Diane O’Brien, Ma to me, asked to write this week’s column. I am happy to take Father’s Day off.  – Ed O’Biren

There it was again, the stricken look of unexpected defeat on the faces of my upstairs neighbors. As, respectively, the chairs of the school and budget committees, the news Wednesday morning that the school budget had been voted down was hitting them hard. Given that the public hearing on the budget just a couple of weeks earlier had shown support for the school committee’s work, those opposed had rallied and actually come out to vote when it really mattered.

I’d been there myself exactly 50 years ago when a proposal to add kindergarten to the Lincolnville Central School (LCS) curriculum had failed for the third time. Defeat is disheartening. Especially when you feel children will benefit from a better school. It’s usually about the money, as it apparently was the other day, but voters will likely try to give other reasons such as those long-ago town meetings when some were saying “we don’t need a kindergarten. Look at us. We didn’t have kindergarten, and we’re doing fine.”

And by the standards of the day, we were. A mere 23 years earlier, in 1948, the consolidated school had been built on a parcel of old farm land in the Center. Recent history had moved education out of the five remaining one-room schools scattered around town and into a modern, four-room building with fluorescent lighting, flush toilets, and central heat. With two grades to a room and four teachers for the eight grades, a hot lunch cook, custodian, and a couple of bus drivers Lincolnville had moved, educationally, into the new world.

But now it was the 1970s and our Midcoast towns were beginning to grow. Lincolnville, which before the Civil War had some 2,150 people, lost population steadily through the decades, falling to a low of 811 in 1920. When Wally and I moved into the old farmhouse at the top of Sleepy Hollow in 1970 the population was 995, and the modern consolidated school was bursting at the seams.

So apparently was the Hope school, for some years before our arrival a decision was made to have one grade per teacher/room in both our towns. Grades one through four would go to the Hope school, and grades five through eight to Lincolnville.

Memory is a tricky thing, and I’m just now learning how we enshrine certain events over the years until the stories we tell may be wildly off the mark of what really happened. To make things worse, as we age we lose our compatriots in life – parents, siblings, spouses, friends. There’s no one to correct our cherished memories. With all that, here’s what it was like fifty years ago.

What a transportation nightmare that must have been. Hope includes South Hope out by Route 17 and of course, Lincolnville stretches from the Beach to Moody Mountain, Youngtown to the Northport line. The summer we arrived Wally was offered the job of teaching principal at LCS. He’d teach math and science to the seventh and eighth grades, and serve as principal of the school.

The school had been built according to the state’s school plan: four rooms along a central corridor, two offices at the front entrance, and a downstairs cafeteria space. One of the offices was for the three selectmen; Eileen Young, the town clerk at the time, did most of the town’s business (hunting licenses, car registration, tax payments) at her home on Camden Road. The other office was for the principal. Who was also teaching classes of up to 37 students.

Robin Heald was the traveling art teacher which meant she had a cart of supplies to push between rooms, and after her one or two LCS days, she’d work at Hope, and I believe, Appleton as well. Ditto for the music teacher, Pat Magee, who was a longtime Lincolnville Town Band member; years later I wrote about her childhood in Staying Put. A part-time reading teacher came in on certain days to help students. That was the special education program. I’m not remembering if there was anyone doing physical education, but since there was no gym and only a rudimentary schoolyard with some swings, I think the kids just ran around outside during recess.

Polly Davis was the hot lunch cook, famous for her peanut butter fudge among students. Bob Harvey was custodian when Wally came, followed later by Kenny Hall, a favorite of my boys with his extensive comic book collection in the little shop he kept in his home across from the school.

Were there problem students in those days? Or should I say kids with problems? You bet. And services for them. Not really.

A pregnant eighth grader? “Could have happened in the classroom with 37 kids,” Wally responded to a school committee member.

The boy who called the reading teacher something unmentionable here?

“You don’t talk like that to an old lady who’s trying to help you,” said the principal and promptly took the boy home.

When the father answered the door and said he’d take care of it (drunk and with fists flexed), Wally said, “on second thought, I’ll just take him back to school,” and settled the kid on a desk outside the office for the day.

