ARROWSIC

In the midst of a controversial lawsuit, Tim Harkins, chairman of the Regional School Unit 1 board of directors, set personal time aside for a question-and-answer session with Arrowsic residents Monday, to discuss the state of the RSU.

Harkins, an Arrowsic resident, requested that the board of selectmen convene a meeting, after residents expressed frustration that — as there is no school building within the town — there is no warrant article that allows for discussion of the school unit at the annual June Town Meeting.

Ten residents attended, as did the three-member board of selectmen and state Sen. Eloise Vitelli, an Arrowsic resident.

Programming

Selectman Sukey Heard asked Harkins about programming within the system, and how a board of directors determines what programs will take place within a school unit.

“Issues that we wrestle with in terms of programming always fall within the budget discussion,” said Harkins.

Programming the board has talked about bringing back but were unable to owing to budgetary constraints, said Harkins, included restoring foreign language training at the middle school, expanding the music program and strengthening health education at the middle school level.

“One of the biggest focuses this year was how much effort or resources we were going to put into our Pre-K program,” said Harkins. “We’ve been advocating for strong Pre-K, but we get a little bit of push back because Pre-K is not something that is mandated by the state.”

Harkins said that people within the community, in favor of minimizing the school budget, were opposed to allocating spending to optional programs rather than using those resources for state-mandated programs.

Approximately 30 percent of voters within the RSU member towns, which include Arrowsic, Bath, Phippsburg, West Bath and Woolwich, voted in opposition of the $28.3 million school budget for 2014-15.

“Instead of growing that program this year, we chose to reinforce it,” said Harkins, noting that the board had created a part time Pre-K director position who will be responsible for reporting to the board regarding the district’s Pre-K program as well as the Pre-K programs the RSU contracts for services, such as the YMCA and The Children’s Schoolhouse.

Facilities

“You have aged buildings in the system,” said Roger Heard, “and I know you’re taking moves to repair them. What are the long-term plans that the school board has for the building situation?”

Harkins said that the board began looking in depth at the facilities three years ago, hiring an additional person on the operations and maintenance staff as a short-term solution and commissioned a the creation of a report on the system’s buildings to address long-term needs.

Harriman Associates, an architecture and engineering firm with offices in Auburn and Portland, was contracted to conduct a study of Morse High School and the elementary facilities, said Harkins.

“Anecdotally, we’ve always heard ‘Morse is in bad shape,’ ‘Morse needs help,” said Harkins. “(We) can’t make decisions based on anecdotal information.

“Our director of operations echoed the same thing,” he added, noting the board decided to have an outside party analyze the condition of the high school. Harriman Associates has previously been contracted in 1986 to conduct a similar study, Harkins said.

The report substantiated what voters and the facilities director has said about Morse, said Harkins, which led up to $5.2 million bond authorized by voters in November 2013, of which approximately $3.4 million will be used to update and repair Morse.

In April, the Maine Department of Education approved six schools for state-funded construction projects, one of which was Morse.

Though the state will fund a new high school for the RSU, Harkins said, the board’s position is that the work that needs to be done at Morse is long overdue and cannot wait as it directly affects the educational experience of the students there.

RSU 1 superintendent Patrick Manuel presented the findings of the report to the community in four meetings that took place at each of the units elementary schools to gather feedback residents on the report to convey to the board.

While a report on these meetings from Manuel is not due to be presented to the board until their August meeting, Harkins said: “From what I hear, while there would be dollars saved from closing a facility, the emotional impact of that exceeds the dollar savings that we would have.”

Lawsuit

Few questions were asked regarding the ongoing lawsuit between West Bath and RSU 1 and Bath. Arrowsic and Woolwich, which were being sued along with RSU 1 to recover $1.9 million West Bath claims the town was overcharged by the RSU, were excused from the suit in a partial summary judgement issued in June.

“It’s in the hands of the court,” said Harkins, and noted that he thinks some key points regarding the case have been overlooked in newspaper coverage but said he preferred not to delve into those at the meeting.

“I think it’s an unfortunate thing and there were missteps made probably on both sides,” he said, “but I don’t feel that it had to go to court and I don’t feel it had to go to court for this period of time.”

rgargiulo@timesrecord.com