AUGUSTA – Money is trumping educational concerns as communities continue to run into conflicts while grappling with school consolidation.

That was the finding of a new report from the Maine Children’s Alliance released Thursday. The white paper found that budget preoccupations were crowding out educational concerns in the state’s push to consolidate school districts. The Maine Children’s Alliance is a nonpartisan, statewide, multiissue child advocacy organization.

The white paper reviewed the process that produced the consolidation law in the state’s biennial budget, explains how the legislation took this particular form and how it has worked for the local school districts charged with implementing it.

“Consolidation is a worthy thing. It’s a goal that has to be reached in order to improve the quality of education and contain taxes,” alliance president and chief executive officer Elinor Goldberg said Thursday. “There are huge benefits to making things more efficient.”

Goldberg said the study found that short-term financial imperatives have obscured the larger goals of regional cooperation. Reorganization planning committees, or RPCs, that worked to create educational improvement plans made significantly greater progress toward agreement than RPCs that have focused solely on financial issues, she said.

Goldberg said the state needed to work with the communities to ensure that consolidation is managed successfully and that more time would be needed to accomplish that. Otherwise, the advantages of consolidation could be obscured as communities run into logjams over money.

“We’re trying to bring it back to the kids. If we keep the quality of education in the discussion, we won’t get so sidetracked with the money,” she said. “We just think there needs to be a slight variation on what’s to be done to get to the goal of consolidation. We want it to be long-term and useful. There needs to be a bit more talking and planning. The point is, a lot of communities need a little more time and more help.”

The consolidation law mandated that the state reduce the number of school districts from 290 to 80. Last month the Department of Education announced that goal would be reached but also admitted that many regional consolidation committees were getting bogged down by financial questions.

The department alleviated that problem by convincing the Legislature’s Educational and Cultural Affairs Committee to amend the law to enable school units to devise their own method of cost sharing, protecting the minimum subsidies of schools that agree to merge with their neighbors and eliminating a mandated minimum level of financial support for education that was imposed on a couple of dozen communities in the initial law. The measure is expected to be voted on later this month.

In response to the Maine Children’s Alliance’s report, Department of Education Communications Director David Connerty-Marin noted Thursday that still more work needs to be done to make consolidation successful. He also commended the planning committees that continue to attempt to find a solution and said the planners should not lose sight of the ultimate goal of improving opportunities for all Maine students.

“The report underscores the unsustainability of the current system. We agree with the conclusion that there needs to be more focus on educational improvement,” Connerty-Marin said. “Some planning groups are doing great work in that area, and others have pulled out a calculator, run a few numbers, and decided they wouldn’t save any money and called it quits. The planning groups that are seeking out educational opportunities are moving forward in a way that will benefit all the students in their region.”

The alliance’s white paper reviews the process that produced the consolidation law in the state’s biennial budget, and explains how the legislation took this particular form and how it has worked for the local school districts charged with implementing it.

Goldberg said the study found that the state’s shrinking enrollments were bound to raise per-student costs to unsustainable levels unless much greater levels of cooperation can be achieved.

She said that by 2009 the state will provide 55 percent of the overall cost of education and remain at that point. Unless savings are found elsewhere, communities will have to deal with the ramifications of lower enrollments and the growing cost of education, she said. Unless taxpayers are confident their leaders are doing the right thing, it will be difficult to sustain quality education, she said.

“We’re kind of getting to a cliff where we have to deal with this,” Goldberg said. “We’re getting to a point where we’ll get less money for each child. … I think Mainers will pay anything for their kids, as long as they think it’s working.”

wgriffin@bangordailynews.net

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