When I chaired the Cumberland-North Yarmouth School Board a few years ago we decided to commission a study to consolidate the school bus operations of Cumberland, Yarmouth, and Falmouth.  To one who has spent a career in business looking at how to make organizations work better, this seemed an obvious and easy move.  The towns are in close geographic proximity.  The routes virtually overlap in many areas.  Each town’s bus fleet is significant but not so large that the combined fleet would be unmanageable.  In short there was a powerful case for consolidating around one Operations Director and one maintenance center.  However, after months of discussion the idea went no where.  Why?  Principally because each town wanted its maintenance garage to be the maintenance garage and each supervisor the surviving supervisor.

I mention this situation because it is relevant to the discussion on school district consolidation that is set to unfold in Augusta following the Governor’s proposal last week to consolidate Maine’s school districts from 152 to 26. Actually there are 286 school districts; however there are only 152 Superintendents.

The Governor didn’t exactly break new ground with his proposal.  He acknowledged that he was responding to recommendations first put forward by a Select Panel of the State Board of Education last year.  The Select Panel’s recommendations were subsequently endorsed in the broader study of Maine’s economy by the Brookings Institution.  The Brookings report was released in October of 2006.

While he did not break new ground with the outline for consolidation, his proposals are surprising in two ways.  The most significant departure from the Select Panel’s recommendations is the manner in which these new consolidated districts are to be determined.  The Select Panel and Brookings called for a high level bi-partisan redistricting panel that would develop a specific plan for these new districts.  The plan would then be submitted to the Legislature for a one-time up or down vote, not subject to amendment.  This is much like the process the federal government has used for base closings.

Another surprising feature of the Governor’s proposal is the claim that this proposal will result in a cost savings of $250 million over the next three years, a significant part of which will accrue in the next biennium.  Where would savings of such magnitude come from?  Not from reducing the number of superintendents from 152 to 26.  As several have pointed out, the savings here might be in the range of $10 million dollars.  The cost savings analysis that David Silvernail’s USM Center for Education Policy, Applied Research and Evaluation carried out on the Select Panel’s recommendations estimated a total cost savings from consolidation of perhaps $47 million over three years.

The remaining $200 million savings in the Governor’s proposal would have to come from increasing the student teacher ratio from its current level of 12.7 to the national average of 15.6.  Silvernail’s group estimated savings in the range of $140 - $150 million per year from such a shift.  The Governor’s proposal apparently assumes savings only for middle and high schools moving to the higher ratio.  The plan proposes to simply modify the state reimbursement formula to only pay district teaching costs equivalent to the higher national student to teacher ratio of 15.6.  This would reduce state expenditures, but it would only reduce overall education expenditures to the extent that districts actually reduce their number of teachers- by perhaps 3000 or so state-wide. This is significant, particularly since we need to improve student achievement at the same time.  Given the difficulty of actually reducing teachers and the trade-offs required, the notion that significant overall savings would accrue in this biennium seems highly unlikely.

So the Governor may be left with a proposal that will get bogged down in endless wrangling in the Legislature over district boundaries and the like as well as a proposal that promises much more in savings than it is likely to deliver.  There is no question that Maine should consolidate its school districts, but I hope Legislative leadership convinces the Governor to take another look at the approach recommended by the Select Panel and Brookings.  Such an approach is more likely to be successful in the long run.

Finally, let us not forget that the real work will begin once the consolidation plan is completed.  It will be then that the kind of trade-offs that my school board tried to deal with in consolidating transportation will be multiplied many-fold.  The process of getting local officials, administrators, teachers’ and municipal employees’ unions, and parents to work together to operate more efficiently while actually improving student achievement is likely to be on our state agenda for several years to come.