Coalition-building and a different consolidation

What would Maine's commissioner of education have preferred to see done differently in implementing Maine's school district consolidation law? Education Commissioner Susan Gendron sat down with the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel editorial board this morning. I joined them for the meeting and asked the commissioner that question.For Gendron, more coalition building before floating the consolidation proposal would have been useful. Specifically, the state's executive branch could have reached out to the groups representing Maine's school superintendents. "If there had been some outreach, we might have mitigated some of that anger," Gendron said. School boards and superintendents, after all, were ultimately responsible for carrying out the mandate from the state. "There was a lot of anger from those associations," the commissioner said. Of course, those associations -- the Maine School Superintendents Association and the Maine School Boards Association -- are connected under the auspices of the Maine School Management Association. Some of the more high-profile, consolidation-related disagreements with the Department of Education have come from those groups. In October, for example, the Maine School Boards Association joined the chorus backing a citizen-initiated effort to repeal the consolidation mandate. And in January, Maine School Management publicly accused the Department of Education of counting too many successes after a round of votes on local district merger plans. Had the coalitions been built up before Gov. John Baldacci announced his consolidation intentions, perhaps the resistance would have been less and the merger efforts would have been more fruitful. Or maybe the results would have been the same. But some of the resistance might have been less public.