This week the Coalition to save Maine Schools will be submitting 60,000 signatures to the Secretary of State in order to repeal Maine’s new school consolidation law. If the signatures are found to be valid, Maine people will have an opportunity to weigh in on this controversial and harmful new law next fall.
Few people are aware of the damage this new consolidation law has caused; especially when combined with deceptive budget and spending gimmicks put in place by the legislature and the governor.
In short, the Baldacci administration, with the support of the legislature has not only worked to eliminate local control of community schools, it has created a school funding formula that picks the pockets of the Maine property taxpayers in order to free up money to balance the state budget.
A little history is needed.
In June of 2004, the people of this state passed the Maine Municipal Association’s “55 percent” referendum question, which demanded that the state pay 55 percent of “the cost of public education” statewide. Voters were hopeful that the provision would lead to some relief from high property taxes.
Instead, the governor and the legislature took advantage of the fact that “the cost of public education” was not defined in the law that was passed by voters. This left plenty of “wiggle room” for our elected officials to manipulate the funding formula in order to channel money for local school budgets and property tax relief into the state’s General Fund.
How?
Prior to the new funding formula, the Maine Department of Education spent millions of state dollars for programs such as Jobs for Maine Graduates, the Maine Science and Mathematics magnet school in Limestone, and the Governor Baxter School for the Deaf. These three programs alone cost a combined $10 million, all of it paid for with state funding.
Once the “55 percent” law passed, the legislature and governor decided that the new law required the state to pay only 55 percent of these costs, meaning that the state’s share of the costs of these programs dropped from 100 percent to 55 percent. Local property taxpayers were made to pay the rest.
By the time the 2008-09 state budget was developed, the administration had taken 19 programs that had once been 100 percent state funded and made local property taxpayers pay 45 percent or $123 million in school costs shifted to the local property tax.
For the governor and the legislature, this was a win-win. Not only did they get to cut their own budget in a way that was nearly invisible to taxpayers, they then got to claim that they were paying their 55 percent share without putting in as much new money.
The impact that such trickery has had on many of Maine’s towns has been enormous. For the 2006-07 school year, more than 70 school units received less in school subsidies than in the previous year. The very next year, 85 school units got less.
These budget gimmicks are in addition to a $17 million cut the legislature made in state school aid for 2007-08. Because school district consolidation was supposed to save so much money, the state cut another $35 million in school funding for that.
If school consolidation in its current form is allowed to continue, local school boards and superintendents across the state will be replaced with much larger regional school administrations run by regional boards.
The last voice left at the local level with the knowledge and experience to unravel such budget schemes will be lost. State budget writers will then have the freedom to push more and more state spending onto the already overtaxed property taxpayer.
Skip Greenlaw, leader of the army of volunteers that collected signatures for the school consolidation repeal have given the people of Maine a great gift.
We now have an opportunity to unravel the political distortions that have come from leaders in Augusta. The debate over school consolidation will be elevated to a level of prominence, and the disturbing truths will be exposed so that those responsible can be held accountable.
More importantly, though, we will be able to once again focus our attention where it belongs; on our local community schools. Just imagine how much progress might have been made improving the quality of education in Maine if state leaders had spent as much time working for excellence in education as they did on consolidation and disingenuous budget gimmicks.
David Trahan
Waldoboro
David Trahan served four terms in the Maine House of Representatives. He is a candidate for the Senate District 20 seat. He is also a member of the Coalition to Save Maine Schools. He can be reached at 832-4135 and at dptrahan@midcoast.com. All calculations in this column are based on budget figures supplied by the State of Maine’s Office of Fiscal and Program Review and the Department of Education.
