In an OpEd in the Bangor Daily News, parents Sandra Pyne and Janet Winchester detailed how district reorganization planners in SAD 38 are looking to eliminate school choice options there as part of a plan to merge with SAD 48 in Newport, “School choice must be preserved” (BDN, April 29).

They are not the only parents in Maine who should be worried about the loss of school choice. A new report from The Maine Heritage Policy Center details how school choice opportunities across Maine are being scaled back or eliminated as state-mandated school district consolidation efforts continue.

Like the planned merger of SAD 38 and SAD 48, the plan for the merger of Carmel-area SAD 23 and neighboring Hermon would eliminate the opportunity SAD 23 students currently have of going to a high school of their choice using a waiver granted by the school committee. In recent years, high school students from SAD 23 have attended as many as six different high schools using this system. Under the provisions of the reorganization plan, however, existing waivers will be “grandfathered.” After that, no more waivers will be granted, thus eliminating school choice opportunities entirely for the almost 300 students in SAD 23 who have that option today.

Two examples from southern Maine illustrate how choice is under attack in other parts of the state. If reorganization plans go through in the Lincoln County town of Dresden, school choice there will be limited to only 15 percent of high school students. The other 85 percent will lose choice entirely. As recently as 2004, the nearly 300 high school students in the towns of Durham and Pownal attended 15 different high schools. The reorganization plan there will require every high school student in the two towns to attend Freeport High School, which fewer than 60 students from the two towns choose to attend today.

These developments should be of great concern to residents of the Bangor area. Though many school units in this part of the state enjoy opportunities for school choice, few have yet to establish how school choice is to be handled once the large regional school districts the state requires are put into place.

Greenbush, Alton, Milford and Bradley, which all have school choice, are planning to merge with Old Town, which does not have choice. How will these communities deal with choice issues?

Students in Orrington, Dedham, Clifton, Holden and Eddington all have a choice of high schools to attend, but students in Brewer, with which they plan to merge, do not. How will choice be dealt with in that area?

Between them, Veazie and Glenburn send their 370 high school students to eight different high schools. They are looking to merge with Orono, which has no school choice. What will be the resolution of choice issues there?

These are not small questions. Many towns in Maine, and in the Bangor area especially, enjoy options for a choice of schools that are the envy of families and school choice advocates across the nation.

This is not simply a matter of tradition. Research by the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation found that Maine’s school choice program improved student outcomes, regardless of the socio-economic status of the students, while saving taxpayer dollars. In fact, they found that in order to match the performance gains that resulted from school choice, Maine taxpayers would have to spend an additional $909 per student, and that was in 2002.

These findings are consistent with countless studies of school choice elsewhere, which have similarly found improved student performance as a result of the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit that choice and competition bring to the mission of educating. In particular, a number of studies have found that school choice improves performance among disadvantaged and minority students.

School choice here in Maine is under assault, however, despite language in the reorganization law that calls “the preservation of opportunities for choice of schools” a “declared policy of the state.”

Supporters of school choice in the Bangor area would do well to keep careful watch on reorganization efforts involving school choice in other parts of Maine. They should also heed the advice put forward by Pyne and Winchester, who suggested in these pages that for those looking to save school choice “now is the time to get involved.”

Stephen Bowen is the director of education policy at the Maine Heritage Policy Center. His report on the effects of reorganization on school choice is available at the www.mainepolicy.org.