BUCKFIELD — A former RSU 10 director said Monday that she intends to begin a petition drive to put a reconsideration of the town withdrawing from the district on the June ballot.
The move comes after the Board of Selectmen last week refused a request from members of the withdrawal committee to place the same question — if residents still want to pull out of the 12-town school district — on the June ballot.
On Monday, Maida DeMers-Dobson, a retired educator and former member school board member, said she intends to petition citizens to get the question on the ballot.
DeMers-Dobson said she thought the committee was “spinning its wheels” trying to come up with an impossible solution and was not turning out to be a productive use of time and resources.
Last June, residents, claiming costs in RSU 10 have soared while the quality of education has declined, voted to begin the process of withdrawing from the school district.
Since a withdrawal committee, tasked with negotiating a departure from RSU 10, was formed in September, it has made little substantive progress in drafting an agreement.
At this point, DeMers-Dobson said, it would be better to bring the issue back to voters and set up a series of informational meetings regarding the pros and cons of continuing with the process.
She also cited comments made by committee Chairman Glen Holmes, who has reported residents’ declining enthusiasm for withdrawal since neighboring Hartford and Sumner have not started withdrawal processes.
At the time of Buckfield’s June vote, it was widely felt that if the three towns pulled out together, they might be able to re-form SAD 39, which was merged into RSU 10 in 2009.
DeMers-Dobson said residents need an opportunity to take another look at whether they really want to risk paying tuition for students to attend another school district or attempting to convert Buckfield Junior-Senior High School into a single K-12 school, options that have been discussed by the withdrawal committee.
“I see this effort as destructive toward our town’s feeling about itself as a community, and it’s not going to have a good outcome,” she said.
“That’s where the discussion belongs, I think, back with the town,” she said.
The possibility of a higher price tag for putting together the agreement also concerns DeMers-Dobson. Voters gave the committee a $20,000 budget, but Holmes, at the Jan. 15 meeting, told fellow committee members it could cost $30,000 to $50,000 to put a legal agreement together.
Committee member Judy Berg, however, disputed the figures offered by Holmes in an interview Monday. Berg, who was one of the main drivers for the vote to withdraw, said the committee could complete much of the work on an agreement with the school district itself.
She said the goals of withdrawing remain the same — to improve academic outcomes, reduce costs and keep the community’s high school. She said the committee was finally getting some of the information and financial data it needed to begin drafting a withdrawal plan.
Martha Catevenis, the committee’s newest member, said she was discouraged that committee members requested bringing the issue back to voters because it heard some people changed their mind about withdrawing.
She said she wanted to see the committee move forward and come up with a withdrawal plan that can be submitted to the school district and Maine Department of Education for approval. If voters decide they really don’t want to withdraw, they will have another opportunity to reject it at a vote down the line, she said.
“Our job is to move forward,” Catevenis said. “It may not be the direction they want to go in but we have to give something solid to our townspeople to make a decision on.”
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