Schools’ fate set before reform effort

So determined are legislators to prevent their school consolidation plan from being blamed for school closings that they have included supermajority votes before any school could be abandoned. But it’s too late. Schools are going to close in Maine in the next few years, but not because of district consolidation, which merely offers a chance to make the process less painful.

Schools will close for two reasons, one that took hold 30 years ago and the other in January 2005. The first is demographics. In 1978, state records show, Maine had 239,549 students (overseen by 12,553 teachers and fewer than 900 administrative officials). As of the 2005-06 school year, Maine had only 200,909 students (but 16,698 teachers and 1,300 administrative officials). That drop of students is not uniform across the state, and the flight from service centers to surrounding towns makes any clean comparison of the number of students to staff over time very difficult. In any event, the trend for students is projected to continue downward, helping to push the per-student cost of education here to among the highest in the country.

What prevents the trend line for staff from continuing up is what was passed as LD 1 two years ago. That legislation will send schools more than $800 million in additional funding from 2006 through 2009, bringing the state to its goal of 55 percent of the total cost under the funding formula in Essential Programs and Services. Then, the other half of LD 1 kicks in, and instead of increases of 8 percent or 10 percent annually, the state will contribute 2.5 percent or 3 percent more each year.

The rising costs won’t have gone away, only the state increases, which leaves local funding to make up the rest. To imagine one possibility for what happens next, put yourself on a school board in 2010. Where once you had 520 high school students bustling (do teenagers bustle?) through the halls of the local school, there are now 310. In the classroom, there are plenty of empty desks. The purchasing collaborative you hoped would save money helped some but not much. Your principal also oversees the middle school, where enrollment has dropped even more steeply. The roof on the high school leaks and there are unhappy rumors of mold in the walls. In the next community over, the situation is similar, except the principal there also has bus duty.

Separately, those two communities would have some difficult choices to confront. But here is where opponents of district consolidation, who warn that the measure will lead to closing schools, are correct. What is a difficult decision for two districts is much easier for a consolidated single district, with one school board facing two faltering high schools and a distinct squeeze on its regional budget.

Consolidation won’t cause the school to close, and some economies of scale might help in the short term to keep schools open longer. But eventually, when the tradeoffs of maintaining both schools for fewer and fewer students become clear to taxpayers, the regional board will wonder why they had waited so long to act – or they will unless the Legislature makes the closure process so onerous as to be impossible.

Consolidation critics will lament the tragedy of closing schools – they are correct again in saying these schools are often the heart of a town – but the more serious tragedy has already occurred in that loss of tens of thousands of children in Maine. And while this state has approved 54 new schools or major additions to schools since 2000, it has been notably unable to rebuild its school-age population.

In the last couple of decades, all those teachers and administrators have taken the additional school dollars provided by taxpayers and raised the national test scores of Maine students, sent more high school graduates to college and, in countless ways, done what countless state and federal rules have demanded. Schools won’t close because these educators have failed. But they will close because the local economy around them cannot sustain the number of families with children necessary to continue. District consolidation is a symptom of that.

It just isn’t the cause.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News. Readers may contact him at tbenoit@bangor

dailynews.net.