Time for state to repeal rural school consolidation
2/18/09 | 11 comments
Guest Column

Time for state to repeal rural school consolidation


By Sen. Doug Smith and Reps. Paul Davis and Pete Johnson

We noted with interest the Feb. 6 BDN article by Diana Bowley regarding the rejection of the proposed school consolidation plans in the Piscataquis County area. We would like to add some observations to the debate.

The voters of all of the towns and school districts within Piscataquis County were perplexed by exactly the same difficulty that confronted many legislators when the matter first came before the Legislature in early 2007. The specific difficulty was the inability to identify actual savings to be derived from school consolidation. The governor and his people claimed there would be savings in the millions of dollars, but the facts have proved otherwise.

The word around the State House now is that many people were sold a bill of goods by the governor and his education experts. Only one of the three of us — Sen. Smith — was in the Legislature when this issue came up for discussion and vote. Sen. Smith never received a satisfactory answer to his inquiry about potential savings and voted against the consolidation measure. If all three of us had been serving at the time, all three of us would have opposed it.

The idea of consolidating rural Maine is not a new one to the Baldacci administration. In our opinion, the administration has been attempting various types of consolidation to the detriment of rural Maine for several years. One only needs to study the infamous LD 1, which actually took money from rural school districts and gave it to larger urban districts that have far more assets than the rural districts do.

Another telling piece of evidence is the treatment of our hospitals. Maine owes its hospitals approximately $425 million, including more than $40 million to the so-called critical access hospitals, mostly in rural Maine. For example, the state owes $6 million to our local hospitals — Mayo Memorial in Dover-Foxcroft and C.A. Dean in Greenville. These debts stem from MaineCare services dating back to 2005.

When this school consolidation measure was initially advanced, the governor and his people assured us that the substantial savings would enable municipalities to reduce property taxes. While that was a laudable objective, the sad fact is that consolidation has produced little or no savings. In some school districts, costs have actually risen.

Moreover, the architects of this plan decided that local people had to accept it or face punishment in the form of fines. The mighty state holds a gun to rural Maine and says. “Do as you are told or we will pull the trigger.” This bizarre feature of the law has led some towns to accept the fines because they are smaller than the cost of consolidation. Obviously, these fines will impose greater financial hardship on municipalities that already are struggling due to the recession.

To make matters worse, the governor’s proposed budget for the next biennium — starting July 1 — actually reduces the amount of general purpose aid to local schools from the current budget. Instead of ramping up to 55 percent of the cost of essential programs and services, as promised, the state has retreated further from that goal. We accept that the state’s huge revenue shortfall requires cuts in many programs. But imposing fines on schools that don’t consolidate will aggravate the damage and harm education.

It is now clear that the administration failed to exercise the analysis and due diligence that should have preceded the introduction of this measure. This was a classic example of going off half-cocked. And sadly, there were much better ideas available.

The Maine Heritage Policy Center suggested that Maine adopt administrative service districts. In an ASD, every local school system would be a member and could voluntarily enter into joint undertakings with their regional partners to provide specific goods and services. Those options would have included special education, cooperative purchasing, shared counseling, shared curriculum development, shared payroll services and shared transportation — things that would produce real savings. This outstanding suggestion was ignored.

For the amount of money that has been wasted on the current school consolidation effort, there could have been several million dollars of incentives to help with the planning and implementation of local efforts. This is a proven model elsewhere and would have had strong support from local school officials and many of the legislators that opposed the efforts of the governor and his minions. This could still be done without the threat of local towns being punished for refusing to bow to Augusta.

A people’s referendum to repeal school consolidation will come before the Legislature soon. The Legislature could act to repeal it. Failing that, we suggest that all penalties be removed from the law pending a vote of the people on the question of repeal of the entire school consolidation law. If the repeal occurs, we can then move on to take up other suggestions that will contain costs and improve schools, this time with proper local participation and leadership and without the heavy-handed tactics of the current law.

Sen. Doug Smith lives in Dover-Foxcroft, Rep. Paul Davis lives in Sangerville and Rep. Pete Johnson lives in Greenville.

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Comments
11 comments on this item
On 2/19/09 at 1:16 AM, fredrogers wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

You can repeal this law I suppose. But since most towns have spent hundred of thousands on good faith efforts to consolidate and abiding by the law passed by a majority of our state reps. do we know also reimburse them if we repeal the law, using the same logic here ?

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On 2/19/09 at 8:19 AM, Mainecommenter wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

"In an ASD, every local school system would be a member and could voluntarily enter into joint undertakings with their regional partners to provide specific goods and services."

If this is such a good idea, why haven't the districts engaged in this activiy before? If this was something the Superintendents wanted to do, it would have been done. The MHPC's proposal does nothing but support the expensive status quo. The perveyors of Maine's local educational fiefdoms have had their time, now it's time for the adults to take over and properly plan larger, more effective school districts that utilize efficiencies of scale.

Even more concerning is the fact that these three are Republicans. Whatever happened to fiscal discipline and responsibility? Why should the GOP actively support a luxuriously high level of school administration? Conservatives indeed!

