As the members of a committee crafting the merger of three local school systems change course, they are charting what is largely new territory alongside a small number of Maine school districts.

By a one-vote margin at a July 10 meeting, the committee members planning the consolidation of the Fayette, Winthrop and Maranacook-area school systems opted for an alternative structure for their proposed regional school district. The committee had, at one point, been making fast progress toward completing a plan for a regional school unit, the structure most consolidating districts are adopting.

In choosing the alternative structure, the district's architects set out on the same path as three other regional districts in Maine whose requests to use alternative structures have received state Department of Education approval.

A handful of other districts around the state have begun weighing whether to go the alternative route.

The Maranacook-area committee began discussions about alternative structures after members reviewed the reorganization blueprint of a Mount Desert Island-area group shaping a schools merger, Wayne member Stan Davis said.

"It seemed to us very, very close to what we wanted to do," he said. A number of Fayette, Winthrop and Maranacook-area planning committee members favored the alternative structure as a way to limit the power of larger towns in the district to close the small towns' elementary schools.

Maranacook-area schools serve students from Manchester, Mount Vernon, Readfield and Wayne.

The Mount Desert Island plan sets up multiple local school committees to oversee elementary schools and another committee to oversee a centralized high school system and district administration.

"From the very beginning, our committee has taken the position that we want to continue to function in the manner we do now," said Gail Marshall, who chairs the Mount Desert Island-area committee. "We've always been clear about our ultimate objective."

Despite the committee's certainty about what it wants, the regional district's planners have much left to settle.

The school-district consolidation law's alternative structure provision -- which was heavily favored by proponents of increased local control over regionalized school systems -- is vague about the structure's shape. The law specifies little beyond requiring systems choosing such a structure to adopt consistent core curricula, school policies, calendars and collective bargaining agreements with employees.

"With the exception of transportation, that's exactly how our school union system has been functioning," Marshall said. "That's what we have been advocating to maintain."

But since the Department of Education will award one subsidy check, planners of alternatively shaped regional districts will need to address how to divvy up the funds between multiple local school committees.

In the Fort Kent area, committee members planning a school district merger appear likely to adopt an alternative structure as a way to make their plan more palatable to voters used to more decentralized school systems, said Fort Kent Town Manager Donald Guimond, a co-chairman of that regional planning committee.

Changing course to adopt an alternative structure, however, is proving complicated.

"We were shooting to bring this to voters in November," Guimond said. "We're not at all sure we're going to meet that timeline, but that's still our goal."

Voters need to approve their local school districts' mergers at the ballot box or face penalties from the state.

"At the end of the day we still have to show some savings and we're having a hard time with that," Guimond said.

John Sprague, the chairman of a Machias-area committee planning a district merger, said his committee chose the alternative structure because it offered individual towns greater local control than a conventional regional school unit.

Still, Sprague said, the alternative structure is the best of two undesirable choices.

"I have never seen such a mess that the state has made of our education system," he said of the statewide push for school-district consolidation.

Fayette, Winthrop and Maranacook-area planners take their next steps toward forming the alternative structure this week when they meet with town officials. Those officials from the six member towns need to submit new notices to the Department of Education explaining their intent to merge and form the alternative structure. The planning committee has not chosen the easiest possible path and the future is uncertain, Davis said. But that's to be expected in a process that offers planning committees leeway in deciding between different district structures.

"Anytime there's flexibility then you also lose part of your initial clarity," he said.

Matthew Stone -- 623-3811, Ext. 435

mstone@centralmaine.com