Wiscasset, Maine, police arrested the town’s middle and high school nurse for operating under the influence in the middle of a school day — four months after a mother publicly accused the school of mishandling an incident in which her son says he was strangled by a classmate in a gym class the same nurse was covering. The two matters are legally separate and neither has been resolved in court, but together they have kept Wiscasset Middle High School’s nursing office under sustained local scrutiny since spring.
The OUI arrest
Wiscasset Police Chief Lawrence Hesseltine arrested Sommer Maybee Harding, 44, of Bath, at 3:10 p.m. on Sept. 22, in the parking lot of a shopping plaza on Route 1, and charged her with Class D operating under the influence. Harding, the school nurse at Wiscasset Middle High School, was booked at Two Bridges Regional Jail and released on $300 cash bail by 7 p.m. that evening. Less than an hour later, Superintendent Dr. Kim Andersson placed her on paid administrative leave and opened an internal investigation. Harding has not entered a plea, and as with anyone facing a charge that has not been proven in court, she is presumed innocent unless and until a judge finds otherwise.
A mother’s complaint from May
The arrest follows a controversy that first put Harding’s name in local headlines in May. According to police and school officials, an 18-year-old high school senior was accused of putting both hands around the throat of a 14-year-old eighth-grade student and forcing him backward roughly 12 feet during a combined middle-and-high-school gym class on May 19 — a pairing of grade levels the district says is not supposed to happen. Harding was substituting to cover the class that day. The boy’s mother has said publicly that the school downplayed the incident, did not immediately contact police, and sent her son back to class without a medical evaluation. Parents held a protest outside the school days later demanding answers about how the class was supervised and why police were not called sooner. No criminal charges tied to the May incident have been publicly reported as of this writing.
A school nurse is often the only medical professional in the building, which means judgment calls that would get a second opinion in a hospital — does this kid need to go to the ER, does this altercation get written up, does a parent get a phone call today or tomorrow — land on one person, alone, with no one down the hall to check them. That’s exactly why an OUI arrest mid-shift is a bigger story for a school nurse than it would be for almost anyone else in a similar job: it isn’t only a personal legal problem, it’s a question about who was fit to make those calls on the days that mattered — including one where a mother says her son needed medical attention and didn’t get it.
What happens next
Harding’s OUI case moves through Maine’s court system on its own track, separate from any review of the May incident. The Wiscasset school district has not said when its internal investigation into her administrative leave will conclude, or whether that review will also address the unsupervised class pairing parents have criticized since May. Neither the district nor Harding has responded publicly to the OUI charge beyond confirming the leave.