Doubts for the compliant, too

Uncertainty awaits the Maine school systems that turned down district merger plans under the state's school district consolidation mandate.

There's also uncertainty in store for those 94 districts that have approved consolidation plans and are entering new district arrangements on July 1.

Skip Greenlaw and Judith Sproule are out with a letter this month from the Maine Coalition to Save Schools urging state lawmakers to do away with the consolidation law. The two consolidation opponents -- Greenlaw led the successful signature drive to land a consolidation repeal question on November's ballot and Sproule is the vice chairman of the Trenton School Committee -- point out the limbo in which both sorts of districts find themselves.

The districts that voted against consolidation, of course, will be indefinitely saddled with state penalties -- reduced state aid and elevated local costs -- until they, somehow, come into compliance with the consolidation law. How long can they put up with the penalties?

The 94 consolidating districts, of course, don't face the penalties their non-compliant counterparts face. That doesn't, however, mean life is easy. As I've noted here and as the Bangor Daily News reported, some towns are attempting to back-track on their consolidation arrangements. They want a way out of the districts they voted themselves into, sometimes, under the threat of state penalty. There's no provision in the consolidation law allowing towns to withdraw from their regional school units.

Greenlaw and Sproule also note that 89 of the consolidating districts might find themselves in trouble if a November vote on a consolidation repeal is successful. Those districts (five of them -- in the Bath region -- consolidated under a different law, so the same conditions don't apply) "will be without legal structure or authority to maintain their contractual obligations and operate their schools," they write.

Maine legislators have essentially agreed to put off debate on major changes to the consolidation law until after November, when the fate of the repeal is clear. And depending on which way the vote goes, the state's lawmakers will take up different sets of adjustments to consolidation, or post-consolidation, laws.