The future is now

It has been 14 months since Gov. King unveiled Laptops for Lunchboxes, his plan to provide laptops computers to all Maine public middle-schoolers. It has been 11 months since that great idea with the unfortunate name was converted by the Legislature into a $50 million technology fund with a task force of experts to decide how to use it.

It has been four months since that great idea produced its report and its recommendations, an improved version of the governor’s plan, with cheaper machines, more training and thorough protections against the misuses and abuses of technology that caused so much worry.

And it has been one month since the state Senate decided to throw it all away, decided that the best way for Maine to close a budget gap was by gutting the technology fund. Much of that gap was created by exploding health-care costs, but in a triumph of expediency over reason, senators figured that killing this poor, struggling state’s chance for educational and, after that, economic, leadership was better than raising the price of a pack of cigarettes by 26 cents, even though cigarettes are a leading cause of the exploding costs.

The Senate’s action was a mistake and an affront to the committee/public-hearing process that ensures important decisions get as much daylight as possible. The Senate and House have been locked in a budget stalemate ever since, barely speaking to each other and fiscal-year deadlines are fast approaching. It is time to correct this mistake.

It begins today with the Education Committee. The committee must endorse the task force report and reaffirm the Legislature’s promise, made just last summer, that Maine is willing to put $50 million into a no-risk investment in its future. The entire program, after all, will be paid for by the investment income from the endowment; if, for some strange reason, Maine kids don’t thrive with this educational tool the way kids everywhere else do, the program can be scrapped and the endowment cashed in.

But for this to work, there must be an endowment. Several prominent foundations are ready to provide many millions in additional support, but only if the state keeps the commitment an endowment signifies. Proposals floating around the Legislature to fund a laptop program year by year, or to cut the fund in half and spend it down to nothing and then perhaps fund it again simply won’t do.

Members of the Education Committee have another crucial task before them today – to prove several important things about themselves and their legislative colleagues. Such as that the creation of the endowment last summer and the appointment of the task force was not merely a stalling tactic to put off a difficult decision. That the public is invited to participate in committee hearings for a reason. That when the Maine Legislature makes a commitment to this state’s future, it actually intends to keep it.