Bangor school board fears subsidy cuts

BANGOR – Next year’s school subsidy may be significantly less than the Legislature promised, based on a recent letter from the commissioner of education, the superintendent said Monday.

A Nov. 8 letter to superintendents and school board chairmen in which Commissioner Duke Albanese noted Maine’s economic downturn and advised communities to manage their budgets carefully could be “setting [us] up for the kill,” Superintendent Sandy Ervin told the Bangor School Committee.

“This is very unsettling for me both in the way it’s put together and in its content. When I first read it I had a real chill,” Ervin said.

Communities could be in for a repeat performance of 1991, when the Legislature reduced the General Purpose Aid in the middle of the year, Ervin said.

The school committee agreed with member Phyllis Shubert, who suggested that Ervin write a letter from the committee to local legislators “telling them they must re-establish education as a priority.”

“We need to be proactive,” Shubert said.

Albanese said in his message that in the aftermath of Sept. 11, Maine’s vulnerable economy could have an impact on General Purpose Aid to schools and that if revenues continued to decline, the governor and the Legislature would have a hard time increasing state subsidies next year from the amount approved last spring.

Although there is no plan to reduce GPA in this fiscal year, Albanese pointed out that it had been done in the middle of the 1990-1991 fiscal year.

Albanese’s advice to “examine expenditure items in your present budget that you can hold in abeyance … ” particularly rankled Ervin.

“The idea that superintendents have money that they can hold

in abeyance … I don’t know where it is,” Ervin said.

It may be time to dig into the governor’s technology endowment – funds for the middle school laptop initiative – and his Rainy Day Fund, money set aside for unexpected financial problems, according to the superintendent.

“I don’t know whether it has to be a monsoon, but the Rainy Day Fund isn’t a private treasure chest,” he said.

Bangor can’t afford to lose one penny, the superintendent said. “For us to cut, we’ll be facing some very hard choices. You can always make them, but they’re a gun to head kind of thing.”

In his letter to legislators, Ervin will recommend that the state look to the Rainy Day Fund and the laptop program so state subsidies won’t have to be decreased. Ervin also will recommend the elimination of the cushion program whereby schools are guaranteed that state funding won’t decline.

For her part, School Committee Chairman Martha Newman said she’s never felt as boxed in.

“If something happens and the governor and legislators decide that the property tax – the most regressive tax in Maine – will pay for what they don’t cover with the GPA, those representatives will never be able to claim that education is at the top of their priority list,” she said.