the 60/40 agreement from residents who believe it is unfair. It’s interesting that people are speaking up now, considering that the cost-sharing discussion voted upon this spring was not initiated by the voters’ desire for a new agreement between the three towns. It began as a way to address a dispute between Kennebunk and Kennebunkport concerning $324,000 of old debt from the two towns’ former school district, Maine School Administrative District 71.

Arundel is not party to that debt and never was, but somehow the scope of the committee’s review was widened to look at how future costs will be shared among all three towns.

The committee ended up considering three main options, each of which would impact the three towns differently. All three of the plans would have increased costs for Kennebunkport and decreased costs for Arundel, with minimal changes either way for Kennebunk.

Today, the committee is calling for a new way, with Arundel’s Diane Robbins, a school board member, saying that the same proposals won’t do this time around.

In the meantime, some Arundel residents are working toward withdrawal from the RSU, and it’s interesting how their efforts are being interpreted. Some, like Kennebunkport Town Manager Larry Mead, are against a new cost-sharing proposal because they believe it seems pointless if Arundel is not even going to be part of the equation next year. Others, like Arundel Town Manager Todd Shea, think a new cost-sharing proposal could change Arundel voters’ minds about pulling out.

 

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Charter schools on the minds of many

http://blog.scarboroughleader.com/2011/12/15/charter-schools-on-the-minds-of-many.aspx

By David Arenstam

Special contributor

In June, Maine became the 41st state to pass legislation to allow 10 new charter schools to be established over the next decade. Students and teachers will begin to fill those classrooms in September 2012.

With less than one year to go before Maine’s first charter school opens, parents, teachers and administrators are waiting to see how these new campuses will affect public education in one of the most rural and least populated states in the nation. Behind the scenes, educators and administrators are looking at new curriculum, trying to estimate attendance figures and calculating potential budgets.

The law created a seven-member State Charter School Commission to authorize and oversee the new schools. The commission will decide where the new schools will be established, who will run them and which school districts will be affected. 

There is no timetable in the law to complete these tasks and now teachers, administrators, legislators and parents all wait and watch as the law takes effect.

There has been some speculation by educators, administrators, and citizen groups about where the first charter school will be located and what type of need or niche it will fill, but officials at the Maine Department of Education will not name the first charter school or its location.

Deborah Friedman, director of policy and programs for the Maine Department of Education, said the current public school population is nearly 300,000 students. 

According to the language in the new law, as many as 10 percent of existing public school students may transfer to the newly formed charter schools.  However, that 10 percent safeguard exists only for the first three years. After that, there are no transfer limitations. 

“Parents always want what’s best for their kids,” said Donna Buttarazzi, a mother of three from Arundel.  

Buttarazzi lives in a school district where parents choose where to send their children to school. High school students from Arundel may go to Biddeford, Kennebunk or Thornton Academy.

“If charter schools are the best option, that’s where mine will go,” she said.

 When students move, the money associated with them transfers as well, and it is the potential loss of these funds that seems to worry administrators the most.  

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RSU 21 Cost-Sharing Review

In other business, the board put out the word that two at-large members of the Kennebunk community will be elected to the RSU 21 Cost-Sharing Review Committee. The RSU 21 Board of Directors voted on Dec. 5 to initiate a review of the cost-sharing formula.

The towns of Kennebunk, Kennebunkport and Arundel will each have two members represented on the committee as well as a member from the school board.

Kennebunk Selectmen will be interviewing candidates and talked about seeking the best representation.

"My feeling is that if we interview the people, we need to ask them what their strategy might be, listen to that and then decide what the strategy of this board might be," said Selectman Dave Spofford. "I think we need to have a good strategy, based on numbers, to be sure that this works for the taxpayers in our town at least."

http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20111215-NEWS-112150345

Arundel should go into RSU withdrawal with open eyes

Published:

Thursday, December 8, 2011 12:06 PM EST

Now that the three-year waiting period has passed, Arundel residents who want out of Regional School Unit 21 are eager to begin the withdrawal process. As of Jan. 2, 2012, petitioners can begin collecting signatures of those who favor withdrawing from the RSU, which now includes Kennebunk, Kennebunkport and Arundel.

