I am writing to urge residents of the towns forming the Sheepscot Valley Regional School Unit (SVRSU) to vote “yes” on the consolidation question on their town ballot Nov. 4 (towns include Palermo, Somerville, Windsor, Chelsea, Whitefield, Alna, Wiscasset, and Westport Island).
The planning process over the past year has revealed a remarkable amount of collaboration and compromise among the towns to ensure that consolidation does not produce big losers or big winners in this new district.
The key point to keep in mind is that this is not a vote on whether to consolidate or not–consolidation is mandatory under the law passed last session by the Legislature.
You will probably have a chance to vote “yea or nay” on consolidation later, since the repeal petition drive was successful.
At this point, you must weigh whether the plan put before you is a reasonable one for your town and vote accordingly. If you want to see the whole regional plan, you can access it at www.wiscasset.k12.me.us or visit your town office for a copy. You can also view a set of Frequently Asked Questions.
While the district looks a bit odd geographically, both the Sheepscot River and a common set of values unite it.
These towns value the role of small schools in our communities and those that have the option of high school choice greatly value it. These towns are committed to promoting educational opportunities while containing rising school costs.
They are also interested in pursuing creative ways to share teachers, programs, and resources among the towns to create diverse educational experiences for our children.
Formation of the regional district will require a shift in thinking – school committee members will need to think of educational needs across the district, not just “our” children in “our” town.
The district school committee will have 20 members with either two or three representatives elected from each town. They will vote according to a weighted voting system based on town populations, much like the systems the school unions use now.
Will the smallest towns be outvoted? Possibly, but they have spent years in school unions learning how to forge alliances in the voting process to represent their interests; this will be no different.
Will their small schools be closed? Not without a two-thirds vote of the SVRSU committee and a referendum in the town (a higher bar than exists right now).
Will taxes go up or down? The most realistic way to look at this whole effort is that it will reduce the upward spiral in school expenditures over time.
In the short run (first few years), costs may go up, as closing costs of old districts overlap with start-up costs of the new district.
In the longer term, RSU aspires to achieve efficiency targets that will produce the costs savings expected from consolidation: 25 percent fewer central office personnel, 62 percent reduction in central office space needs, 20 percent reduction in per-student central administration costs, not to mention efficiencies in purchasing, transportation, and maintenance contracts.
The planning process for the RSU produced a cost-sharing formula that is reasonable and equitable.
Each town will have to raise its “mil rate expectation” under the state’s EPS formula, as happens now.
Additional costs will be shared across the district by calculating what each town would contribute to the RSU in Total Local Contributions in a FY2008-09 budget – for example, Somerville’s share would be 2.77 percent.
This percentage will then remain constant over the first three years of operation, after which the formula will be reviewed.
There are other provisions about the disposition of buildings and property, staff contracts, local school committees, existing debt and other important concerns that are built into the plan, which you may view online.
Again, all the towns’ concerns were reasonably accommodated through the collaborative planning process.
The school consolidation effort definitely has its share of detractors – there is no argument that the process could have been managed more smoothly. However, whether we consolidate or not, we will be facing serious fiscal challenges in the coming years, as revenues to fund K-12 education are growing at a much slower pace than K-12 expenditures (and that was before the national economy started declining!).
We have the privilege of educating our children in small community schools but we also have the responsibility to ensure the quality and cost-effectiveness of that education.
The time to start is now. Vote “yes” on the SVRSU ballot question on Nov.4.
(Rep. Lisa Miller, D-Somerville, represents House District #52 which includes Chelsea, Somerville, Whitefield, Jefferson (part), Washington, and Hibberts Gore)
