Retired Educator Ed White: ‘This Whole Thing Terrifies Me’
By Will Tuell
The Machias-Area Reorganization Planning Committee (RPC) voted to submit an “alternative organizational structure” (AOS) plan to Maine Education Commissioner Susan Gendron as part of the group’s efforts to comply with Maine's controversial school reorganization law.
“We have a new structure,” said Union 102 and East Machias Superintendent Scott Porter. “As of July 1, 2009, school unions do not exist. Period. SADs have been put back in the law [as well as] consolidated school districts, but school unions have been zapped. They're gone.”
Local voters will have the right to reject or accept the new school regionalization plan presented to them, said Porter. “If you opt to opt out,” he said, “[the town] will become a municipal school unit, which is what you are, really, in a school union. You would have to come to an agreement as to where you would take care of your central office services.”
Porter said that the RPC could file an AOS that would allow local school committees to exist, but with less input on the running of their schools. He said that the core functions Gendron and her staff will be looking for in an AOS include “employment of a superintendent, performance of business functions, special education administration, transportation administration, core curriculum, budget, state and federal reporting and adoption of policies. And the structure they've allowed is called an AOS.”
Porter said that because of a change in the law—lowering the minimum number of students required to form a consolidated unit from 1,200 to 1,000—the Machias-area RPC should no longer be spurned on the grounds that they have too few students.
“[An AOS] does allow school committees to have some control over budgets,” said Porter, “some control over personnel, some control over policies,” but state subsidy for the 12 towns from Lubec to Jonesboro would flow through the central governing board.
“For all 12 towns that we're involved in from Lubec to Jonesboro, all the state subsidy would flow into that new unit referred to as an AOS. All the subsidy comes into that unit, and then this group [RPC] has to negotiate how that subsidy is assigned to each and every town.”
Unfortunately, planners will be negotiating this subsidy allocation blind, said Porter, because in the future the state would be providing “one printout” for the whole consolidated unit and not providing information on a per-town basis as has been the case in the past.
“I used to be a math teacher before I got into administration,” said Porter. “I don't see how it is remotely possible to come up with a formula to accurately distribute subsidy per town, year after year. It is not possible to get that done and get that done accurately. The Department of Education goes through about 50-60 pages of calculations to get what I get [four pages]. We can't reproduce that. We don't have the ability to do that. Could we ballpark it? Yeah, but it wouldn't be what you're going to get, and it's going to change per year, because student populations go up in some places, some places they go down, valuations go up way up, some places stay level. It's all over the place with the towns that we're talking about here.”
Still, the RPC must develop a plan or face the prospect of losing its subsidy in the near term.
“There's no way to bypass it,” said Porter. “You can't get around it. You have to do it. Sen. Kevin Raye (R-Perry) tried to get an amendment through that would allow you to go directly to the towns and have them vote [whether they] even want to go through this process. That got voted down. We have to go through it. The ultimate hammer is [the state] not sending your subsidy check. That's the ultimate hammer if you say we're done.”
The RPC agreed to craft an AOS, electing a small group headed up by Porter, Elm Street School Principal Tony Maker and East Machias Selectman Kenneth “Bucket” Davis, who will work on the logistics of the plan and bring it back to the full committee for consideration “over the summer.” If all goes well, a plan could be submitted to Gendron in August, clearing the way for local referendums from November to January.
Porter said that an AOS doesn't allow for “100 percent local control,” as many in the area would like. “I will tell you now that the AOS will not get you the kind of local control that you're looking for. It allows you to have committees, but you do not have 100 percent control over the money for your town. They won't allow that to take place. And that structure is the fiscal entity for all the money coming in. That is the way it is. Some people are going to gain; some people are going to lose. And it's going to redistribute who pays what at the end of the day.”
Repeal Efforts Continue
Insomuch as RPC members pledged to follow the process laid out before them, several, including longtime educator and Jonesboro resident Ed White, observed that repeal might be the best way to “save” Maine's educational system.
“This whole thing terrifies me,” said White. “I've been in education a long, long time. And what I see is [that] we're going on the skids right now. This state, I believe, from talking to some of my friends around New England, is a laughingstock of the region. People are saying, 'What are you guys doing up there? You've got a good education system. And now it's going down the tubes.' It frightens me what is happening to a good education system. Obviously we've got to meet the law, but honest to God, this [repeal] is the only way we can save the education for the kids of the state of Maine.”
In an e-mail to members of the Maine Coalition to Save Schools (MCSS), the group seeking to put a referendum for repeal of the new school law on the November 2009 ballot, Skip Greenlaw, its leader, announced that as of May 21 the group had collected 41,875. MCSS must collect 55,087 signatures to force a statewide referendum, but is pushing for 60,000 in case any signatures are invalidated.