AUGUSTA — The fate of the Limestone magnet school will be central in the coming legislative debate on the budget, state lawmakers and King administration officials say.

Gov. Angus King has proposed phasing out funding for the school to save $2.1 million for his two-year $3.78 billion budget.

Only days after King briefed legislative leaders and reporters on his budget last week, parents, students and staff at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics already were marshaling their forces to urge the Legislature to keep funding their school.

At the same time, lawmakers in both parties and administration officials were predicting a struggle over the fate of the magnet school, which opened in 1995 and now has 170 residential students from across the state. Almost all are high school juniors and seniors, but a handful of sophomores also attend the specialized high school.

Christine Voyer, 16, of Peaks Island, a junior, said she was disappointed that King has proposed closing a school that he has never visited.

“This will be a hard sell,” conceded Kay Rand, King’s chief legislative liaison.

The magnet school has long been championed by lawmakers from northern Maine, including two members of the legislative leadership — Assistant Senate Minority Leader Leo Kieffer, R-Caribou, and House Minority Leader James Donnelly, R-Presque Isle.

Yet lawmakers from Aroostook County are far from alone in supporting the school.

“This is not just regional support,” said House Majority Leader Carol Kontos, D-Windham.

Sen. Michael Michaud, D-East Millinocket, a critic of the school, said legislators in both parties will be upset by King’s plan.

King, who has consistently opposed the school, wants to provide $2.1 million to keep it open through the end of the 1997-98 school year. That means virtually all of the existing students would be allowed to graduate from the school before it closes.

King’s budget would boost state aid to all other public schools by only 1 percent the first year and 2 percent the second year — far less than educators say they need.

“Clearly the money that goes toward that [magnet school] is taken away from other schools,” said Michaud, who described the concept of a magnet school as elitist.

Rand said King and Education Commissioner J. Duke Albanese question whether a magnet school is good education policy.

Not only does the school isolate its students in Limestone, Rand said, but removing the best and the brightest students from traditional high schools after two or three years makes classes there less challenging for the remaining students.

Kieffer counters that the magnet school is one of the state’s educational success stories, with high test scores and a string of impressive awards and college scholarships.

“I think it would be a terrible, terrible shame to close that school,” Kieffer said. He rejected suggestions that the school is elitist by noting that few of its students come from wealthy families.

Other supporters of the school argue that it is too soon to reject an educational experiment that has graduated only one class of seniors and is now in only its second year of operation.