Nearly 50 years ago, a Democratic governor and a Republican Senate president put aside their differences long enough to change forever the social and educational landscape of Maine. The result was the Sinclair Act, which locked many small towns together into more efficient school districts and muscled dozens of small high schools out of existence to the dismay of small-town boosters.

The law has special meaning today because of a new reform movement to squeeze even more efficiency out of our educational system. One of the reports that has been guiding Gov. John Baldacci in his effort to induce more school and municipal regionalization concluded, “We need a bold new set of strategies like those found in the 1957 Sinclair Act. In essence we need a Sinclair II Act.”

The events surrounding the passage of the Sinclair Act make for interesting history today. While the themes are still with us, however, the state’s political and social setting back then more closely resembled Mars than the Maine of today.

Maine was a one-party state dominated by Republicans, and it was only with the election of Gov. Edmund Muskie in 1954 that Democrats began to loosen their grip. Republicans still controlled the Legislature, however, and there had to be a meeting of minds before the school and tax reforms that both sides wanted could occur.

The key Republican leader was Senate Majority Leader Robert Haskell of Bangor. In 1951, he had supported swapping the state property tax for a 2 percent sales tax, creating some extra money for school funding reform. Haskell was concerned, however, that the new formula was open-ended, encouraging frivolous spending on such things as the dozens of tiny high schools that dotted the landscape like mushrooms, many with fewer than 50 students.

“These institutions were demonstrably bad, not because they gave a bad education (Mr. Haskell saw this as a fruitless and futile argument), but because they produced drop-outs and did not prepare Maine’s boys adequately for college,” according to a monograph called “Schoolmen and Politics: A Study of State Aid to Education in the Northeast,” written by a group of scholars for Syracuse University. It was the only published source I could find on the politics behind the Sinclair Act.

On the other hand, Haskell believed schools needed more money, and he had a natural ally in the new Democratic governor.

Because of continued dissatisfaction with the school funding law, the Legislature ordered its Joint Legislative Research Committee to hire a consultant and find out what was wrong. The committee’s subcommittee on education contained some influential individuals including Haskell himself and Sen. Seth Low, a Rockland Republican who was one of Haskell’s allies.

Its chairman was veteran Sen. Roy U. Sinclair, R-Pittsfield, a former teacher and businessman who had a reputation as a financial specialist. The group hired J.L. Jacobs & Co. of Chicago to do the report that would justify wholesale reform measures.

The Jacobs’ Report found that per-pupil expenditures in Maine were the 11th lowest in the country. Teacher salaries were sixth lowest, helping explain why there was such a bad teacher shortage. Less than half of the state’s teachers had bachelor’s degrees.

Meanwhile, more than 120 high schools had less than 100 students. Teachers in these smaller schools were being paid as much as 50 percent less than teachers in larger schools, even though the schools were costing more to operate per student.

The proposed law used a carrot-and-stick approach. Towns that formed school administrative districts with high schools of 300 students or more would be rewarded with state aid, while communities deemed to have too many small schools could lose aid.

Backed by a 1 percent increase in the sales tax, the act established a “foundation system” to help iron out funding inequities, a minimum teacher salary and a requirement that schools hire only certified teachers.

Political maneuvering orchestrated by Haskell and Muskie helped push the extraordinary measure through the Legislature. Haskell put Sinclair in a seat on the powerful Appropriations Committee. Low was given the chairmanship of the Education Committee, a clear violation of seniority rules.

A Muskie ally, Rep. Lucia Cormier, D-Rumford, led the proponents, both Republican and Democrat, in the House. Gov. Muskie was determined to raise the sales tax a percentage point. Tying most of the revenue to extra school funding made the bill more palatable for some skeptical rural lawmakers.

Objections to the bill had more to do with the details of SAD formation than with policy issues. The mandatory minimum pay for teachers upset some, while others worried about how a town could get out of an SAD once it was formed.

The “educational brain trust” won the day. When the votes were counted, the Sinclair Act had passed in the House 109-23, and in the Senate by voice without objection. Not one Democrat voted against the act.

The first school administrative district was formed by Presque Isle and Westfield.

The first district high school built to carry out the intent of the law was Bonny Eagle High School, which replaced tiny high schools in Buxton, Hollis, Standish and Limington. The latter had only 36 pupils, according to the Bangor Daily News.

Several small towns, including Liberty, Brooks and Perham, initially fought the formation of SADs, and it wasn’t until three years after passage that the Maine Supreme Court declared the law constitutional.

But a recitation of these events doesn’t do justice to the emotional tenor of the school-district wars. “I was called a Communist, Socialist, just about everything, but I guess people are getting over it now,” reminisced Sinclair a decade later.

David Silvernail, a researcher at the University of Southern Maine, recently summed up the impact the law had had a decade later when Sinclair made his comment.

By 1967, 230 of Maine’s 492 towns had formed 64 school administrative districts. Teacher minimum pay had increased 60 percent, and high school students had a much broader range of courses.

In 1957 more than a third of high school students were attending schools with fewer than 300 students; by the mid-1960s, that number had been cut in half. And the bigger high schools cost less to run per pupil than the smaller ones.

“Clearly, the Sinclair Act changed the way our schools were organized and run, beginning in the 1960s, and, the effects of these changes can still be seen today. The act took us several steps closer toward creating greater student equity of education opportunities by creating larger school districts and by establishing more comprehensive school programs. It provided more funds for education, and it distributed these additional funds among our schools differently, based on need and ability to pay,” Silvernail said.

But many of the same nagging questions are with us today. For example, the dropout rate hasn’t decreased much since 1960, and this was one of Sen. Haskell’s major goals. Additionally, there is still broad debate over whether big schools or small schools are better places for individual students to learn and to develop socially. Issues like these have never been solved, but the notion that bigger is better probably will continue to influence events until Americans have a change of values.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net