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It’s been a tense month at Wiscasset Middle High School. Students have walked out. Teachers have threatened to quit. School board meetings have been packed. Accusations have flown on social media.
The division started in late October, when the school district placed Principal Gina Stevens on administrative leave, just four months after she was permanently appointed to the role. Since then, administrators have recommended that Stevens be fired over accusations that she violated numerous protocols, including placing a hidden camera in a school closet without authorization.
But Stevens has denied the charges, and many staff and families have leapt to her defense, arguing that she has boosted morale in the school following previous turnover.
The tensions could come to a head as soon as Tuesday evening, when the Wiscasset School Committee had been scheduled to hold a hearing on Stevens’ dismissal. However, the district said Friday that it may be postponed.
Wiscasset is just the latest Maine community to be divided over the management of its schools in recent years.
However, while many of those recent debates have centered around hot-button national issues such as mask mandates, critical race theory and gender identity, Wiscasset’s upheaval stands out in that it’s not driven by any larger issues, but rather by the loyalty that staff and families feel toward a single school leader.
“It should have never gotten to this point,” said one of Steven’s supporters, science teacher Shari Templeton, in an interview. “Even if, and that’s a big ‘if,’ everything was true, or if anything was true, it would not be grounds for dismissal.”
The leader of the Wiscasset school district, Superintendent Kim Andersson, has recommended that Stevens be fired over allegations that were investigated by the school district’s attorney.
In addition to the hidden camera incident, Stevens also allegedly accused students of vaping without evidence, allowed a student to be indefinitely removed from the school without following applicable rules, and accused a teacher of lying about the hidden camera and caused that teacher to cry.
“I’m happy that people love their principal, but I have my job I have to do, and sometimes it’s not popular work,” Andersson previously said in an interview.
While school districts normally handle personnel matters in closed-door executive sessions, Stevens has taken the unusual step of opting for such proceedings to happen publicly.
Colleagues and community members have rallied to her side. They packed into a pair of school committee hearings in mid-November, and a week later, more than a dozen students held a walk-out from class, according to the Lincoln County News. At least two carried signs calling for the superintendent, Andersson, to be fired.
And in a public letter that was signed by 25 school employees and shared with the Times Record, they expressed “strong support” for Stevens and warned that some staff may leave if she is fired.
Stevens does a lot for the school and her firing would create “the biggest hole possible,” said one of the letter signers, English teacher Michelle Fraser, in an interview.
Templeton, who has been an educator for 22 years, said she left teaching for a decade, but decided to come back because of Stevens. She respects Stevens’ ability to keep discipline while acting compassionately.
Stevens “has the utmost integrity” and “the morale within the building was at an all-time high” before she went on leave, Templeton said.
Both Templeton and Fraser said that tension has risen in the hallways of Wiscasset Middle High School, and that while teachers are staying professional, students can still sense their stress and fatigue over the proceedings.
“Productivity from students is down, and from staff is down,” Templeton said. “Something that should be a fairly short-term project ends up taking much longer because everything is so labored.”
Now, many Wiscasset community members are anxiously awaiting the upcoming hearing, in which lawyers representing the school district and Stevens are expected to present their cases.
The school committee may still decide to hold some portions of the meeting in executive session, and ultimately, its elected members will have to decide whether to fire Stevens.
So far, it’s unclear how the proceedings could ultimately play out.
There have been other heated debates about the leadership of Maine school districts, like the contentious departure of a principal from Scarborough High School in 2018. There was a backlash in that case, with voters ousting three school board members and teachers holding a vote of no confidence in the superintendent.
Jason Putnam, a co-chair of the Wiscasset School Committee, said there has been misinformation floating around social media about the proceeding, and that he’s been threatened and called names. But Putnam believes the situation shouldn’t even have “sides.” He said Andersson is simply doing her job as superintendent and that the truth will emerge at the hearing.
“This has been poorly framed as Kim against Gina,” Putnam said. “Kim had no choice. As soon as she found out something happened, she had lawyers investigate it. She did not investigate it herself.”
