A consolidation debate looms

Consolidation opponents will zero in on debate in the Maine House this afternoon as lawmakers take up four key measures that would delay or eliminate penalties meant for those districts that didn't consolidate and repeal the state's school district consolidation mandate altogether.

The more than 100 districts that turned down consolidation plans are paying close attention to L.D. 285, a bill sponsored by Blue Hill Democrat James Schatz. While the bill didn't make it out of the Education Committee with an "ought to pass" recommendation, the vote was 8 to 5. That made it, along with the committee tally on the citizen-initiated consolidation repeal, the closest of the four measures that will come before the House this afternoon.

If the minority's recommendation prevails, the penalties meant for those non-complying school districts would be delayed one year, allowing the districts more time to make alternative consolidation arrangements.

Officials from the towns interested in L.D. 285 scrambled on Tuesday to write letters to the lawmakers who will be deciding whether they get hit with cuts to their state subsidy for their communities' votes against consolidation. There was one consistent theme in those pleas: We're not trying to resist Maine's consolidation law. We simply need more time.

"The towns and school districts in my jurisdiction area have not acted with intentional defiance of the school reorganization law," wrote James Underwood, superintendent of School Union 106, which serves Alexander, Baring Plantation, Calais, Crawford and Robbinston. "The voters, however, did vote to turn down a law that effectively would have crippled their school districts and definitively exercised heavier taxes on the citizens, taxes which likely would have forced closure of some of our schools."

In Fayette, the thinking is along the same lines. Jim Wright, a Fayette school committee member who sat on the committee charged with working out a consolidation plan with Winthrop and the Maranacook-area schools, called for more time to let that rural town devise a palatable consolidation plan.

"We feel that if we're given the time we can meet the state guidelines," Wright said.

Fayette's elementary school will cut a number of positions in the coming year, Wright said. If the 130-student school system didn't have a $39,000 penalty to deal with, at least one of those positions likely could have been saved, he said.

"We're hoping that they'll see this as an emergency given the economic downturn," Wright told me Tuesday.

For Fayette, Wright said, the penalty has been a tough pill to swallow.

"It feels odd when you've been diligent, when your school has been frugal," he said.

At the same time, he said, the consolidation plan would have been just as undesirable.