RE-REDISTRICTING SCHOOLS

Before Maine drops its 152 school districts for the 26 proposed by Gov. Baldacci, the 60 or so contemplated by the state Board of Education or any other number, it must persuade communities that the proposed districts are the most efficient, effective choice. These will require more data and some legislative tinkering.

Gov. Baldacci correctly anticipated potential political resistance to the drastic reduction in districts by cutting state funding for central office administration, from $346 per student to $186. He also proposed requiring that all new dollars for education that bring the state’s share to 55 percent be met with equal reductions in local property taxes.

The local politics of the proposal – on how it affects school curriculum and standards, autonomy and policy direction – will be intense as the issue is debated in the Legislature. But the proposed funding restrictions intentionally box in communities that may try to opt out. They would be forced to ask their local taxpayers to pick up 100 percent of any additional costs, a difficult choice if tax rates are falling in towns around them.

Those politics, however, demand that the administration be able to defend all of its decisions as lawmakers scrutinize them. The administration has yet, however, to provide a persuasive defense for the most dramatic feature of its new districts: the range in their student populations. Under the proposal, the smallest district, around Calais, would have 1,824 students and the largest, around Portland, would have 20,000. Yet the research that finally got Maine moving toward fewer districts may not support these numbers.

Two years ago, economist Philip Trostel of the University of Maine and Catherine Reilly, now the state economist, found that per-student costs decline up to 574 students per grade – about 7,400 students per district – and then essentially flatten out. Geography limits raising all districts to 7,400, but there is no reason not to take some of the very largest proposed districts, above say, 14,000, and cut them in half or, in Portland’s case, thirds.

The benefit of reducing them is evident to anyone who has worked in a large organization. Even with only one superintendent each, districts with a high number of students would have more officials – assistant superintendents, assistant curriculum coordinators, etc. – and therefore more paperwork and more meetings and, out of necessity, more bureaucratic irritants.

A further benefit of reducing the largest districts to 7,000 or 8,000 students is that a more uniform size is likely to make state regulation and oversight easier in the future. As lawmakers contemplate school reforms five or 10 years from now, their work likely would be more effective if the districts they are affecting were more or less similar in administration and organization. But a district with 2,000 students and another with 20,000, as contemplated by the governor’s plan, are more likely to be set up quite differently.

Sometimes, that is the sacrifice an organization makes to save money. But if, as the research suggests, the maximum per-student savings was reached well before 10,000 students, the primary remaining reason for these very large districts is that the state had an existing map for its technical career center divisions and decided to apply it in this case.

Changing the proposal from 26 districts to, perhaps, 32 is far from fatal to the overall plan, but it would put the state in a better position to produce a stronger final plan and build confidence among school officials that this substantial reform has been well thought out.