EDITORIAL: The uncomfortable, but necessary, conversation about GSA’s future
Jan. 21, 2026
By John Boit
The most dreaded conversations are the ones we know will end with a hard decision. The seven so-called “sending towns” served by George Stevens Academy need to have such a conversation in the months ahead.
George Stevens is a town academy–a private school that serves as the de facto high school for its communities. For many decades, it enjoyed robust enrollments of 350 students or more.
Then, three things happened: First, families began having fewer children. In my own corner of Penobscot, I was once one of a dozen children in the neighborhood. Now there are four.
Second, the school found new cash flows by attracting foreign boarding students, mostly from Asia. But when that dried up, partly due to Covid, the school took a huge financial hit.
And third, because towns on the peninsula have allowed parents to spend their portion of taxpayer-funded tuition money at other schools, and as demographics changed, families began sending their kids farther afield. Not just to Bucksport, but to Ellsworth, John Bapst, boarding schools and elsewhere. (Full disclosure, I was one of those kids, but GSA didn’t miss my tuition when the school was bursting with students in the 1980s.)
Today, GSA has about 205 students. The school has announced impending layoffs, with details expected next month. At the same time, it is sending the message to town governments that it wants to discuss the possibility of entering into tuition contracts.
Essentially what this would mean is that any town that agrees to such contracts would only be able to spend tuition money at GSA. Families would no longer be able to apply that tuition money–about $15,000 annually–to other schools, except in certain cases, such as those for children with special needs.
This doesn’t mean students are forbidden from attending other schools. It just means that towns would no longer help foot the bill, based on the argument that local tax dollars raised should be spent locally. Right now, GSA estimates it is losing out on more than $1 million a year because one out of every three students in the area chooses not to go to GSA. One out of three. That is a huge number.
I am not going to presume to tell families what they should think of this plan. The vitriol on social media about this has already begun, even before people fully understand what’s at stake.
But something that is missing from the heated rhetoric around this topic is what happens if we don’t have a high school.
For starters, forget the notion that the state will come in and start a public high school. It won’t. The state seems incapable of helping with most of our problems–housing, healthcare, economic progress–and is facing a budget shortfall of hundreds of millions of dollars. Just consider that the current wait list for state-funded renovations of existing public schools is years–and I mean decades–into the future. So good luck getting the state to kick in tens of millions to start a new public school.
Instead, what would most likely happen is that children on the peninsula would be sent to the other public schools in the area. Penobscot and Castine would go to Bucksport. Brooksville and Sedgwick would go to Deer Isle. Blue Hill and Surry to Ellsworth. You get the picture.
Those schools might then grow, sure. But ask yourself: What happens to the core of the peninsula? It gets hollowed out.
And the problem is, we are already getting hollowed out. Think about these changes that have happened before our eyes:
In 2009, the Blue Hill hospital closed its maternity unit. There are no longer any children being born on the Peninsula or Island.
We no longer have a single nursing home in all of Hancock County. The last one closed in 2024.
Last week, Northern Light announced it is closing its clinic in Castine. In the same week, Castine’s only daycare announced it, too, is closing.
Do you ever feel like this place we call home is increasingly incapable of being there for us for life’s most important moments–birth, death, education, and the feeling of community and the sense of place that comes with it?
It was not lost on me when, at GSA’s press conference last week announcing it wanted to pursue town contracts, the din and applause of a basketball game in the gym next door could be heard through the walls. The sense of community that game brought–all those cars parked outside, the friends and neighbors cheering for their team, the kids learning to play and compete–all that could disappear.
We are at risk of becoming a place where you are welcome to live only as long as you are not a burden, as long as you are healthy, as long as you don’t need to be given an education, and as long as you have the money to import whatever goods or services you need to live.
If we don’t have a high school, why would any young family want to stay here, let alone move here? And wouldn’t that cause a correlated decline in local elementary schools? After all, it would be easier to move closer to the areas with high schools for continuity of education. Is anyone thinking of that?
And by the way, let’s be honest and acknowledge that many of our local elementary schools cost waaay more per student–about twice as much–as GSA. And yet, we are fiercely loyal to those elementary schools. Why? “Because,” the constant refrain goes, “if we don’t have a school, no young people will want to live here, and our community will die.”
Exactly.
Meanwhile, every year for the past five years GSA has had to beg towns for $1,700 per student in supplemental funding just to meet its budget.
As a town academy, GSA does not receive any funding from the state except for some school lunch subsidies. They have shaved budgets, laid off teachers, and cut programs. Before we yell at them, please try to think about what its survival or failure will mean for you, for your job prospects, for your home values, and for your sense of community.
And yet, I still have hope, because all we need is to acknowledge these things, to stare them in the face, and to decide to do something. I don’t know what that is, but we need to have the dreaded conversation. As a GSA grad said to me last week, “The elephant in the room is getting bigger.” I’m grateful to GSA for speaking up, uncomfortable as it is.
–Boit is the publisher and editor of The Rising Tide.
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