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State House: A key test for all five proposals is whether residents will give up local control.

By BETH QUIMBY Staff Writer January 14, 2007

Gov. John Baldacci's plan to slash the state's school districts and administrators is not the only school-consolidation proposal percolating in the Legislature.

Lawmakers this session will consider at least five bills aimed at merging school districts or some of their functions. They range from Baldacci's ambitious approach, which would shift control of education spending from the local to the regional level; to less radical plans that would encourage school districts to start buying in bulk and sharing back-office functions.

The plans are sponsored by both Democrats and Republicans, who estimate they will save taxpayers tens of millions of dollars a year. All are aimed at reducing the amount of money spent on school administration statewide, and most would put the savings back into classrooms.

All, however, are likely to test Mainers' willingness to give up local control over their school districts.

"The local school board knows their schools intimately, such as which kind of lawn mower we are buying," said Colleen Quint, executive director of the Mitchell Institute, which provides scholarships to Maine students, and a former member of the budget committee in Minot. "Some of us are quite ready to give that up. Some of us are not."

The last time Maine's school districts were comprehensively downsized was in 1957, when the Legislature passed the Sinclair Act, which created the school administrative district system.

School consolidation has long been viewed as a way to stretch education dollars -- it has been embraced elsewhere, such as Hawaii and New Brunswick, Canada, both of which operate with only one school district. Yet it is virtually unknown in New England.

REFERENDUMS FORCE THE ISSUE

Baldacci has made several efforts to promote consolidation. In his first term, he proposed creating "municipal service districts" by combining at least five towns and two school districts to share a single district-wide property tax, school board and municipal council. None of his ideas got far in the Legislature.

But after tax-cap referendums in 2004 and 2006, and three reports that have called for merging school districts, the Legislature now appears to have caught on to the idea.

The proposals include the governor's measure; a plan promoted by a coalition including the Maine State Chamber of Commerce, Maine Education Association, Maine Municipal Association, Maine Hospital Association and Maine Service Centers Coalition; a plan by state Sen. Karl Turner, R-Cumberland; a proposal based on a Maine Children's Alliance report; and a bill based on a Board of Education report. Many of the plans incorporate ideas from the Brookings Institution report on the state's long-term economic prospects, commissioned by GrowSmart Maine and released last year.

So far Baldacci has released the most detailed and far-reaching plan.

"The elephant in the room right now is the governor's proposition," said Turner.

While Baldacci's previous ideas depended on incentives to bring about change, his new proposal would be mandatory. His plan would create 26 school districts from the existing 296. It would cut the number of school superintendents from 152 to 26.

School districts would range from about 1,800 to 20,000 students each under the governor's proposal. The districts are based on the state's existing vocational technical schools. The new regional districts would share administration of a number of operations, such as special education, transportation, human resources, payroll and purchasing. Each district would be governed by a regional school board elected from the cities and towns in the district. District voters would control the budget.

Baldacci estimates the plan would save $250 million over three years. He proposes the money be used to equip each school with its own principal and all high school students with laptop computers. District voters would...