GRAY – NEW GLOUCESTER – Two School Administrative District 15 bond referendum questions, which would authorize spending for school renovations and the construction of a new high school athletic complex, drew fire at a public forum Tuesday night.
About 30 residents of Gray and New Gloucester attended the meeting at the Gray-New Gloucester High School. With the members of the school board on hand, many of the members of the public chastised the board for setting the wrong spending priorities.
Much of the criticism revolved around the school board’s decisions regarding the proposed athletic complex. The board had originally proposed the spending as one comprehensive, $7.4 million bond package that funded new classrooms and meeting rooms, a renovated portico, and improvements to the parking lot at Gray-New Gloucester Middle School, as well as science lab renovations and the construction of a new athletic complex at the high school, including a multi-use field with synthetic turf.
Facing criticism that the board had not given voters enough choice in the matter, the board voted to shift the $738,000 in proposed synthetic turf spending into a separate referendum question.
Yet, at the Tuesday night meeting, the criticism continued, as residents expressed general anger at the board for the proposed $3.75 million in athletics-related spending. The athletic complex would include a new baseball field, two softball fields, a multi-use practice field, a running track, and a “small ball” field with synthetic turf.
“Wouldn’t the money be better spent in programs to get the kids up to speed with their test scores?” said Colette Tweten, of Gray.
Jayne Ercolini, of Gray, accused the board of trying to keep up with richer towns in the region.
“You don’t have the tax base to do this, and you don’t care,” Ercolini said. “So the real embarrassment is not the condition of your field. The real embarrassment would be putting people out of their homes because they can’t afford to pay their taxes. That would be embarrassing to me.”
Blaine Skilling, a teacher at the Dunn Elementary School, said that the board’s priorities communicated the wrong message to the student body.
“Are we telling the kids that our town and this district is an embarrassment?” he said. “How are we making them feel? They can feel like they are something less because we might not have what the towns around us have, when we should be boosting them up any way we can? As a teacher I have to do that. I have a kid sitting there in $180 shoes, and I have another kid I am buying shoes for.”
“I don’t want them to feel like an embarrassment because they don’t have what the others around them have,” Skilling added.
But to Eric LaLiberty, a coach with the nonprofit Patriot Soccer Club, which uses the existing fields, the district ought to invest in fields that are competitive with neighboring towns.
“People say ‘Good enough, we’re playing on cow pastures,’” LaLiberty said. “As a coach, I sprained my ankle setting up cones on the field, almost canceled my practice because of the lack of conditions that we have, and now traveling to all these schools and seeing what they have compared to us? I mean, we can’t even hold a candle.”
In the view of Tina Martell, chairwoman of the board, the proposed spending constitutes needs, not luxuries.
“We’re not trying to keep up with the Joneses,” Martell said. “We’re just trying to get what the kids actually need in this district.”
Martell said the board chose to separate turf because taxpayers see it as a luxury.
“For a community like us, who has a limited amount of space, turf is the solution,” she said. “It’s not a want. It’s a higher upfront (cost) but the maintenance cost is lower over time. It pays for itself over three to four years.”
Since the board views athletics as a core part of a student’s education, it included the proposed athletic complex in Question 1, not Question 2, Martell said.
Furthermore, Martell said, taxpayers are misplacing the aim of their ire, much of which should be directed at state legislators, who have pushed the burden of school funding and teacher retirements onto municipalities.
“Over the last four years we’ve had a lot of unfunded state mandates, charter schools, and teacher retirement,” she said. “This district has been hit hard.”
In November 2012, voters approved a referendum allowing the purchase of 28 acres behind the high school and to conduct a district-wide study of buildings and athletic fields.
Board member Amy Arata, who had unsuccessfully motioned to indefinitely table the bonds, said this year’s spending proposal is too much.
“The feedback that I have been getting from both Gray and New Gloucester is that this is too much money too soon after a big budget increase last year,” Arata said.
Sean Chayer, a resident of New Gloucester, agreed.
“In the past nine years, our school taxes have risen by 60 percent,” Chayer said. “They have risen by 11 percent just in the last year. People cannot afford these increases.”
Amid the outrage, Superintendent Bruce Beasley urged calm.
“You can be angry at me; you can be angry at the board; you can be angry about teacher negotiations; you can be angry about a lot of things – the process,” he said. “All of those things you can be angry about. But again, what I hope you look at, and you think about is, are these projects that we are proposing worthwhile to your students, your communities, and the programs that have been developed over time in these communities?”
A CLOSER LOOK
A final community forum on the SAD 15 bond referendums is set for Thursday, Oct. 23, from 6 a.m.-8 p.m. at Gray-New Gloucester Middle School.
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