Education: April 2008 Archives

In all the furor surrounding the legislature's $53 million tax day tax increase, it may have been overlooked that even though it took them three and half months to do so, the legislature did eventually pass a bill on school consolidation. The bill that was enacted, LD 2323, contained pieces of two other bills, the original LD 1932 and LD 2280, which was one of the Committee's own bills.

LD 1932, as everyone will recall, was the Education Committee's original bill to enact a handful of technical changes to the consolidation law. LD 2323 enacts those changes, which include:

- Allowing local cost-sharing agreements, which was seen as the major impediment to consolidation
- Allowing minimum special education subsidy receivers to remain eligible for minimum subsidy if they join a new regional school unit
- Removing the 2 mill minimum requirement, which was resulting in major cost shifts.

The new LD 2323 also includes some of the elements added to LD 1932 by the Education committee, such as:

- Allowing an exception for some units of 1,000 to 1,200 students (in isolated rural areas);
- Clarifying the roles and responsibilities of local school committees and regional school unit boards and the relationship between the two (local school committees can remain, but have limited influence and no budget authority)
- Allowing school property to remain in local hands if agreements are worked out regarding maintenance, etc.

Before being passed, LD 2323 was amended by House Amendment "G", which included language from LD 2280 and which makes largely inconsequential technical changes to the law. It does move the final deadline for voter approval of a consolidation plan from November of this year to January 30 of 2009, which now represents the final date by which voters must approve a reorganization plan before penalties take effect. It also makes some technical changes to the budget validation process, but does nothing to postpone or exempt towns from the budget referendum requirement. All Maine voters will get the chance to approve their local school with a referendum vote.

To deal with the whole "school union" issue, which sunk to original LD 1932, LD 2323 contains this provision:

"The bill authorizes the Commissioner of Education to approve plans for alternative organizational structures under the school reorganization law. To approve a plan for an alternative organizational structure, the commissioner must find that the plan will satisfy the purposes of the school reorganization law including: consolidation of system administration; consolidation of administration of special education, transportation and business functions; adoption of a core curriculum; and adoption of consistent school policies, school calendars and collective bargaining agreements."

In other words, rather than proscribe acceptable alternate consolidation arrangements, such as school unions, the law gives the commissioner the authority to approve some variation of them, as long as the plan meets with her approval. Though this vests quite a bit of authority with the commissioner, it may, at the end of the day, be the best solution given the wide variety of school structures in place all over the state.

So what to make of all this? The changes in LD 2323 do indeed make the law more workable and give it quite a bit more flexibility than was originally in put in place. The budget validation process remains in place, which is the one element of the law that many of us believe holds any hope of generating savings for taxpayers. School choice remains protected as well, though that is not stopping merging districts from making it an issue.

Voters should watch carefully what happens next. With the legislature now mercifully in adjournment, the focus returns to the local level, where the reorganization committees now head back to work. They have from now until January 30 of next year to get some kind of reorganization plan approved.

The fun never stops in the State House. Apparently out of revenge for the veto of LD 1932, the Maine House last night passed a bill to repeal the consolidation law in its entirety. In its original form, the bill, LD 2281, would have substantially watered down the budget validation requirements contained in the school reorganization law. MHPC testified against the bill vehemently, and it came out of the Education committee with all three senators opposed, meaning it faced certain death when it reached the Senate.

Last night, though, the bill was amended in the House, striking out all of its original language and replacing it with language repealing the consolidation law. It passed, 73 to 59, and is now awaiting action in the Senate.

That's not all. Upon issuing his veto of LD 1932, the governor submitted a new bill, LD 2314, which contains the original elements of LD 1932 before is was literally amended to death by the legislature. That bill came to the House floor last night, as all bills do, to be assigned to a committee. Rep. Jim Schatz (D-Blue Hill), an ardent opponent of consolidation and one of the few Democrats to vote against the law last year, then made a motion to kill the new bill outright before it could even be sent to the committee. The bill was promptly tabled before a vote on his motion could be taken, and awaits further action today.

Clearly, the governor's veto of LD 1932 has not been taken lightly in the House, where tempers, on the Democrat side in particular, are running high. Democrats in the House and the Governor thus find themselves in a fascinating standoff at this point. The governor can veto any action the legislature takes and be pretty confident his veto will be upheld. They can kill any bill he puts forward, as was attempted last night, and he can make no changes to the consolidation law, which is in dire need of changes, without their support.

