Alna should work with Regional School Unit 12’s other towns to plan the district’s future, an Alna representative to the district’s board said Oct. 8.

Ralph Hilton asked selectmen to consider having a board member serve on the district’s strategic planning committee. Its outcomes could impact local education and its costs, he said.

“Everything you do in education affects what the rest of the tax base is,” Hilton said.

The district’s board would like to have all member towns represented on the committee that next meets in February 2015, Hilton continued. He said the meeting is timed to follow the November votes Palermo and Windsor will be taking on whether or not to leave the district.

Some of the panel’s prior planning no longer applies now that Wiscasset has left, and it makes sense to wait until those two towns have made their decisions before the committee meets again, Hilton said.

“It’ll be after we find out if we’re smaller, again, or if we’re the same size,” he told First Selectman David Abbott and Third Selectman David Reingardt. Second Selectman Jonathan Villeneuve was not at the meeting.

The person the town has on the committee does not have to be a selectman, Hilton said.

Board members planned to read a set of minutes Hilton gave them from the committee’s September meeting in Chelsea. It notes questions panelists raised including how to get more community involvement in schools and how to reach out to home-schooled students. Participants also discussed possible parent surveys and the need to consider schools’ support staff along with administrators and teachers when looking at professional development, according to the minutes.

Road cracking concern

Cross Road has cracks that need attention before the road’s condition worsens, Hilton and selectmen agreed. Hilton, the only Alna resident in attendance besides a reporter and Town Clerk Amy Warner, taking minutes, said some of Cross Road’s cracks have grass growing up from them.

Abbott said he would call Alna Road Commissioner Jeff Verney and recommend the cracks be repaired. There’s enough money in the roads’ budget to cover the work, he said.

“It wouldn’t make sense to have the money sitting there doing nothing and have the road go all to pieces,” Abbott said.

Cross Road was not part of a large paving project Alna did in 2011, but the road has had some culvert work in recent years, town officials said.

The board meets next at 7 p.m., Oct. 22, at the town office on Route 218.