SAVING THE BOAT SCHOOL

Gov. John Baldacci has made a good start in pledging $75,000 to keep the Down East boat-building school in Eastport for another year. But tough decisions lie ahead if Maine is to do more than just keep the school afloat. In recent years, it has been treated badly.

No one can doubt the budgetary crunch that led President Bill Cassidy of Washington County Community College to propose shifting most of the school’s operations from Eastport to the main campus in Calais. But it will take expensive improvements in the former building construction shop in the Calais campus to equal the modernized plant at the college’s Marine Technology Center at Eastport. School officials are preparing comparative cost figures for keeping the school in Eastport vs. relocating most of its activities to Calais.

The latest crisis came after classes were suspended last year because of low enrollment and to update the curriculum to meet changing needs of Maine’s ship-building industry. Seventeen students have applied for the coming year. A half-dozen more could be accommodated, but the teaching staff is stretched thin, one of the two positions having been eliminated in another economy move.

The tiny boat-building school, Maine’s only public higher education program of its kind, provides trained workers for the state’s $600 million industry with its 250 boat yards. Yet the companies are always looking for more skilled employees.

The community colleges have an active recruiting program, but specific recruitment for the boat school has been dropped and officials say it no longer can be afforded. The school’s former director, Tom Duym, managed to find funds for recruiting visits to high schools, so that students could hear from working professionals what a boat-building job would be like.

Mr. Duym considers the school an expensive but unique Maine asset. While many college courses prepare Maine students to find jobs elsewhere, the Eastport school draws outsiders to Maine, to train, find jobs and settle here. Of the 5,000 people employed in the industry, more than 1,500 are in Washington County. Mr. Duym says that since its founding in 1969, the school has drawn 300 boat-builders into the state. He found those “nontraditional” students in their early or mid-20s to be a productive addition to Maine students fresh out of high school.

The revamped curriculum, with additional attention to fiberglass and composite construction and computer design, continues to include wooden-boat construction, once the backbone of the course.

The best solution would be to keep the school in Eastport, and accept it as an expensive but vital enterprise, well worth the cost of maintenance, operation and promotion. But wherever the school winds up, with generous support and inspiring leadership it can once more pay off handsomely for Maine’s boat-building industry, for the state as a whole and for the Washington County economy.