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In the end, it will be voters, not bureaucrats, who will make the final call on consolidation.

October 10, 2007

— It's true that Education Commissioner Susan Gendron has extraordinary powers under Maine's school district consolidation law.

It's also true that because she has the final word on which merger plans can be sent to the voters for approval, she may be the most influential education commissioner in state history.

What seems to be in dispute, however, is whether that is a problem. Although some people have raised questions about her role, the Department of Education is the right place to review all the plans that will turn 290 school districts into about 80. And if it's not Gendron making those decisions, then who should it be?

The questions about Gendron's role as defined by the state law passed by the Legislature this year comprise the latest attack on Maine's ambitious school-district consolidation law.

Now that their merger intentions have been approved by the department, school districts have until December to draft final plans. Those will be reviewed by the department, and eventually Gendron will determine which ones will be sent out to the voters in each district for final approval.

The law calls for each district to have at least 2,500 students, although it allows for many exemptions. Gendron has the authority to let some smaller districts continue without merging. She has also pushed districts that are already bigger than the minimum to consider merging anyway.

The flexibility built into the law recognizes that Maine is a diverse state, and a 2,500-student district in southern Maine is going to look much different than a district for the same number of students outside Caribou.

That diversity calls for a case-by-case evaluation of the opportunities for merging in each group of communities. No law could have been written to account fairly for all the different circumstances that the districts face.

The decisions could also not have been left to the current school districts to work out on their own. If that were the case, there would be no significant reform.

Ultimately, it's not Gendron but the voters in each town who will decide if they want to merge or not. They can choose to accept the new way of running schools, or stay as they are and pay the economic penalties that the law requires for inefficient school districts.

Maine must get control of school administration costs. Giving the commissioner the authority to push the process along is the right call.