With only days remaining in the legislative session, what will happen next? With the November legislative elections looming over the horizon, who will give in?

Get your popcorn and stay tuned...

The long strange journey of LD 1932 came to an unceremonious end last night when the senate failed to override Governor Baldacci's veto, effectively killing a bill first put forward by the Department of Education in November of last year. At that time, school units across Maine were struggling to comply with reorganization, and a citizen's initiative to repeal the law was gaining strength.

The administration offered up LD 1932 in the hope that the slight bill, only a few pages in length, would "remove unintended barriers to consolidation" and allow districts to "move forward." It was believed that the bill's early December public hearing date would mean that it would be ready to go to the full House and Senate in early January. There was talk that it would be voted on and signed into law within the first week of the 2008 legislative session.

Now the bill is dead, and legislative leaders find themselves going back to the drawing board with about a week left in the legislative session.

What went wrong??

There is plenty of blame to go around.

First and foremost, blame goes to the legislators who voted for the unworkable bill last year. Rushed through the process, modified and amended countless times along the way, the final bill was a disorganized mess. It was passed anyway under pressure from legislative leaders on both sides who were looking to book the illusionary savings it was to have created into the state budget. A wiser move would have been for the legislature to create some kind of commission to work out the details of the bill over the summer and present a much more thoughtful alternative this spring. They did not.

Blame also goes to the Department of Education, which substantially underestimated the trouble the bill was creating and which submitted a mild fix, LD 1932, to a law with major problems. In so doing, the Department simply invited the avalanche of bills and weeks of legislative meddling that followed. The Department had an opportunity last fall to work carefully with the law's critics to create a substantive reform bill that might have withstood the legislative process better than LD 1932 did. Instead, they tried a narrow, technical fix, and thus brought on themselves all that followed.

A good deal of blame must also be laid at the feet of the Education committee, which, though well intentioned and hard working, proved repeatedly that it was simply not up to the task of dealing with the reorganization law. Both this year and last, the work of the committee was unceremoniously scrapped by the legislative leadership. Though committed to doing the right thing, the committee never developed any kind of consensus around a cohesive vision for what the reorganization of schools should look like, with the result that every bill on the subject, including LD 1932, came out of the committee in two or three different versions, each competing with one another for the attention and support of legislators. Imagine how things might have gone differently had the committee been able to overcome its own internal divisions and present a united front against the rest of the legislature and the legislative leadership.

And it is with that legislative leadership that the blame for the failure of LD 1932 ultimately rests. That same leadership crafted the flawed reorganization law in the first place, behind closed doors in the waning days of the last legislative session. They then browbeat legislators into supporting it with threats of a state government shutdown should they fail to pass the budget bill which contained the reorganization provision. When legislators returned to session this winter with dozens of bills to amend the troubled law, the leadership virtually guaranteed ongoing dissatisfaction among rank and file legislators by summarily dismissing every reform bill that was proposed. All legislative concerns were to be answered in a single bill, the leadership told them. The bill? LD 1932.

The last hope to save LD 1932 was probably lost when it came out of the Education committee in three different versions, and then a fourth if one counts the amendment drafted by committee member and Senate Majority Leader Libby Mitchell. By immediately offering a floor amendment to her own committee's bill, even an amendment with much to recommend it, Sen. Mitchell instantly undermined the committee's work and set divisions in place that lasted until the bill's final defeat yesterday. In the weeks that followed, countless amendments were offered and the bill was slowly reworked into unrecognizability. As the governor put it in the message that accompanied his veto, the bill's "original purpose was lost."

This morning, legislators awake to the challenge of doing something substantive to deal with the reorganization law with only days remaining. A moratorium on reorganization activities is most likely the best option at this point, (if not outright repeal,) accompanied by some kind of incentive package to encourage districts to pursue reorganization where their work thus far has borne fruit. The legislature may also wish to authorize the creation of a commission to rework the reorganization concept over the summer, allowing it to submit proposed changes to the next legislature.

If they do so, one hopes the next legislature will do a better job with this issue than this one did.