Rural caucus to meet on consolidation plan

AUGUSTA – Members of local regional planning committees working to implement the school consolidation law will talk about the process to legislators from rural areas this week.

In a meeting arranged through the Maine Small Schools Coalition, RPC members from Van Buren, Jackman, Greenville, Castine, Union 76 (Stonington, Deer Isle, Brooklin and Sedgwick), Union 92 (Hancock, Lamoine, Mariaville, Otis, Surry and Trenton) and Bucksport have agreed to report to the caucus at 8 a.m. Tuesday in Augusta.

The law has affected smaller, rural schools more than some of the larger school districts in the state, and the meeting will give the legislators in the Rural Caucus an opportunity to hear concerns specific to rural districts, according to Dick Gould, executive director of Maine Small Schools.

Gould said he proposed the meeting with the caucus after an attempt to set up a similar meeting with the education committee failed.

“Legislators should be listening to the people who are doing the work,” Gould said. “This will give them a chance to talk with these people and to hear the people in the field talk about the many, many problems, barriers, issues – whatever you call them – that are really making it difficult to meet all the timelines and maybe even make it impossible to carry out the proposals in the law.”

The Rural Caucus welcomed the chance to meet with regional planning committee members, according to Sen. Roger Sherman, R-Aroostook, vice chairman of the caucus. The caucus is a group of 35 to 40 state senators and representatives from both parties that meets regularly during each legislative session to discuss issues relevant to rural communities. The lawmakers in the caucus often can work collectively to influence the legislative process.

The caucus has heard other reports on the consolidation process and the meeting with the committee members, Sherman said, will provide an unfiltered assessment of what the committees are dealing with.

“It gives us a chance to hear from them about some of the issues involved in what they’re setting up and how they can be put together,” Sherman said.

Part of the problem, according to Rep. Jim Schatz, D-Blue Hill, is that much of the information legislators are receiving is coming from the education committee, which is advocating for the proposed amendments from the Department of Education, and from the state-hired facilitators working with the planning committees.

“The sense you get from the testimony of the facilitators,” Schatz said, “is that, although there may be problems or barriers in some areas, the process is generally moving forward. That may be a little more optimistic than those of us who live in reality land might articulate it.”

The planning committees have run into significant barriers in trying to form their respective districts, Schatz said, and the session with the caucus will give legislators a clear view of how those committee members view the requirements of the law and some of the proposed amendments proposed as a fix for the law.

“We’ll get a chance to know what they are dealing with in the committees and draw some conclusions about whether the fixes will amend the law to make it palatable,” he said. “We’ll also get a better idea about what some of the barriers are.”

Judy Sproule of Trenton, a member of the Union 92 regional planning committee, who will speak at the meeting, said the process in her committee is at a standstill and committee members have lost much of the enthusiasm for the task because of the roadblocks they have encountered.

“We’re at a standstill,” she said. “If this law just went away and they told us all the time we’ve spent has been wasted, we’d be thrilled. It’s just going nowhere. The kinds of things they want us to put together, our people are not going to vote for.”

While she did not want to speak for the entire committee, Sproule said she would favor repealing the law and starting over.

“That would be the best option,” Sproule said. “Then people could sit down in earnest and come up with a way to get out of this administrative mess.”

It might be possible for the various committees to unite on that position, Sproule said, and they might have some sympathetic ears in the caucus. Schatz submitted legislation calling for repeal of the law and Sherman voted against the budget bill that included consolidation last year.

“I wish we could repeal it,” he said. “That way we could work on this issue in a more logical way.”

rhewitt@bangordailynews.net

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