Talk about timing. Maine's schools had no sooner opened for another year last week when fiscally challenged public officials in Augusta started wondering aloud if perhaps we could save money by shutting them down.

That's right, underpaid teachers, stressed-out parents and overjoyed kids. The next line of defense against a $30 million (and counting) state budget deficit could be the "school furlough day."

What exactly is that, you ask?

Think "snow day" without Storm Center's Kevin Mannix. Think bleeding a school year that, compared to other states, is already on the anemic side. Think shifting into reverse while the rest of the world puts the pedal to its academic mettle.

"We need to look at it with an eye to minimizing the impact on our kids, while at the same time preserving what our kids need," said Education Commissioner Susan Gendron in an e-mail last week. "Do I think it merits exploration? Yes. The choices are getting harder and harder."

No argument there.

Gendron and Health and Human Services Commissioner Brenda Harvey met last week with the Legislature's Appropriations Committee to talk budgets – and from every angle the picture was very, very bleak.

Maine's $5.8 billion, two-year budget that took effect July 1 (already $500 million less than the last biennial budget) assumes $30 million in second-year cuts that have yet to be identified.

Add to that looming revenue shortfalls that could push the deficit as high as $80 million, and you start to understand why lawmakers wanted some face time with Gendron and Harvey, whose departments each account for about 40 percent of the state's annual spending.

Harvey flatly told legislators the days of nickle-and-diming are over – the only way forward for the DHHS is for the Legislature to start axing whole programs.

Gendron, on the other hand, presented the results of sit-downs she has held with superintendents around the state – their suggestions ranged from statewide energy bids to statewide labor contracts and health benefits to statewide wage freezes to, alas, statewide school shutdowns.

"We're not talking about a permanent change," stressed Michael Cormier, superintendent of the Mount Blue Regional School District in Farmington and chairman of the Maine School Superintendents Association's funding committee, in an interview last week. "We're talking, hopefully, one year that you would have to do this – and we'd be doing it because we're in a crisis."

To be fair, nobody is eager to cut Maine's school year by (fill in the blank) days to save money – Gendron estimated last week that one day without school would save $7 million, just under half of which would come from the state's general fund.

Hard as furloughs might be to stomach, Gendron and others note, they're preferable to eliminating entire educational programs that already hang by a thread.

Still, at a time when calls for a longer school year echo from U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (who warns that the United States is falling far behind countries like India and China when it comes to time in the classroom) to Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio (who wants to increase his state's school year by a full four weeks), moving Maine even temporarily in the opposite direction feels like, shall we say, the wrong answer.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, Maine's mandatory minimum of 175 in-class school days placed it behind 42 other states in 2006 (the most recent year available).

Twenty-nine of those states require that pupils be in class no fewer than 180 days – or a full week longer than Maine.

In other words, despite what they might tell us, Maine's kids are by no means trapped in an educational gulag.

Compared with Kansas (186 days) and Ohio (where Strickland's four-week add-on would push the minimum from 182 to a whopping 202 days), they...