Just as Gov. John Baldacci’s staff was examining priorities for funding next year, it discovered by reading the newspaper that Bangor Mental Health Institute’s Learning Center had been axed, largely for budgetary reasons. Legislators discovered the same way or through letters from constituents. The decision not only was a surprise that produced unhappy policy-makers, it was made before a decision of whether to offer an alternative had been made.

Today, the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee is expected to review the decision and perhaps consider other ways to deliver programs that provide a broad range of classes, in reading and math, how to use computers and how to apply for college. It should. Maine officials (and the courts) regularly talk about providing better services to the mentally ill. Here is a program that does this successfully. The Learning Center already has a small staff so the savings of bringing in another group to offer the services promises to be small – $245,000 minus the cost of offering services through other means.

Jacquelyn Dodge, the director of the Learning Center, observes sensibly that the program is valuable because it helps “patients see themselves as intelligent people with a future.” Newell Augur, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, concurs: “We think it’s a great program and works well.” It is proposed for elimination, he said, because the state is short of money, the program is an institutional way of delivering a service when the state is trying to move into the community and no federal rules require Maine to deliver the service.

But even as the department had decided to eliminate the Learning Center by year’s end, it has yet to agree on an alternative. And lawmakers haven’t even had a chance to decide whether the program ought to be eliminated. They should take their time to consider its value and whether keeping it or keeping it with modifications could make it even more effective.

For instance, the center already does a significant amount of work in the community, helping clients transition to other programs, working with agencies to ensure clients continue with their education or picking up with previous work for serial hospital admissions. Center teachers have even set up tutoring at the University of Maine when needed. This sounds like a valuable service reflective of the trend in mental health care – might the center’s role be expanded, rather than cut, to include the non-hospitalized mentally ill?

A teacher at the center, Mary Freeman, asks, “When we know education is the most effective and least expensive cure for the chronic return of patients to institutions, why are we dismissing it as worthless, or in the lowest measure, ‘unbillable’?”

It is an excellent question, and there certainly seems to be solutions to offering these valuable services to residents without merely closing the Learning Center and hoping another public service picks up the slack, which sounds awfully like the deinstitutionalization fiasco of a couple of decades ago. Lawmakers have plenty to ask about today.