School plan compromises quality

The citizens, educators and selectmen of the town of Frenchboro wish to summarize our deep concerns and to urge a “No” vote on legislation pertaining to the Gov. Baldacci-Commissioner Susan Gendron “Regionalization of Education” proposal.

The argument of student-teacher ratios: Small island communities, whether isolated by water or geographical distance, are a significant source of the “low” student-teacher ratios in the state of Maine identified as “a problem” that needs to be fixed. A careful, detailed, analysis of such communities, however, would show that any effort to “fix” the so-called “problem” of low student-teacher ratios would be far more expensive than maintaining the present system. The “savings” of a few superintendent salaries would be far outstripped in bricks and mortar and transportation costs – transportation not only of students, but also of special services providers and a new tier of managerial bureaucrats. The changes brought by the present proposed legislation is, in our opinion, only the tip of the iceberg of changes to come, and will lead not to a lessening of costs but to a significant lessening in quality of education, quality of family life and quality of community life.

The issue of “local control” must not be debated only on the level of ideology and principle. What local control means to us, demonstrated in a large number of wonderful examples, is that our proximity to the unique issues of providing an exceptional educational and nurturing program in a remote area has led to great creativity and resourcefulness. The community, in addition to paid schoolteachers, has provided a broad array of rich experiences for our children that never would have come through a remote, cumbersome, single cookie-cutter answer, overworked, bureaucratic system.

We are confident that our school is less costly to the state and to our taxpayers, and far superior in measurable quality, to any experience our children would have in the system resulting from the state’s takeover of education. Examples from business and other large institutions, such as the Catholic Church and major Protestant denominational structures, constantly demonstrate the failure of top-down reorganizations based on the prospect of cost savings. At present, a large number of volunteers and their enthusiastic promotion among a larger network of caring and supportive folks presently generates a significant amount of money that positively impacts education on this island. This reality, we are sure, is replicated in small school communities all over the state.

Reorganization, bureaucracy, unresponsive and distant overworked administrators, a clear disconnect between community and school – all will lead to a rapid diminution of volunteer workers, an extraordinary loss in outside sources of income, and the loss of will to raise taxes to support a system in which folks neither feel ownership nor have a voice. Students and money and volunteer workers will leave public education for alternatives more responsive to their vision and supportive of their participation. All this, before we point out that a whole new managerial bureaucracy will have to emerge under the state’s proposal in order to connect superintendents earning much higher salaries with their minions.

Until the governor, the state bureaucracy, and the Legislature can fix the problems in mental health care, for example, created many decades ago when the state closed state mental health institutions “to save money and improve care,” we have no reason or confidence to risk any change in our schools. The consent decree won in a lawsuit brought by the city of Portland in the face of the state of Maine’s failure to provide the promised satellite system of alternative services some 20 years ago is still in effect today. Only when the state finishes the task of providing better health care for less money will anyone in their right mind entertain any proposal to let the state take over education.

Our fears of the impact of regionalization and the distant, out of touch, and nonresponsive bureaucracy it will foster are ironically and beautifully illustrated in Commissioner Gendron’s attempt to “communicate” with island communities. A directive calling island representatives and educators to her office in Augusta on Thursday, Feb. 15, was received on Tuesday, Feb. 13. Even without weather considerations, ferry schedules, teaching responsibilities and school board member responsibilities make attending such a meeting impossible. In our view, the governor and Commissioner Gendron are not only heavy-handed and insensitive, but ignorant and ill-informed of the reality of education, of daily life and of community involvement in education in a large part of the state of Maine.

Robert Stuart, a selectman in Frenchboro, wrote this commentary on behalf of the town’s Select Board.