AUGUSTA – School districts that now pay tuition to send students to any one of several high schools in neighboring communities should align themselves with only one high school in the future, according to a preliminary report presented Tuesday to the State Board of Education.

Also, school unions should convert to administrative districts.

The recommendations were made by the School Administrative Unit Task force, charged by the Legislature’s Education Committee last year to study how schools could be most cost-efficient and provide the best educational opportunities.

Lawmakers will review the report next month. While all the task force members haven’t yet weighed in on the draft, the basic premises likely will remain intact, according to Chairwoman Joyce McPhetres, a member of the state board.

After reviewing 50 years of research, conferring with experts, and examining what’s happening in other states, the group discovered that, because of the continuity of instruction, curriculum, and professional development, students do better academically in districts where everyone knows which high school they will attend, said McPhetres.

The group also found that school unions spend $441 more than SADs for each elementary pupil and $752 more for high school students, said Susan Cameron of the Department of Education who also served on the task force.

The changeover from unions to SADs should take place within five years, according to the report.

In a school union, towns share a superintendent but maintain their own school boards. In a school administrative district, towns have one governing structure and proportional representation on the school board. An SAD is less expensive to run because the towns involved often share transportation, administrative and teacher costs, while in a school union, towns operate largely independently, task force members said.

More than 100 communities now belong to school unions.

The process of changing from a school union to an administrative district is laid out in state statute and would entail public hearings and a vote by residents, Cameron said.

The proposal to have only one high school per district could be controversial among towns without high schools that tuition their students to neighboring communities. Residents tend to guard fiercely their right to school choice.

Also, the recommendation to eliminate school unions could have implications for state construction funds. For instance, legislation to encourage unions to reorganize into school districts might include provisions to withhold state funding from unions that don’t convert.

Carrying out the task force’s recommendations would necessitate eliminating some barriers that exist within the school funding formula, according to the report. For example, current law says state subsidy could be lost if two communities want to merge as a district, but one has debt service.

Neither of the recommendations is new, said McPhetres. The 1957 Sinclair Act offered incentives to towns that created school districts, she noted. Aligning K-8 schools with a particular high school also has been suggested in the past.