Positive signs within an Appropriations Committee subgroup suggest school district reform continues to progress as the group acknowledges that some regions of the state cannot fairly meet district size goals and that local involvement with any reform will be crucial to its success. There remain a hundred small reasons why this reform will be difficult and several large reasons why it must happen.

Primary among these large reasons is the amount of school funding the state and communities can afford to contribute to schools. The state is feeling the squeeze now because it is boosting the percentage of total funding it puts into K-12 education, but local government felt that same pressure before. Maine has one of the most expensive school systems, per pupil, in the nation, with an inordinate amount going toward district-level administration.

Requiring multiple districts to work together as a single district saves money in the short term by lowering the number of personnel and allowing more efficient purchases of goods and services. The savings over the long term, however, are even more important. As multiple schools learn to work together, efficiencies in the courses taught, extracurricular activities planned and construction carried out will lower the cost of education and at the same time allow more money directly into the classroom, supporting teachers and providing improved resources to students.

Focusing more on Maine students is especially necessary now because their performance, measured through the National Assessment of Educational Progress, has slipped from among the best in the nation seven or eight years ago to close to middling now. Maine doesn’t have more money to put toward these students, but it does have inefficiently spent district administration money that could be put to that use.

The Legislature’s Education Committee produced a plan for moving the state toward district consolidation that was not strong enough, so it produced three more plans to push the issue along. The Appropriations subcommittee – two Democrats, Sen. Peggy Rotundo and Rep. Emily Cain, and two Republicans, Sen. Karl Turner and Rep. Sawin Millett – are basing their recommendations on that work. The process has been unusually open to the public and grounded in a commitment to making needed but difficult decisions.

The subcommittee is expected to report a plan later this week. At a minimum, it must include required consolidation, a substantial reduction in the number of school districts and plenty of time and support for communities to make the change to less costly administration, and understanding that not all communities can make the same level of change. Early indications are that the plan will have all these elements.

The latest drop in budget projections is one more piece of evidence that the Legislature must pass this reform. Maine supports K-12 education as well as any state, but it no longer can support K-12 spending that doesn’t add directly to the well-being of students and, indirectly, to the health of their communities.