AUGUSTA – The Maine Senate has approved a bill that will permit the formation of school unions as part of the state’s school consolidation program.

The Senate on Thursday voted 26-8 in favor of the legislation, which was hammered out last week by a six-member conference committee composed of House and Senate members. Senate Majority Leader Libby Mitchell and House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, who each have school unions in their districts, sat on the committee. The bill is expected to be taken up by the House of Representatives next week.

Because the bill represents a major revision of Gov. John Baldacci’s school consolidation program, it remains uncertain whether he would sign the legislation in the event it wins approval in the House.

“The governor has already said he cannot support anything that would undo the education reforms that have been implemented, but he hasn’t said whether he would veto this,” Department of Education spokesman David Connerty-Marin said Thursday.

Connerty-Marin said LD 1932 originally was designed to remove financial barriers to school consolidation. He said the amended version passed Thursday, while retaining those changes, also contained provisions that the department believes would seriously weaken consolidation efforts.

The major change in the bill is a provision that would allow existing school units to form school unions. In school unions, individual member schools have authority over their portion of the union budget. In the consolidated school systems created last year by the consolidation law, a regional school board controls the budget.

Connerty-Marin said the department opposed the amended version because “we’d be going backward, not forward, on school consolidation. We estimate that we could end up with over 200 districts if they allow school unions.”

The school consolidation bill was designed to reduce the number of school districts in Maine from 290 to a maximum of 80 and produce estimated savings of $36.5 million.

Although the law established school units with a minimum of 2,500 students, provisions in the amended bill give Education Commissioner Susan Gendron the authority to grant waivers for school units with as few as 1,000 students under certain circumstances. Geography and demographics would determine whether a waiver would be considered.

The Education Department was supportive of the provision in the bill that removed the financial barriers to consolidation. Those changes were approved last December by the Legislature’s Education and Cultural Affairs Committee. The bill was expected to be approved in January, but it became bogged down after some senators and representatives pressed for the establishment of school unions.

Along with school unions and the small-district waiver provision, the Senate bill also would enable regional school units to design their own method for sharing the local cost of running the unit, allow towns that now receive a minimum state subsidy to retain those funds when they join a reorganized school system, eliminate the requirement that all communities must raise at least 2 mills for education, and put in place a uniform budget approval process to be implemented upon consolidation.

“Nobody disagrees with the need for these fixes,” Connerty-Marin said. “It’s the school union piece that does the damage.”