Ending the Endless Fight

The Newport area school district is considering an unprecedented seventh vote on its budget, with the school committee deciding tonight whether to put the $16.8 million budget out to yet another referendum. It shouldn’t. Instead of clinging to what in this case has been a failed process, the committee should call for a district-wide budget meeting, at the end of which a budget must be adopted.

The fight in SAD 48 between educators, students and parents on one side and taxpayers, often without children in school and fed up with increases in their tax bill, on the other is symptomatic of tensions in many communities. It is also the type of fight that led to two citizen’s initiatives that voters will consider this year. One from the Maine Municipal Association, which won a three-way vote last fall but did not garner enough support to be enacted, would require the state to pay 55 percent of education costs, something it said it would do in the 1980s, but hasn’t gotten around to yet. The other, more dangerous, measure would cap municipal property taxes at 1 percent of 1997 assessed values, further exacerbating the school budget crunch.

All three efforts result from the same problem – the state has not followed through with numerous promises to increase its level of financial support for schools. That means local taxpayers have been left to pick up the tab and, in towns like Newport, Corinna, Hartland, St. Albans, Palmyra and Plymouth, they are saying they can’t do it anymore. At the same time, however, the total value of property in the area has doubled in the last six years. That, of course, means that taxes go up. It also means that the state sends less money. SAD 48 now gets 65 percent of its funding from the state, down from 70 percent in 1997.

There are merits and flaws in the arguments made and tactics used by both sides. The school committee is right that cutting teachers and classes will hurt students. They are wrong, however, to unflinchingly stick with a budget that, initially, was rejected by a 2-to-1 ratio. Rather than perpetuating the fight, they should have more forcefully asked opponents what they wanted in order to approve the budget. Did they want class sizes increased? Did they want to do away with band?

Opponents are right to reject the budget if they truly feel it is extravagant. If so, they should be very clear with the school committee about what should be cut, keeping in mind that increases in personnel costs, including double-digit rises in insurance costs in recent years, are outside the board’s control. To repeatedly reject a local school budget to protest actions in Augusta is futile. The only ones harmed will be students who receive inferior services.

In the short term, a budget needs to be finalized and a district-wide budget meeting is the best forum to accomplish this. In the longer term, budget opponents should continue to advocate for real tax reform in the state capital. Legislators may also want to consider reversing a recent change that did away with a law requiring that district budget meetings be held if a school budget failed to pass after two referendum votes.