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On 2/19/09 at 8:19 AM, Mainecommenter wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

"In an ASD, every local school system would be a member and could voluntarily enter into joint undertakings with their regional partners to provide specific goods and services."

If this is such a good idea, why haven't the districts engaged in this activiy before? If this was something the Superintendents wanted to do, it would have been done. The MHPC's proposal does nothing but support the expensive status quo. The perveyors of Maine's local educational fiefdoms have had their time, now it's time for the adults to take over and properly plan larger, more effective school districts that utilize efficiencies of scale.

Even more concerning is the fact that these three are Republicans. Whatever happened to fiscal discipline and responsibility? Why should the GOP actively support a luxuriously high level of school administration? Conservatives indeed!

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On 2/19/09 at 8:51 AM, freedomlover wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

Most of the school districts in the Piscataquis County and western Penobscot County are in the most efficiently run category. They were UNDER EPS, unlike the extravagant bigger school systems including Bangor's.

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On 2/19/09 at 10:19 AM, pizanos wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

The reality is that consolidation will be the way of the future, not only in schools but also in hospitals, tertiary education and a variety of other services. If the current economic crisis is anything to go by, the pressures against inefficient or fragmented infrastructure will only increase. That's not to say that some smaller school system cannot continue to go it alone but with declining student counts and increasing costs the economic handwriting is clearly on the wall. Maine 's population base of 1.3Million is barely equivalent to the size of a large city and yet must carry the cost burdens of an infrastructure that is far larger than that of an average city. Better to plan an orderly transition to the way life will be than to limp along behind the times forever playing catch-up.

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On 2/19/09 at 11:06 AM, Mainecommenter wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

Well said, pizanos. Very well said.

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On 2/19/09 at 1:25 PM, George wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

School governance consolidation was sold to us as savings hundreds of millions of dollars. Many districts have found out that they are not saving money and it will cost them more under a consolidated structure. Project savings are two or three years out. The key is that the savings are "projected." How many times have we seen savings projected and it doesn't pan out. Governor Baldacci and the State Department of Education pulled all the stops to get this law passed and implemented. They also pressed in their words for "an aggressive timetable" and claiming that "the status quo is unacceptable." The Department of Education has also put a publicity spin on this whole thing and hired a PR person as a spokesperson stressing that schools are all winners in this. The push toward consolidation of the levels of government is aslo a threat to freedoms and democracy. When the state says vote Yes or pay a penalty is that a true vote on an issue. People in rural Maine had the courage to vote No on many of these consolidation plans because they knew they were being sold a bill of goods. The different layers of government are a check and a balance on each other. The system is not the most efficient at times but it keeps decisions local and people can say yes or no to decisions that are pushed from above. Also larger government structures tend to less serve the people well the farther they are away from the people. Maine schools and towns face challenges due to the recession. Creating a larger bureaucratic structure with bureaucrats in control will not make a better or more efficient structure in Maine. It takes away the power of the people and leaves it for a few. Maine doesn't need top down governance or state control. Maine needs choices and cooperation between layers of government and not a dictatorship or socialism where the stae knows what is best for us.

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On 2/19/09 at 2:40 PM, Mainecommenter wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

George, it seems your arguement is really aimed at the Maine Constitution. As a reminder: "...the Legislature are authorized, and it shall be their duty to require, the several towns to make suitable provision, at their own expense, for the support and maintenance of public schools;"

Your comment regarding a dramatic uprising of the electorate in northern Maine is also very disingenuous. Some, perhaps, didn't like the plans that the committee created but were open to alternatives. And, in some cases, onlya small minority of the electorate voted; some plans introduced to some Aroostook County districts for instance, were defeated by 158 people...hardly a large turn out

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On 2/19/09 at 6:02 PM, fredrogers wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

Look maine has the oldest and most rapidly aging demographics in the entire us. Schools are only viable if there are kids and younger families to pay the tax base needed. It is a trend that appears unstoppable in the next 15 years. Most of rural maine is even more skewed towards an aging population and where there just will not be a tax base to support schools and most likely a limited or very few town services without dramatic regionalzation of all services as previous posts suggest as well.

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On 2/19/09 at 9:53 PM, brown1tree2 wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

I have no problem with school consolidation. There are schools in the state that have only a handful of students. Hardly viable fiscally. But why did the plan have to be rammed down our throats to be done NOW??? I voted against it because I felt that I was being blackmailed by the State. Their idea of vote yes or lose funding was nothing short of blackmail. If they had proposed a plan to the citizens and then let them decide, without all of the threats it would probably have gone through. I do believe very strongly in local control in everything. This is just another case of our government trying to get too strong. We have to back them off and insist that they do what the majority of the citizens want. The wind turbine issue is being handled by the state the same way - show it down our throats. Also LD 199. Will our legislators ever learn to do things the way we want them done. The citizens rule the state. When that ceases then we go back to socialism and fascism. Sorry to ramble on but this really gets to me.

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On 2/20/09 at 4:32 PM, Saltoria wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

There are always winners and losers. In this case:

Winner: Augusta

Loser: children and local taxpayers

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