One of the biggest gripes people at this end of Regional School Unit 12 have is paying more for their students than the northern towns do. In fact, the district calculates all eight towns' bills without regard to how many students they have.

That could be about to change at the polls next month. If it does, the likely results would be some relief for taxpayers in Wiscasset, Westport, Alna and Chelsea.

On the flip side, Somerville, Whitefield, Palermo and Windsor could all get stuck with bigger bills.

On November 6, district voters will consider the new formula and a provision that would temper the blows and savings for the first 3 years.

The district based its current formula on the combined amount all eight towns paid for education in 2009. A town's share of the budget is the percent its 2009 amount was of that original pie.

The three-year-old formula doesn't account for changes in the number of students a town has. And that, said the district board's chairman Hilary Holm, is the problem.

“The trend has been declining enrollment, but (the formula) never adjusted for a town having reduced students,” Holm said in an interview September 26. “So we had to do something that would reflect changes.”

The proposed new formula does. It divides the district's operating cost (minus pieces that need few or no local dollars) by the total number of students, to get the average cost per student. Then that figure is multiplied by the number of students a town has.

The state money the town gets for education is then subtracted to determine the town's bill.

The district will go by what the state reports for the towns' student counts (the number of students a town has) each February, based on local counts taken the previous April and October.

For the next 3 years, a safety net would temper the share shifts. In the fiscal year that starts next July, a town whose share shrinks under the new formula would have to contribute 75 percent of those savings into the net; a town with an increased share would only be responsible for 25 percent of that increase. Those percentages change to 50 percent each the second year; in year three, a town with a lesser share would only pay 25 percent of  the savings, while a town with a greater share would have to cover 75 percent of its additional amount. Then the net disappears.

In one example of the first-year impact of the safety net, the new formula would, without the net, have saved Alna $81,036 if it had been in place for the current fiscal year. However, the net, in its first year, would have cut the savings to just $20,259.

Even so, William Stafford, one of Alna's representatives to the district, said he “definitely” supports the proposal. “I hope everyone in Alna goes out and votes for it,” he said. He and several others interviewed from the district's southern end, which stands to have a lightened burden, shared that sentiment. They described the proposal as fair because it charges the same amount per student for each town, and each town's state revenues would now directly offset its bill.

Dennis Dunbar, chairman of Westport Island's budget committee, called it “a vast improvement in terms of equity. And it would certainly benefit the town,” he said. “I'm not crazy about the safety net because it delays the benefit, but it's a compromise that's probably reasonable for everybody.”

Dunbar and Mary Myers of Wiscasset are each involved in their towns' withdrawal talks. They declined to comment on whether the changes to the formula, if passed, might give their towns pause. But speaking only as a member of the district board, Myers said the potential change in Wiscasset's share “is definitely a positive to the financial side of being in the RSU. It is very fair across the board,” she said.

Eugene Stover, another board member from Wiscasset, criticized the formula for how the local student counts are set. He favored a different counting method, and had opposed the formula change on the basis that more information was needed on the impact, he said.

The proposal voters face would also change how the district figures towns' tabs for adult education. Towns' shares are currently the same percentages as the rest of their education bill; instead, they would be based on town populations in the last Census.

The package of cost-sharing changes will pass or fail in a majority vote district-wide. So if any towns reject it, it could still pass with enough support elsewhere, Jerry Nault, chairman of the board's finance committee, said.