
OCT. 11, 2024: Harrison Town Manager Cass Newell, left, speaks during a joint selectmen’s meeting held by West Paris and Paris at the Paris Fire Department last Friday. Also pictured: Matt Frank, Chairman of Harrison’s Select Board. Nicole Carter / Advertiser Democrat
PARIS — Harrison Town Manager Cass Newell has confirmed to the Advertiser Democrat that the town may exit Maine School Administrative District 17.
Newell made her announcement after Friday’s Paris/West Paris joint selectmen’s meeting, when the Select Boards for those towns voted to move forward with legal action against the district in the wake of its decision and actions to close Agnes Gray Elementary School last February.
Harrison will not join in a solution involving litigation, according to Newell.
“We are pursuing a look at all of our options for education in general,” she said. “Which means leaving the district.
“I think based on our citizens and what I’ve heard so far, the likelihood of us being part of this (lawsuit) is not the direction our town wants to go in. Our town wants to pursue exiting the district.”
Harrison’s board of selectmen had authorized Newell to start investigating avenues to exit last spring after SAD 17’s 2024-25 budget first failed at referendum and the district announced a potential school consolidation plan that would close elementary schools in Harrison, Norway, Waterford and West Paris, replacing them with a larger school centrally located in Norway.
Apart from their determination to hold onto their community elementary school, Harrison residents carry a higher financial burden to fund SAD 17 schools because their property valuations are higher than those in the other towns in the district. The town’s assessment value covers 22% of the district’s total, as calculated by Maine Department of Education, yet less than 7% of SAD 17 students reside there.
Harrison contributes more than 20% of the district’s local share responsibilities that cover expenses beyond Maine Department of Education’s formula for essential programs and services (EPS).
SAD 17’s current $50.4 million budget, passed at referendum earlier this month, is about 14% higher than the DOE’s EPS allowance, which Harrison also pays a disproportionately high percentage of.
Last June the town formed its Education Options Team, a volunteer committee assessing how outside education funding would work for a municipality independent of a regional school unit.
Led by Newell, the committee has reached out to several Maine communities that have already completed the process of separating from their districts.
“We have talked with Dixfield at length about how that process went,” Newell said. “We are also talking with Sebago. We will meet with their select board in two weeks to learn about their school district exit.
“These two are the bigger ones, as they are in our [western Maine] area and of similar size to Harrison. And similar strategies took place in the process, has been our understanding.”
Sebago left SAD 61 six years ago. Approximately 100 K-fifth grade students attend the community’s Sebago Elementary School. About 100 seventh through 12th-graders primarily attend SAD 61’s Lake Region Middle and High School in Naples on a tuition basis; that option will expire at the end of the 2027-28 school year.
In the Dixfield school district situation, its four sending towns, Canton, Carthage, Dixfield and Peru voted to leave Regional School Unit 10 in 2016, five years after dissolving their previous School Administrative District 21 and joining RSU 10. The four-town district is now Regional School Unit 56.
As a previously established school district, the new RSU 56 already had school campuses and system infrastructure; its buildings in general were in better condition than many of those in the former districts SAD 39 (Rumford) and SAD 39 (Buckfield) it joined 2011 to form RSU 10.
RSU 10 currently consists of the Buckfield, Hartford, Hanover, Mexico, Roxbury, Rumford and Sumner communities.
“That’s where we’re at – ground level research,” Newell said. “We have not spent any town money on this. We would obviously go to town meeting, or a special town meeting if need be, if that’s where we end up.”
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