If Wiscasset wants, it can get a head start on planning for its first year away from Regional School Unit 12.

The town has the option to put together a transition team that would have no hiring or budget-making power, Maine Department of Education spokeswoman Samantha Warren said November 7.

“That said, if the town moves forward in electing a new school board with the same energy it got the withdrawal item on the ballot and overwhelmingly approved, that board should certainly be able to complete all of the work of getting their new municipal school administrative up and running by July 1, 2014,” Warren wrote in an email response to questions from the Wiscasset Newspaper.

Once the school committee is elected, it can make contracts and take other other action; in the meantime, selectmen cannot appoint a school committee, Warren said.

Doug Smith, chairman of the citizens' group, Wiscasset Educational Research Panel, supports having a transition team.

“Wiscasset really needs to do it, asap,” Smith said in an interview November 7. The committee could start looking at everything from central office staffing to bus routes, Smith said.

“There's a tremendous amount of work that has to be done,” he said.

Selectmen's Chairman Ed Polewarczyk was not sure yet if a transition team is the way to go. There's still some bitterness in town over the selectmen's choices in who it appointed to the withdrawal committee, he said.

In addition, having a transition team might discourage other residents from running for the school committee; and it might turn out that the school committee doesn't agree with suggestions the transition committee has come up with, Polewarczyk said.

That would be very frustrating for the transition panel after all its work, he said.

Polewarczyk said he would need more time to think about the idea of a transition team. Meanwhile, he wants to move quickly to schedule the school committee election, he said.

That could happen as soon as the board's next meeting on November 19, if possible, he said. “I wouldn't want to do something inadvertently and make something invalid.”

Although Smith and Polewarczyk agreed the town has much to accomplish by the time the withdrawal takes effect next July, it can be done, even with much less time than Wiscasset has, according to one man who's been through it in his town.

Art Tatangelo is chairman of the board of selectmen for the western Washington County town of Cherryfield, and he chaired Cherryfield's withdrawal committee.

The river town had just weeks between its final withdrawal vote May 14 and the start of year one outside a school district it had been with since the 1960s, Tatangelo said.

The town took several proactive steps ahead of the withdrawal vote: Those included a town meeting vote for a five-member school committee if the withdrawal passed; and working with Jonesport to line up a shared superintendent, Tatangelo said in an interview November 6.

His advice to Wiscasset: “I think the biggest thing you can do, and what we did, is to forget the past, just relax, and then keep moving.

“I wish them all the best,” Tatangelo said.