SCHOOL SAVINGS

Spurred by shrinking school enrollments and tight budgets, education officials have for years talked about consolidating schools. The talk was just that, however, and there has been comparatively little action. That should change with the recommendations from a governor’s advisory committee.

The committee of education and finance experts offers real solutions with real incentives. If five or more school units with a population of at least 2,500 students form a regional school district and agree to share supplies, equipment and costs, including staff development, business operations and special education, they would receive an annual 10 percent bonus in state subsidy and a 50 percent construction reimbursement. Regional districts with between 1,000 and 2,500 students would receive a 7.5 percent bonus and a 25 percent construction reimbursement. To be eligible for these incentives, the regional district would have at least one high school with a minimum of 300 students. They must also demonstrate that administrative costs are being decreased.

“The incentives will encourage towns to at least think about [collaboration],” said James Doughty, the task force chairman and dean of the Husson College Department of Education.

He added that, as districts continue to lose students – a 13 percent decrease is predicted by 2015 – districts will have to do more than think about it.

This is where the governor’s committee’s work dovetails with the recommendations of a legislative task force on school administration. That group recommended that school unions – in which towns, often without their own high schools, jointly hire a superintendent yet maintain separate school boards – be abolished with all towns joining a more formal school administrative district. This would cut down on administrative costs by reducing the number of superintendents and improve the continuity of education because the students would know where they would go to high school. Now, unless arranged otherwise by superintendents, students in a school union can chose where they will attend high school. Those in an SAD must go to their district’s high school.

An SAD is less expensive to run because the towns involved often share costs for administration, teachers and transportation, while towns in a school union operate largely independently, the committee reported. On the education side, an SAD can foster a continuum of curriculum planning because students will be assumed to move through the system together, ultimately attending the same high school. In a union, each elementary school is more apt to consider itself as an independent unit rather than part of a larger chain of education.

Based on these recommendations, the Legislature’s Education Committee may decide to propose changes in state statute to require a move from school unions to school districts. This, in the words of Robert Cobb, dean of the University of Maine School of Education, would provide the “push” necessary to get towns and their school administrations to work together. The “pull” would come in the form of the incentives called for by the governor’s task force, of which Mr. Cobb was a member.

By pushing and pulling, these task forces, and the governor and Education Committee that formed them, must move school consolidation from a topic of conversation to a work in progress.