Stephen L. Bowen Thursday, May 10, 2007

The education committee's plan would do little more than maintain the status quo. The appropriations subcommittee plan takes a more aggressive approach and ultimately gives the unelected State Board of Education the final say over which school districts will be merged or eliminated. That plan focuses too much power and influence in Augusta.

The solution, therefore, is to find an approach that generates budget savings but does so without sacrificing local control -- one that will improve educational services and increase accountability without saddling the state with enormous regional school districts.

In January, I authored a proposal for the Maine Heritage Policy Center that would create collaborative bodies, known as Educational Service Districts (ESDs), through which existing school districts could share administrative and instructional services. Used in countless other states, these cooperative districts have generated remarkable savings and improved educational services by allowing small local districts to share resources with each other.

This is not a new concept. Right here in Maine, regional bodies of this type are already in existence, such as the Western Maine Educational Collaborative. Formed just last year, the collaborative already shares services across 11 school districts serving 13,000 students. In the process, it has saved its member districts hundreds of thousands of dollars.

How much could the state save using this approach? In my most recent analysis I outlined how the ESD model could easily save the $36 million that state budget writers are looking for. All of this is achieved, by the way, without creating the immense bureaucratic school districts, heavy on administration and light on parent and community involvement, which consolidation advocates propose.

Using the ESD model as its base, a broadly acceptable education reform bill could be crafted that includes elements from the work of the legislative committees. The education committee, for example, proposed development of a common school budgeting format, which would allow voters to more easily compare school districts with regard to school administrative spending and areas of budget growth, improving local accountability. The appropriations subcommittee proposed a review of state and federal mandates on local school districts, hoping to identify and reform areas where local administrative costs are driven by actions in Augusta and Washington.

The worst part about the endless debate about how best to merge Maine's school districts is that it is a divisive and time-consuming debate that we don't need to have. We can improve accountability, generate needed savings and provide better services to our schools and students and also keep our traditional local school districts.

The Legislature's Rural Caucus appears to have come to a similar conclusion, recently embracing a "consolidated" consolidation plan of this kind, including the creation of regional collaboratives. Let's hope the rest of the Legislature follows their lead.

Stephen L. Bowen is a teacher with MSAD 28, a former state legislator and an adjunct scholar at The Maine Heritage Policy Center. The author can be reached at sbowen@mainepolicy.org.