Wiscasset and Boothbay area speakers agreed Monday night, their communities should be thinking over what's next as student numbers have declined and residents still feel a connection to the local schools. Boothbay Town Manager Daniel Bryer Jr. sat with Boothbay Selectman Russell Pinkham to his right and, to Bryer's left, Boothbay Harbor Selectman Kenneth Rayle, in the audience of a Wiscasset Future of the Schools Committee meeting.

The committee has met off and on since 2021, when voters called for a committee and selectmen appointed it. Monday night's attendees from the peninsula said similar questions are being, and need to be, asked there. 

They had listened about 20 minutes to the Wiscasset panel plan three subcommittee reports — on the status quo and expansion; regionalization; or tuitioning out the high school grades — when Chair Duane Goud asked if they would like to ask questions or to speak. Bryer explained he and the others were just there to see where Wiscasset's committee is at in its process. He said, "We've started our own committee and we've already met with one of your subcommittees. And we're going to try to do the same thing ... split it up into three different groups ... Board members agree, that something has to be done, because we're just traveling in a direction that isn't going to work on the peninsula."

Wiscasset committee member Deb Pooler told the visitors she found encouragement in a Maine Education Policy Research Institute report that student populations declined 20% statewide from 1991 to 2020, there are too many buildings and too few students, and schools are part of towns' identity. 

"I kind of in the beginning felt like it was just us," Pooler said. "But then as I've read, and seen what's going on, I do think we can all work together and work it out. I do. And I think it's going to be the future of education in Maine. It's not going to look like it does right now."

"The biggest thing in our area," said Boothbay's Pinkham, "is emotionally ... Emotions run high on keeping it, where as realistically when you look at the budgets year after year and the number of students keeps dropping ... it's just, it's not sustainable. And plus, socially, what are you doing to the kids? When I was in school, we had 400 students. Now there's 160. I think socially, sports are better and everything else when there's more kids."

That goes for music and arts, too, Rayle said. 

Pooler wants to be involved in finding something that works for the kids and for the towns, she said. "Because, (just) as you feel in Boothbay, that's part of your community."

There's "no downside" to studying things, including possible directions to go in, said Rayle. "And having facts to try to influence the decision rather than emotion, or at least to temper the emotion," he added.

Wiscasset selectmen's liaison to the Wiscasset committee, Sarah Whitfield, asked its subcommittees to, in their reports, back up their statements with the studies or other sources that led to those conclusions. Otherwise, the statements will sound like opinions, she said.

The committee meets next at 6 p.m. May 5 at the town office and over Zoom, when members will review subcommittees' draft reports. The subcommittees are to submit those by May 1 so committee members can view them in advance.