Twice in recent memory, groups of school districts in southern and northern Aroostook County have looked to consolidate into one regional high school under mounting budget pressure, declining enrollment and staffing shortages.
In both instances, the projects were scrapped after years of work amid clashes between district leaders over the locations of the proposed schools, among other issues.
Now, as central Aroostook’s three largest high schools are exploring the possibility of combining, location is again one of the major issues superintendents of the districts that oversee the schools believe could stall the project on a local level. Questions around transportation and the loss of local identity will also play a role in whether or not the project moves forward, the superintendents said in interviews and public meetings.
Presque Isle, Caribou and Fort Fairfield high schools announced on Dec. 4 that they have partnered to submit the first part of an application for a capital funding grant. The grant, through a Maine Department of Education pilot program, would fund a consolidated high school in the region.
Other than an idea that it would be located centrally to the three existing high schools, there has been little discussion of where the school would be built, Presque Isle-based MSAD 1 Superintendent Ben Greenlaw said. That’s among the major items to be determined over the next year and could decide the fate of the newly proposed school.
“In my experience, this is where these plans fall through,” Fort Fairfield (MSAD 20) Superintendent Melanie Blais said in a November school board meeting.
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Blais served as the curriculum coordinator in the Houlton-based RSU 29 as it explored consolidation. She declined to be interviewed for this story, deferring to Greenlaw, who has spearheaded the exploration of the new school.
At least one other group of schools is exploring the grant. The central Maine districts that oversee Dexter Regional High School, Piscataquis Community High School and the career and technical center the schools share announced their application in November.
The districts that represent those schools have been working for years toward forming a consolidated high school. A previous attempt that also included the Corinth-based Central High School and Penquis Valley Middle High School in Milo fell apart in 2023 after the districts could not come up with the funds for an engineering study.
Two years ago, an attempt at regionalization in the St. John Valley between districts in Madawaska, Fort Kent and St. Agatha collapsed because of disagreements on where the school would be located.
And in 2020, the Department of Education scrapped a project in Southern Aroostook that would combine high schools in Houlton, Hodgdon, Dyer Brook and Danforth and the Region Two School of Applied Technology after two schools backed out, one citing the distance students would have to travel to get to the facility.
The location debate is twofold, superintendents said. First, there’s concern over long commutes for students who live in communities further away from the school. Presque Isle, Fort Fairfield and Caribou high schools are all 10 to 15 miles from one another and the municipalities stretch well beyond that distance, ensuring longer commutes for at least some students no matter where the new school is located.
But Greenlaw, citing the existing collaborations between every central Aroostook high school and its two regional tech centers, has an answer to that question.
“We’re already busing students to Caribou, we’re already busing students from the outer reaches of these communities to Presque Isle for tech centers, so it’s not that far off to bus them to [a regional high school],” he said.
Second to the debate is the cultural identity lost when a town loses a school. Each area would retain its K-8 school(s), but would send their students away for high school.
“The schools are the hub of many communities and people always have that fear of losing their identity when we do consolidate,” Jane McCall, superintendent of the Caribou-based RSU 39 said after the initial announcement on Dec. 4. “I know that it was hard back in 2009 when Caribou and Limestone merged. We’re pretty protective of our schools.”
Much of that school-based identity is expressed through community support for high school athletics or other extracurriculars, the other significant local hurdle superintendents have identified.
The regional high school would end one of the longest-standing rivalries in Maine high school sports between Presque Isle and Caribou. And Fort Fairfield, only a month removed from a boys soccer state championship that the town is still celebrating, would no longer compete for state titles as the Tigers.
“No one that I’ve spoken to has said, ‘This is a bad idea in the long term for our students educationally,’” Greenlaw said. “But we’re losing something potentially if we don’t have the Wildcats or the Tigers or the Vikings. We’ve got to be mindful of how we work our way through that because the goal is not to reduce opportunities for students, it’s to increase them.”
One way Greenlaw foresees doing that is by expanding the number of sports or extracurriculars offered by the school, with a larger student body to support them.
If built, the regional high school would be among the 10 largest in the state, with over 1,000 students. That would make it a Class A school for athletics — the largest class under current Maine Principal’s Association designations.
The closest existing Class A schools are Bangor and Hampden Academy, at least 2.5 hours away from Presque Isle, Caribou and Fort Fairfield. That means travel times to away games would grow for nearly every sport the schools currently offer.
These are hurdles officials at the high schools are aware of, and that their superintendents are unsure are possible to overcome. But with the conglomerate of threats looming over the future of public education, they believe it’s in their best interest to try.
“It’s hard to ease concerns when we don’t know where the building would be at this point,” Greenlaw said. “The next move for us is really to vision this with our communities, within our own schools, and come together to talk about what this might look like.”