State money should not be used to pay for the new federal education reform law, but to put Maine’s own academic standards into place, a Portland legislator said Friday.

“Every state dollar we have should be used to implement the Learning Results … and I don’t want to do anything that would compromise that,” said Sen. Michael Brennan, D-Portland.

That’s why he is sponsoring legislation that would prohibit the use of state funds to implement policies mandated by No Child Left Behind.

The bill, LD-1716, also calls for the Maine Department of Education to investigate how much it would cost the state to opt out of participation in the 2001 federal legislation.

A public hearing on the bill is scheduled at 1 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 2, in Room 214 of the Cross State Office Building in Augusta.

Brennan said Friday during a telephone interview that he isn’t optimistic the federal government will keep its promise to fully fund No Child Left Behind.

Since the law has been in effect only a short time, “there’s probably no noticeable difference in what we’ve received and what we’re expected to do,” he said.

But as more and more schools find themselves unable to meet the annual performance standards required by the federal law and the state becomes obliged to provide assistance, “the cost could be enormous,” he said.

Maine receives $87 million annually to fulfill the requirements in No Child Left Behind, Patrick Phillips, deputy commissioner of education, said Friday.

With the money, the state is expected to provide assistance to schools that haven’t met the federal standards, develop assessments, and design and build data systems to track teacher and student performance, among other things.

The state has enough money now to help as many as 24 schools which were deemed last year as needing improvement, Phillips said.

Assuming that some of the 143 schools later named will come off the list as they improve, there could be 60 to 100 schools still needing improvement, Phillips said.

“Clearly we will not have sufficient funds to adequately support this number of schools,” he said.

Michael Sentance of the U.S. Department of Education’s regional office in Boston said Friday that federal allocations have increased each year since the law was passed in 2001 to help states comply with its mandates.

Funding should keep up with states’ needs as Congress continues to increase its annual allocations and “as the understanding and knowledge base for teachers increases [and as] schools get better knowing how to improve and reform themselves,” he said.

Allocations for No Child Left Behind rose from $17.8 billion in 2001 to approximately $23.8 billion in 2004, according to a spokesman from Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based, independent, nonprofit group working to improve schools. That amount has been authorized to increase incrementally to $25 billion by 2007, the spokesman said.

Deputy Commissioner Phillips said the state could lose $90 million to $100 million in federal funds by choosing not to comply with No Child Left Behind.

But he said it isn’t clear whether the state would lose just the money specifically allocated for the law or additional federal funds.

Ohio recently determined that there is roughly a $1.5 billion gap in the money it receives for No Child Left Behind and the amount it has to spend to comply with the law, Phillips said. A handful of other states are conducting similar analyses, he added.

Sen. Brennan said that while budget constraints prevent the state from immediately opting out of complying with No Child Left Behind, “if there are no modifications to [the law] over the next several years, we’ll find that potential costs may outweigh the federal money we’re receiving.”

Brennan said he was involved with helping pass the Learning Results legislation in 1997 and that he believes the state standards are “the correct direction for us to be going in.”

The federal law’s emphasis on standardized, high-stakes testing and on identifying schools as having problems are “two major policy issues we decided not to go with, but are now being imposed upon us,” he said.