SALEM -– The MSAD #58 board continued discussion of the district’s troubles last Thursday evening with long talks on the financial realities now settling in and the need to do something about it.

The district is facing a $420,000 short fall in state subsidies in the years to come.

With continued and anticipated rise in future valuation and with a continuous decline in enrollment, the economic forecast, as it is in many other Maine districts, is not favorable. The State Essential Programs and Services formula uses these variables as primary sources for state funding.

The EPS formula, as well as the end of federal stimulus funding, a Eustis cap in its responsibility to share district costs and other reasons, will put huge burdens on Strong, Phillips and Kingfield in years ahead. This might mean as much as three to five mils for those towns in years ahead if things don’t change.

“That’s huge, that’s really huge,” board chairman Mike Pond said. “If anybody likes it or not, three mills or a third more on your taxes is huge.”

Pond said one of the questions is to look beyond the potential of cuts ahead. If you cut everything right to the bare bones, what do you have left to do? What can you do and where do you go from there?”

“You can’t wait for the house to fall down before you have to say I guess I should have moved… you have to move forward with some type of plan,” he said.

Superintendent Quenten Clark has pro- duced a list of eight options for district savings. He said that many other options could be produced or variations on the options listed could also be considered.

The first option listed is a “do nothing” approach. All other options list some form of consolidating students between the four elementary schools such as “option 8” which promotes a K-6 elementary school in each of the four towns with a central middle school.

Pond agreed that it makes sense to keep enough students in each of the schools to keep the buildings open in each town. He then commented on a plan to move all of the district middle school students to Kingfield. “The truth of the matter is, if you move the seventh and eighth grades, you’re setting the table up for the other schools to close.”

Stratton with such a small school has a huge impact, Pond said. “The way that they are headed, Stratton is on a destination to close,” he said. Not today or tomorrow, he said, but in five years the general population will ask if they want to keep their school open.

Pond said that eliminating staff and bunching classes together is not great; he advocated for some plan to somehow bring the students together.

Under the public comment period, resident Jack McKee urged members to be cautious about immediate decisions. He recommended the “do nothing” option because of the potential of positive economic shifts which could benefit school funding ahead. McKee said when the economy improves they’ll have real problems with trying to come back to present status.

He also noted that the transition would have immediate disruptive impacts on the parents and students. Most of the plans, McKee felt, “appear to be a knee-jerk reaction to the current situation.”

Clark disagreed with McKee saying an improved economy will not change the EPS formula, will not stop increased valuation or the continuing decline in student enrollment.

Sarah Strunk, a Eustis resident and school board member elect, said that she and a group of nearly 32 residents have met more than three times and developed a document called “Principals of education planning for the Town of Eustis.”

In short, she called for the board to produce a long-range plan with consideration of the entire community based on hard data and research.

“What I really want are people to be thinking about the future,” Clark said. “We can not sustain the schools we have with the numbers of kids we have coming in. We can do it for a year; sure we can do it for a year… If the community does not start talking about what the future looks like, it’s going to clobber you,” Clark explained. He mentioned that if they spend their money for bare minimal programs in all five schools, education will not be good in any of them.

“We’ve taken away a lot already here… the ‘do nothing’ strategy is not a do nothing strategy,” Clark explained. Meaning “do nothing” means program cuts, reducing staff and a painful elimination of services.

Pond was protective of the general population which does not necessarily come to school board meetings. “The general population is in trouble here.”

Director Ann Schwink said she’d like to wait a year and not rush into any decision.

Clark noted that if they waited a year and the discussions just went away, they’ll be faced with the same problem, if not worse in the following year.

Director Mary Jane Thorndike showed her frustration with the issue saying that they knew this was coming. She also said the whole two-plus-year consolidation issue prevented them from being more proactive and moving forward toward solutions.

Director Alan Morse said he wanted to make it clear that the discussion of closing Mt. Abram did not mean closing the district high school. “We’re not talking about closing a high school, we’re talking about moving a high school,” Morse explained. Mt. Abram High School is just a building, he said.

Morse was referring to one plan where they might consider closing either the Phillips or the Strong Elementary School and someday make one building be the district high school.

This is a concept that would be an option in years ahead when Mt. Abram exceeds its design life and is in need of serious upgrades and when the high school population continues to decline in numbers.

Mt. Abram has 31 less students than it did last year with an enrollment of 271. As of March 1, MSAD #58 has 840 students down from 887 at this time last year.