America has much to gain from providing young people with a good educational foundation, yet public education is on the decline, burdened down with all of society’s ills, financial difficulties and lackluster public support.

Three years ago a group of Bangor area educators, business people, citizens and community organizations formed the Bangor Education Foundation and set out to support education. A main purpose was to help bridge the gap between communities and their public schools.

Seven members of the BEF’s board of directors met with NEWS reporters and editors Thursday morning to discuss where the foundation has been and where it is going.

The basic intent of the foundation, members said, was to help ignite the spark of change and development in teachers, administrators, students and the public.

While board members aren’t expecting to make major changes in education, they see the BEF as having a quiet, personal, and important impact on schoolchildren, schools and their surroundings. What they are proposing and supporting is a systematic approach to educational reform, one that is “pro-active” to education needs rather than just reactive to the problems as they arise.

Over the last few years, the BEF has been providing three basic but meaningful programs. The most visible of the three has been a series of public education forums. Those featured in these presentations have included Edward J. Meade, chief program officer for the Ford Foundation, Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and nationally known ethicist Michael Josephson.

The BEF also has been involved with work inside Bangor schools. Each year, two rounds of grants have been made available to teachers with creative school projects in mind. In the past, projects funded with the small grants have included using kites to integrate and explore subjects such as history, weather and science, or providing field trips to the woods where pupils can get a hands-on experience with nature.

Businesses and community organizations, which have a great stake in how well pupils are educated, are tied in with education through the foundation’s Partnerships-in-Education Program.

Groups such as the Air Force’s 776th Radar Squadron or Bangor Hydro-Electric Co. are paired with a particular school and its pupil population. Partnerships use the individual qualities of the groups to meet the needs and provide support for the individuals of each of the schools.

And in the research and development stages is a regional center for school principals. The intent of this project is to bring school administrators together as a think-tank in an atmosphere outside of school.

Foundation members see a great need for programs such as these and others in view of the decline in public schooling.

“The idea of public education is on the line,” said Malcolm Warford, president of the Bangor Theological Society. And along with public education the ideas and hopes these schools have engendered are also on the line.

Across the country, he said, many cities have given up on public school systems, as more and more parents send their children to private institutions. Meanwhile, in cities such as Chicago, public schools are becoming large and unmanageable.

Schools are blamed for not providing a quality education yet they are inundated with programs dealing with society’s problems such as drug and alcohol abuse. And educators, particularly teachers, are given little of the respect that is accorded to other professionals, board members said.

But it is not only a system of morals and ideals that is being lost, as board member Leigh McCarthy pointed out. Today, education is not reaching all young people, yet future work forces will require that everyone work and therefore have an education.

“As a society, we can’t afford to give them up anymore,” she said.