Meanwhile, problems were getting solved – too slowly for some of us parents, but bit by bit they were. And most of the solutions came via the ballot. When a new middle school was proposed for the three HAL towns – Hope, Appleton and Lincolnville – everyone was up in arms; it seemed as if no one wanted it. Petitions were circulated, articles were written and ultimately the idea was voted on and tossed out.

Thus, the first of two or three (someone with a better memory than me is welcome to chime in here) additions and renovations were stuck onto the original. Kindergarten had finally passed, a somewhat hollow victory, since within weeks of that vote the state mandated kindergarten throughout Maine. A little-known fact at the time was that of the some 400 elementary schools only four had no kindergarten – Lincolnville, Hope, Appleton, and one other.

Another perennial ballot proposal, that a gym be added to the school, was a guaranteed NO vote. Can’t afford it said the voters, so the Community Building, a 10-minute walk to and from the school, continued to be the LCS “gym” for years and years.

Several missteps – an elevator shaft that leaked, roof joinings that leaked, much delayed maintenance, and ultimately a disastrous mold situation – led to the abrupt closing of the cobbled together Lincolnville school one day in April, 2001 I think. It took some scrambling that spring break to find classroom space around the area so kids could finish out the school year.

Then, at the June Town Meeting came a vote everyone could support. A gaggle of guys in suits who’d been standing up back had us all speculating... who are they anyway? MBNA? Yes indeed, and in those heady years of the company’s tenure here we’d come to expect wondrous things.

They didn’t disappoint.

“We’re here to promise we’ll have a new school ready for you by Labor Day,” they announced to the assembled voters.

There were some (easy to meet) stipulations involved, and indeed we voted “Yes!”

And they delivered. By opening day in September a brand-new facility had arisen on their Point Lookout property, room for all nine grades plus a soccer field. It would be another 2-3 years before a state of the art K-8 school finally arose on the site of that original 4-room building. A years-long fund-raising effort by parents and school supporters brought in a million dollars or so for “extras” that the state didn’t provide.

As an aside, could someone involved in that effort do a write up for the Historical Society’s records? Those were the years my own three had moved on into adulthood, and I wasn’t paying as much attention.

And now, even my grandchildren are moving on, into high school and college. There was one year when there were six O’Briens in LCS, from kindergartner Jack to eighth grader Rose, a bunch of first cousins. One eighth grader will remain next year.

So to déjà vu. Just as 50 years ago when Lincolnville children were six or seven before starting school, certain issues could be addressed by early education – kindergarten – the problems kids face today are more complex. Of course, the no-to-the-budget voters didn’t say what they objected to, other than the price-tag.

Speaking as a former schoolboard member (way back in the 90s), there’s never any fat in the proposed budget. Contractual agreements with staff, transportation, mandated special education, normal increases in utilities and supplies, building maintenance add up to more every year. The school committee has to go back to square one and see where they can cut. As David Kinney promised in a LBB post this week, there will be school next year.

Now that the LCS kids are out, it truly feels like summer, although the Camden Hills Regional kids who didn’t graduate still have one more day of school on Monday. I used the time not writing this column to head down to the beach, grab a bite at the Whale’s Tooth (I had not yet seen their re-designed wine bar, very cool) and check out some of the shops. Tourist season is in full swing, but we understand how important that is, even if we grumble. Be good, and reach out at ceobrien246@gmail.com.

CALENDAR

Tuesday, June 18

Lakes and Ponds Committee, 7 p.m. Town Offce 

Library open 3-6 p.m. 208 Main Street

AA Meeting 12:15 p.m., Community Building, 18 Searsmont Road

Wednesday, June 19

Library open 2-5 p.m. 

Town Office closed for Juneteenth Holiday

Thursday, June 20

Heart and Soul Team, 4 p.m., Lincolnville Community Library

Comprehensive Plan Review Committee, 6:30 p.m. Town Office

Friday June 21

AA Meeting 12:15 p.m., Community Building, 18 Searsmont Road

Library open 9-12, 208 Main Street

Saturday, June 22

Library open 9-12, 208 Main Street

Sunday, June 23

United Christian Church, 9:30 a.m. Worship, 18 Searsmont Road

Bayshore Baptist Church, 9:30 a.m. Sunday School, 11:00 worship, 2648 Atlantic Highway