The Nov. 21 BDN headline, “Consolidation costs may outweigh savings” further fueled my continued mistrust of the state in the school consolidation fiasco. Following ongoing news coverage does nothing to calm mounting fears that this ill-conceived effort to trim the state and local budgets will be more about cost-shifting than any improvement in quality.

Education Commissioner Susan Gendron’s recent op-ed piece in the BDN was, in my view, a weak response to criticism that the state effort is only about budget, not quality. From my observations and experience, her administration hasn’t demonstrated the educational expertise to know how to improve education and raise standards. When she and the governor came to SAD 37 to respond to our “Save Our Small Schools” march to Augusta, the governor and the commissioner kept reiterating that we had too much administration.

We, on the other hand, were trying to get the commissioner to recognize that we had figured out a strategy for improvement that had resulted in the majority of our district schools here in low-income Washington County ranking tops in the state MEAs. Many of us who had worked on those successful educational strategies only shook our heads when we realized that the head educator for the state didn’t seem to comprehend the sound pedagogical steps we had taken to meet the state’s Learning Results, win two federal distinguished school awards and rank three of our schools in the top five in Maine. Her comments in Machias about not knowing what kind of education went on in one of our local good public-private high schools – Washington Academy – left us private school educators gasping for breath.

Maybe it is mostly about politics and Augusta’s budget and little to do with our children’s education.

Peter Duston

Cherryfield