[V]ermont lawmakers are working on legislation this session that would create a 1,100-student minimum for the state’s school districts.
The proposal is an effort to improve educational offerings and to curb property tax rates that have been rising rapidly throughout the state while student enrollment declines.
But Vermont is not the first state to try such an experiment.
Confronted with struggles similar to the ones Vermont is trying to tackle now, Maine in 2007 adopted legislation to set a minimum enrollment for school districts at 2,500.
The objective was to reduce the state’s 290 school districts to 80, according to a 2012 report by Christine Donis-Keller and Janet C. Fairman for the University of Maine.
It was, according to the authors, the first school consolidation effort in Maine in half a century. By the 2011-12 school year, the number of districts in the state had been reduced to 164. However, the report states, “the success of this policy is still open to debate.”
Former Maine Gov. John Baldacci, a Democrat who was a strong supporter of the legislation at the time, likened the school consolidation initiative to a battle, during a telephone interview from his law office in Maine last week.
“You have to expect any dramatic changes are going to take awhile to settle in, and you are going to also probably continue to make adjustments as you move forward,” Baldacci said.
Maine had a declining student population, while the number of administrators was on the rise, Baldacci said. The state sought to respond to the trend by finding a way to stabilize property taxes and improve educational outcomes, he said.
However, the consolidation initiative drew resistance and outcry from around the state.
“People hang really strongly onto local control, and don’t want to lose it,” Baldacci said.
But Baldacci stands by the merits of the consolidation effort. Small schools, he said, don’t have the educational offerings of a larger district. And, small districts have higher expenses.
What didn’t work in Maine
According to the Maine Municipal Association, Baldacci’s consolidation plan was “a bad idea,” association spokesman Eric Conrad said Friday.
About 50 larger districts were exempt from the legislation, which Conrad said generated antipathy among the majority of districts that were subject to the law.
“These smaller districts were under the gun to consolidate and the larger ones were not. They offered no incentives, and this is a good lesson for Vermont. There was punishment without a reward,” Conrad said of the Maine law.
In his town, the school faced an annual penalty of $160,000 the first year which would increase in subsequent years, if they didn’t find a way to join a neighboring community, for example, Conrad said.
According to Conrad, most towns were focused on avoiding the harsh penalties the state imposed. In recent years, he said, many towns have pulled out of larger districts.
“The bottom line is we didn’t find any significant savings through school consolidation, and a lot of school districts have pulled out of it,” said Conrad.
For some districts, a merger has been positive, Conrad said, giving an example of districts uniting around specializations, like foreign language offerings, where schools share staff.
However, he remains opposed to the measure.
“We haven’t seen in Maine, much example, where when you create a bigger government, it costs less,” Conrad said. “If that was the case, the federal government would be the most efficient government in the land.”
David Ruff, executive director of the Great Schools Partnership, a nonprofit located in Portland, Maine, said the last time schools in Maine had been consolidated was in the late 1950s, under the Sinclair Act, and at that time, there was very little pushback.
In 2007 the pushback was strong.
“I struggle to say if consolidation is a good or bad thing generically,” said Ruff. “I think there are benefits and tradeoffs, and those benefits and tradeoffs will vary depending on the school size you have.”
From his perspective, one of the biggest challenges of the policy was taking away local control of districts.
For some districts, creative ways to share resources have emerged. In some cases, two districts that formerly had separate high schools have combined and now offer expanded courses. Classes are divided between the buildings, Ruff said.
“People need to get really clear about what they want as an outcome, and I think the quality of education has to be the primary consideration,” Ruff said.
Gordon Donaldson, professor emeritus at the University of Maine, explained on Friday his perspective on the legislation that led to school district consolidation under the Baldacci administration.
The legislation, which called for “geographically huge districts” in some areas, came as a surprise, and had not been on the radar screen during Baldacci’s campaign that previous fall, Donaldson said.
Then, Donaldson said, “He was elected in November and within three weeks, he was talking about pushing this along.”
Hearings were held that legislative session and the bill was passed in June 2007, a year of study ensued, and every single district had to march to the order.
Not all districts did — some took the penalties and sacrificed state aid, believing their existing structures were what was best for their children, said Donaldson.
“The big promise, of course, was that everybody would save by doing this, and my guess is that’s probably happened in some places, and in other places, it hasn’t,” said Donaldson.
Donaldson suggests that, in consolidating school districts, Vermont provide expert consulting to school boards and superintendents about how they can balance consolidation with local control of the schools.
“There are ways of finding financial savings through other forms of collaboration other than lumping everybody into a centralized unit,” Donaldson said.
The difference in Vermont
According to Marty Strange, of Randolph, who served as policy director for the Rural School and Community Trust from 1997 to 2012, the language in H.361 has some key differences from Maine’s law.
Voted out by the Vermont Legislature’s House Education Committee, H.361 calls for school districts to come together into larger pre-K-12 educational systems of 1,100 students.
One key difference, Strange said, is that under the Vermont education reform bill, some districts can be exempt. Maine did not offer that flexibility.
“The result was chaos, anger, fear, deep divisiveness between neighboring communities forced into these shotgun weddings,” Strange said.
There are parallels to be drawn between Maine and Vermont, but what happened in Maine and why had differences, too, from what Vermont is looking at, said Jeffrey Francis, executive director of the Vermont Superintendents Association.
Francis said that the motivations and processes for consolidation in Maine were different than the changes that Vermont legislators are contemplating.
“What is considered in Vermont falls largely on the lines of various forms of districts, most of whom are already in a supervisory union together with a single superintendent and creating a district structure from the supervisory union structure,” Francis said.