Think of the new Essential Programs and Services model, expected to be signed into law by Gov. John Baldacci today, as a public-disclosure document, a sort of trust-but-verify approach to school funding. State lawmakers get a way to judge actual costs at the local level and school boards and property taxpayers get a lot more evidence to hurl at the state when it decides it can’t afford to pay what it owes. The question of who gets the bill remains to be answered.

Essential Programs and Services, as its name implies, attempts to break down school costs into smaller pieces, its essential components, and decide how much funding is needed to help all students achieve the standards set forth in the Maine Learning Results. Factors such as student-teacher ratios, administration costs, geographic differences, the number of special-education students, extracurricular activities and many others are compiled and a cost per school is developed. The perceived accuracy of the outcomes of these factors will be determined by whether a school is getting more or less than what it currently receives.

The state contributes approximately $730 million a year now to schools, far less than the 55 percent of the total that it originally pledged; according to Education Commissioner Sue Gendron, the state and municipalities would have needed to add $200 million more this year to meet the EPS plan. Where that money would come from – greater efficiencies, redistribution under the school funding formula, the lottery – is anyone’s guess. As the previous administration did, so the current administration will do in describing how it will phase in the added funding, which it intends to do while phasing out certain tax revenue and watching Congress phase out (as a guillotine phases out a head from its body) certain other tax streams. This could be a problem.

Not to knock Essential Programs and Services – the idea of determining what a rigorous education costs and making those numbers widely available is terrific, the kind of accounting that ought to be employed in all agencies. Maine officials have been talking about doing this for a decade and talked specifically since the late 1990s about the amount of money needed to fairly carry it out. Now the plan is enacted and still it is not clear that there will be money behind the plan to make it more meaningful.

There is a chance that meeting the standards in the Learning Results will not cost nearly as much as projected and the state could hit its funding target of sending an honest 50 percent of school costs by the 2009-2010 school year. It is not a chance upon which to build policy, but reason to hope that this insightful system of setting student costs doesn’t fail because lawmakers could not devise a way to fund it. Simply paying the added expected cost to solve the problem seems to have become an impossibility for the Legislature.