We doubt it will take them long to get enough people to sign, considering the fervor shown by many who want to have an independent school district again. A straw poll taken on Election Day 2010 gathered 421 signatures of those in favor of withdrawal from the RSU, out of 438 voters who were asked to sign – and that was just in one day.

This petition will require only 189 signatures, so the process is sure to get rolling quickly.

For those who want out of the RSU, money is the major motivating factor, though the costs-versus-benefits analysis of being part of the RSU has been hotly debated. It’s the hard numbers that Arundel voters will need as they consider the prospect of withdrawing from RSU 21. The town is planning to commission an independent cost study if the petition is successful, which will help clear up, once and for all, what the change will mean for voters’ pocketbooks. But that shouldn’t be the only consideration.

We hope residents will also consider the unbiased facts of what the costs and impact to education will be if they withdraw.

The RSU has been able to add a Spanish program and gifted and talented program at the elementary level, and all-day kindergarten, all of which are important benefits to consider – and that could not necessarily be afforded by Arundel alone.

Let’s not forget the budget of 2008, the final year of the Arundel school district, when the town passed a budget of $6.6 million, an increase of a whopping 7.5 percent over that of the previous year, due to cuts in state aid. That increase meant $300 more per year for the owner of a $200,000 home. With a locked-in contract to Thornton Academy Middle School and all high school students tuitioned to area schools of their choice, the Arundel district at the time had little choice but to make drastic cuts at the Mildred L. Day School K-5 program as their only negotiable area, or raise taxes. They chose the latter.

Money is once again at issue, with RSU 21 proposing nearly $51.4 million of investment in school infrastructure, which will include major renovations to Kennebunk High School and to the elementary schools as well, with bonds slated to go before voters in the fall of 2012. That’s partly why petitioners will be trying to move as fast as they can to get out of the RSU in the next several months, before the town is locked into a significant amount of debt.

Even if Arundel voters reject the renovation bonds, they’d most likely be outvoted if Kennebunk and Kennebunkport approve the work. Arundel voters rejected the last school budget, after all, but it didn’t matter much because the other two towns OK’d it.

It’s true that both Arundel and Kennebunkport have little power in the RSU, with a population of 4,022 to and 3,474, respectively, to Kennebunk’s 10,798. Not only at the polls but also on the RSU board, that power plays out: Arundel and Kennebunkport have only three members each, while Kennebunk has six. Though those numbers make sense for the towns’ respective populations, it certainly doesn’t allow the two smaller towns to have a majority vote on the board for any issue.

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RSU board votes to reopen cost sharing discussion

KENNEBUNK — The RSU 21 Board of Directors spent the majority of its Dec. 5 meeting debating and listening to town leaders from Kennebunkport, Kennebunk and Arundel give their input on the cost-sharing formula between the three towns.

The discussion began after the Arundel Board of Selectmen sent a letter to the RSU 21 board asking it to revisit the cost-sharing breakdown. At a time when the school district is looking to make renovations to several schools within the district, the debt posed by those improvements will place a majority of that burden on the taxpayers of Arundel, the selectmen said.

RSU 21 director Matt Fadiman pointed out that a new cost-sharing formula was rejected by town voters just six months ago.

"My only hesitation, and it's a minor one, is I explicitly and implicitly trust the voters of the community. They sent us a clear message. My only concern is, how do we reform a committee asking at least a very similar if not the same question that the voters clearly rejected a short time ago?" Fadiman asked.

Fellow director Diane Robbins compared the possibility of a cost-sharing plan passing a second time around to when the district budget was shot down by voters, but then passed after improvements were made.

"I think we really do have to look at fundamental fairness, look at the communities, and at least reopen the discussion," said Robbins, who served on the Cost Sharing Committee that put a new plan before voters in May.

