A range of jobs are available in Aroostook County as baby boomers retire, but reliable workers and good wages seem to be in short supply. Lots of homes are for sale, but many need rehabilitation if they can be saved at all.
It’s a great place to raise a family, but try finding affordable child care — or being a young teacher, starting out making less than $30,000. There are plenty of parks, trails, rec programs and school sports teams, but more than 17 percent of high schoolers and 38 percent of adults are obese.
These are some of concerns shared during a community forum in Presque Isle hosted by the Aroostook County Action Program, which has been surveying residents with the aim of improving education, advocacy and support programs for youth, adults, families and seniors.
The forum started with the question, “What do you like about Aroostook County,” and soon led to an honest two-hour discussion about the many challenges confronting the region’s people and institutions.
“Everything is better here, as long as you can find a job,” said Clint Deschene, assistant superintendent at School Administrative District 1.
Job-seekers say finding good-paying positions is hard here, and forum participants cited that as one reason people and families leave Aroostook County for elsewhere in Maine or New England. At the same, managers with employers large and small say they’re having trouble finding good workers.
“It’s the single largest issue we face at The Aroostook Medical Center: the ability to fill our open positions,” said Dr. Jay Reynolds, chief medical officer of the Presque Isle hospital, the largest in The County.
At TAMC, where the starting wage is $10.10 an hour, Reynolds said hiring difficulties run the gamut of everything from janitors and entry-level nursing assistants to experienced nurses and physicians.
Echoing others at the forum, Reynolds said many would-be employees for entry-level jobs struggle from intergenerational poverty and a lack of experience in workplaces, which leave them in need of “soft life skills,” like communication, consistency and timeliness.
“They often just do not have the skillset to be successful in a lot of ways,” Reynolds said.
Officially, Aroostook County’s unemployment rate stands at 5.5 percent, but some estimate it could be double that when factoring in the long-term unemployed who have stopped looking for work.
The forum explored this issue and its intersection with inter-generational poverty and the impact of government assistance programs. For some, there is a “welfare cliff” upon re-entering the workforce, said Claudia Stevens, former executive director of the United Way of Aroostook.
“When people go to work, they lose the benefits that they had and they can’t make up enough money for the difference,” Stevens said. There has to be “some way to blend the two of those, so they can become totally self-sufficient,” she suggested.
Part of that problem — a lack of incentive to re-enter the workforce — stems from chronically low-wages that have not kept up with inflation.
The starting wage is $9 an hour for many home healthcare jobs, which are needed to help seniors living on their own, but don’t provide enough income to sustain a family. That kind of healthcare work “is not a good option for a lot of people because of the pay,” said Pete Lento, a consultant at the Presque Isle CareerCenter.
Another factor is childcare: How do parents, particularly single moms, work when they have young kids? Daycare is not only expensive, it’s “very hard to find,” said Deschene. “People that have money can’t find daycare.” The Head Start early childhood education programs run by ACAP, the Aroostook Band of Micmacs and the Houlton Band of Maliseets are consistently full.
And local school districts may soon have trouble finding teachers, as more long-time educators retire, Deschene said. In the coming years, unless salaries for starting teachers go up, “you’re not going to have enough teachers Aroostook County,” he said.
Currently in SAD 1, beginning teachers start at $29,376 — around $10,000 less than in the districts around greater Portland, Deschene said.
Much of the rest of Maine and rural America face many of the same long-term economic challenges as Aroostook County, but here they are amplified by a vast geography, small municipalities, decades of out-migration and one of the oldest regional populations in the country.
Aroostook County has been losing people since its historical peak at 106,000 in 1960. The 1994 closure of Loring Air Force Base left just under 74,000 by 2000, and last year’s population was estimated at 68,500.
Meanwhile, municipal governments and school districts are still tasked with providing services to citizens, and their spending continues rising, even as population and enrollment decline. For instance, school districts still have to operate almost the same number of buses over the same number of miles, Deschene said. SAD 1 also is in the midst of a “right-sizing” analysis and discussion, exploring options for closing and consolidating Presque Isle’s elementary schools in the coming years.
