Maine legislators are continuing to grapple with the school district consolidation law that was passed year, as amendments to the law and amendments to the amendments are debated.

The Senate has given initial approval to an amendment to the Education and Cultural Affairs Committee's bill, An Act To Amend the Laws Regarding School Funding, that would allow reorganization planning committees (RPCs) the option of choosing a modified school union model as the form of governance for a regional school unit (RSU), which would restore a measure of local control. It also would allow individual towns in the same regional school unit to have different contracts with teachers. The amendment, sponsored by Senator Dennis Damon of Trenton, passed on February 12 by a single vote, 18-17. However, after the Senate reconvenes on February 25, the amended bill will face at least two more votes in the Senate and then would go to the House of Representatives for consideration.

Senator Kevin Raye of Perry, who spoke in favor of the Damon amendment and is one of only seven senators who voted against the school consolidation law last year, says the Democratic senators who decided to vote for the amendment are facing "intense pressure" from Governor John Baldacci and Education Commissioner Susan Gendron to reverse their support for the Damon amendment. He says there's been a "stunning reversal" by senators who voted for the school consolidation law and now believe it is "flawed and unworkable." Some districts are in "utter chaos" as they try to reorganize, he says. Also, the law attacks the school union governance model, which he says is a stumbling block as "towns will lose local control of local schools" as they surrender decisions to a larger school board on which the town may not have any representation.

Some opponents of the Damon amendment believe it will allow for the continuation of an inefficient form of school governance with too many small school systems and school boards.

Raye is optimistic that the Damon amendment will continue to be supported in the Senate, as some Republicans who voted against it, favoring the stronger language of the Education Committee's minority report, may be persuaded that the proposal has the strongest chance of being approved. "It's the one major reform that has the best chance of passing," says Raye.

Rep. Howard McFadden of Dennysville, who is a member of the Education Committee, says the Damon amendment would help schools in this area, since it would allow for regional school unions, and most of the area schools belong to a union. However, he doubts that the amendment would pass in the House, pointing out that the Department of Education has issued a series of "talking points" against the amendment. The department argues that the school union structure is Maine's highest cost form of school governance, since there are too many layers of administration, with only mixed results on student performance.

A school union is a combination of two or more school administrative units joined to share the costs of a superintendent and a central office, but each town maintains its own budget and has its own school board. A school administrative district (SAD) is a combination of two or more municipalities that pool all their educational resources to educate all students, and a single school committee, comprised of representatives from each town, administers the district and decides on the budget.

McFadden describes the structure of the new regional school units that are mandated under the school consolidation law and that reorganization planning committees have been developing as "just a giant SAD."

Scott Porter, superintendent of School Union 102 and East Machias, who is the president of the Maine Small Schools Coalition, believes that Commissioner Gendron and the Baldacci administration are "on a mission to completely abolish school unions." Raye says he is puzzled by the governor's animosity toward school unions, since there is no measure indicating that they are more or less efficient than SADs.

Gordon Donaldson of the University of Maine has compared the costs of rural school unions versus SADs and found mixed results. He concludes that factors other than the type of district are causing the greatest differences in expenditure levels.

Porter points out that school unions allow local school committees to make the decisions about the programs they want in their schools, while SADs are more likely to strip away some school programming as they seek to provide the same level of programs for all towns in the district. He says the option of a school union structure would allow for local school boards that would have the same powers as they presently have, while union office administrative functions could be centralized.

Other amendments proposed

In addition to the amendments to the school consolidate law proposed by Damon and other legislators, both Raye and McFadden are proposing amendments. One, which the Senate voted against, would allow the voters of municipalities to opt out of the consolidation process and bear the penalties at any point, instead of being required to go through the entire process and have a consolidation plan approved by the commissioner of education before being allowed to opt out. The other amendment would restore the dissolution and withdrawal process, in order to make it possible for a school district to dissolve itself and allow a municipality to withdraw from a district in order to align with another district. Currently towns are trapped in the district they belonged to when the new law went into effect and have to go with the consolidation plan the majority of the district chooses. Raye notes that either Franklin or Steuben could be faced with this situation, depending on the final consolidation plan for the Flanders Bay area.

In addition to LD 1932 that is currently being debated, the Education Committee has submitted two more bills to amend the school consolidation law. Although legislators had submitted some 60 amendments to the law last fall, the Legislative Council decided not to accept any of them. Instead, the Education Committee listened to legislators who proposed the bills and agreed to consider the proposals when putting together its own bill, LD 1932. Although many of the proposed amendments "got wiped out" by the Education Committee, according to McFadden, some of the proposals were combined into the two bills that the committee recently submitted.