Once it became clear that the majority of the board was in favor of a new cost-sharing formula, Kennebunkport Town Manager Larry Mead, a member on the last committee to determine a cost-sharing formula, took the podium to urge the school board to leave the formula alone. Mead said that the Kennebunkport Board of Selectmen were in favor of the new cost sharing formula before it was voted down, even though it would raise property taxes in the town of Kennebunkport, but he believed the selectmen would not be in favor this time around. Mead went on to say he believed Arundel would try and leave the district, and that cost sharing should not be examined until the original five-year plan had run its course.

"The reality is folks in Arundel are going to try and pull out of the district. They may not succeed, but they're going to get the signatures to at least start the debate," Mead said. "Let's wait until Arundel decides what it's going to do amongst themselves, then let's talk about cost sharing. It may only be two towns that we're talking about, and if it's three, that's fine too because it's the time to talk about it. I think if you bring it back now I don't believe you'll see the voters in Kennebunkport support this even by a majority vote."

Cost-sharing plans require a two-thirds vote to pass.

Arundel Town Manager Todd Shea "respectfully disagreed" with Mead while acknowledging Arundel has some unanswered questions.

"The town of Arundel is in turmoil right now," Shea said. "We have a lot of questions that really need to be answered. We are not looking to pull out of the RSU district, we are looking to find what's in the best interest of the town of Arundel. There is a perception that people are in favor of RSU doing renovations to the schools, but the same perception is, 'How do I support such a capital improvement plan when the burden is on the town of Arundel, overwhelmingly?'"

Chairman of the Kennebunk Board of Selectmen, Al Searles, also voiced his support of reopening the cost sharing committee.

At the end of the discussion the board approved reconsidering the cost sharing formula with only Vice Chairperson Maureen King voting against the measure.

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Thumbs up, thumbs down

Thumbs up to the RSU 21 Board of Directors for agreeing to reopen the discussion of cost sharing in the district once again. The last cost-sharing proposal, which would have shifted some of the future tax burden from Arundel and Kennebunk taxpayers to Kennebunkport, was roundly defeated back in May. At that time, though, it seemed the defeat was based largely on the displeasure Arundel taxpayers were feeling over what they felt was an inflated budget and a growing tax burden. This time around it was Arundel leaders who came before the school committee to ask that the cost-sharing formula be examined once again. This is especially important with the district considering more than $40 million in building renovations/additions in the next several years. We understand Kennebunkport Town Manager Larry Mead's point about putting off the discussion until the district hits the five year mark, particularly since Kennebunkport taxpayers will likely see their taxes go up should any change be approved by voters. We also understand there's a chance that Arundel will move to leave the district. But given the very real need to overhaul certain school buildings, particularly the high school, and the ongoing struggle many are having with paying taxes, reviewing the cost sharing agreement just makes sense.

http://www.seacoastonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20111208/OPINION/112080366/-1/NEWSMAP

Arundel group seeks to withdraw from RSU 21

By JEFF LAGASSE
Staff Writer  http://www.journaltribune.com/

Published:

Friday, December 2, 2011 12:06 PM EST

ARUNDEL — Arundel’s relationship with Regional School Unit 21 is being held under the microscope.

Thanks to the efforts of a group headed by resident and volunteer firefighter David Lane, a petition may be submitted to the town early next year that would establish a Special Town Meeting vote to gauge public reaction to the possibility of divorcing the town from the RSU.

Until Wednesday night, the town had been poised to send out a request for proposals for the commission of a cost study to determine whether secession from the school district would in fact be cheaper for taxpayers.

But those plans were put on hold during a meeting of the board of selectmen Wednesday night, when town officials decided to put a temporary halt to the RFP and instead hold a public workshop to discuss the petition process. Arundel residents are welcome to attend the workshop, which will be held during the next scheduled board meeting at Mildred L. Day Memorial School on Monday, Dec. 12.

 

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