LD 2323, An Act to Remove Barriers to the Reorganization of School Administrative Units, was passed literally in the closing hours of the legislative session. As predicted, a draft of this legislation surfaced on Monday, April 14, one week after the Governor vetoed LD 1932, which was the original school consolidation “fix-it” bill as amended by the Damon super union concept. The Governor didn’t like the name “super union,” and the commissioner did not like having teacher and staff negotiations done at the local school board level. In the place of super unions, school units may now utilize a provision in the municipal statutes called quasi-municipal agreements. It is my understanding that it is only a play on words and nothing substantive has changed from the super union concept.

Commissioner of Education Susan Gendron spent Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of the week beginning April 14 on the third floor of the Statehouse meeting with legislators and other constituencies trying to gain support for this revision of LD 1932. Judy Sproule, a member of the Trenton School Committee, and this writer met with the commissioner at the request of Sen. Dennis Damon (D-Hancock County) together with Brian Hubbell, Gail Marshall and Paul Murphy of the Mount Desert Island school committees. The commissioner is a very accomplished negotiator and advocate for school consolidation. She had an answer for every question posed to her. When we questioned her about collective bargaining at the regional level rather than local level, she told us that the department’s experience had been that negotiations done at the SAD level were less expensive than those done at other school levels. We’ll be interested to review information that substantiates that contention. We asked her why the provision for withdrawal from regional school units had been removed from this bill. Her answer was that she had been told to keep the bill “simple.” She said that the withdrawal procedure could be added next session. However, when Sen. Kevin Raye (R-Washington County) attempted to amend the bill to provide for a withdrawal provision, the Senate killed that amendment. It doesn’t make any sense to say that you would agree to a withdrawal procedure in the next session of the Legislature, and then defeat an amendment to that effect now.

In a meeting with Washington County legislators, superintendents and selectmen on Monday, April 14, the commissioner told that group that there were too many teachers in Maine. Last year, the Governor and commissioner told us that there are too many superintendents; this year the commissioner tells us that there are too many teachers in Maine. What will she tell us next year? My guess is that she will tell us that there are too many small schools in Maine and that the smalller schools ought to be closed. We all remember that the Governor’s original consolidation bill gave authority to the regional school units to close small schools in their regions.

It is disappointing, to say the least, that our representatives and senators voted to allow this bill to become law without more examination and debate on the substance of this legislation. (We all remember what happened last year when school consolidation was passed without appropriate comment by members of the public.) There was a draft available for review by legislators and others on Tuesday morning, April 15. The final copy of the legislation was not printed until some time after 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 16. The Senate voted on the bill that evening, and the House enacted it on Thursday, April 17. The Senate enacted it Friday afternoon just before adjourning. The obvious question is: What deficiencies will we find with this legislation as people attempt to apply it to their area schools?

I wonder sometimes if the impetus for school consolidation with Maine people flowed and ebbed with the enactment of the Sinclair Act in the late ’50s. Many school units consolidated in the ’50s, ’60s and early ’70s with the opportunity to receive a 10 percent subsidy increase from the state and to build new school buildings where consolidation required central location of instruction. One such attempt at consolidation was SAD 73, which included Stonington, Deer Isle, Brooklin, Sedgwick and Brooksville. The geographic center of the district was in Sedgwick on the north side of the Deer Isle-Sedgwick Bridge, but the student population center was on the south side of the bridge on Deer Isle. Each time a proposal to build a new high school was offered on one side of the bridge or the other, it was defeated. What complicated the vote, besides the bridge, was that Brooklin, Sedgwick and Brooksville tuitioned most of their students to George Stevens Academy, a private school located in Blue Hill. If a high school were built in SAD 73, students would no longer have a choice of going to George Stevens Academy. I suspect that similar set of circumstances or other relevant factors impeded further consolidation of schools at that time.

I received an interesting e-mail from a gentleman who lives in Freeport about a month ago. Freeport, Durham and Pownal have worked to put a plan together for consolidation. The gentleman said that the plan made logical sense because Freeport was losing students and both Pownal and Durham did not have a high school. However, he wrote, “our efforts most likely will be defeated at the polls, not for lack of merit but rather because of the state’s heavy-handed top-down approach and cost increases.”

The state’s heavy-handed top-down approach is indeed the problem. The commissioner did not honor the promises she has made to several legislators during the debate last June. Similar plans offered by school districts last August were treated differently by the commissioner. The department did not understand what it asked the Legislature to pass last year. Recently, a group of superintendents met with some of the DOE facilitators, who acknowledged that they had lost the confidence of not only the superintendents, but also the public. They wanted to know what they could do to regain our confidence. Two very important components of our political processes are trust and integrity, and we believe that the administration is lacking in both. If the process of consolidation moves forward, we suspect that this administration will do all it can to further its goals of consolidation by calling for the closing of schools with small student populations as well as reducing the number of superintendents and teaching staffs.

The Maine Coalition to Save Schools is committed to moving forward with our citizen initiated petition to repeal the school consolidation law. Our lawyer is currently reviewing LD 2323 to determine if the law has been substantially changed to render our petition invalid. If it has not, we shall move forward and gather the remaining signatures required at the June primary election. If a new petition is required, we shall make application for a new petition and complete it during the election day in November. The future of our state and the education of our students require no less an effort than providing the public with an opportunity to express their will about this law.

Lawrence “Skip” Greenlaw of Stonington is chairman of the Maine Coalition to Save Schools. He may be reached at 367-2738 or by e-mail at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .