AUGUSTA — Four women from Vanceboro — including two school board members, a selectman and a concerned mother — drove 200 miles to Augusta Monday to lobby lawmakers and Gov. John R. McKernan about restoring cuts in state aid to local schools.

“I’d think the last place would be to cut our youth, our education,” said Selectman Margaret Bost, after the delegation had met briefly with Education Commissioner Eve Bither, but was disappointed to find the full Legislature not in session.

“I found her to be very receptive,” School Board Chairman Nancy Keene said of Bither. “She gave us her time. I know she’s as concerned about education as we are.”

Keene said School Union 108 would lose $6,000 from a school budget of about $250,000 next year as part of an estimated total of $31 million that has been proposed for cutting from state aid to education.

The cuts are necessary to help offset a two-year state budget shortfall estimated at $210 million, according to the McKernan administration.

The Legislature is grappling with balancing the budget, and both the Legislature and McKernan are trying to find money to restore some of the cuts to state aid. But both sides say the shortfall is too large for all of the cuts to be restored.

Bost said the town of Vanceboro had only 200 residents, and 63 of those were elderly people living on fixed incomes.

The town operates Vanceboro Elementary School, with 35 students in kindergarten through eighth grade.

The $6,000 cut in state aid may not sound like much, Keene said, but it will compound a problem caused by the removal of nine students who live in Lambert Lake from the Vanceboro school next year.

The school union gets about $4,000 in state subsidy for each student, so the loss of nine students will mean a $36,000 drop in state aid.

One of four Vanceboro teachers will not be back in the fall, Keene said.

Keene and the other women said the Lambert Lake students were lured away by Topsfield, which just opened a new school and wanted to increase its enrollment. They said they were fighting to keep their own school open.

Last week, the Vanceboro School Board and Bernadette Lam, principal of the Vanceboro School, wrote to McKernan asking that the cuts in state aid be restored.

The town officials would prefer increasing the state sales tax or income tax to cutting aid to education, but both McKernan and the Legislature have refused to endorse raising broad-based taxes.

Keene said the women left Vanceboro in northern Washington County about 6:30 a.m. Monday and spent about three hours on the road before arriving in Augusta.

Besides Bither, they saw representatives of the Maine Teachers Association, and planned to visit Senate President Charles Pray.

Keene said the group would return for more lobbying on Thursday, April 5, when the full Legislature returns.

Besides Bost and Keene, Clara Robison, a member of the school board, and Sandi Botta, a concerned parent, made the trip to Augusta.