[Local-Maine-Schools] (Still at it): Appropriations Subcommittee, 4/05

[John March]

This is classic "inside the bubble" social engineering.  These people are
completely removed from reality.  They have the deluded arrogance of Soviet
apparatchiks designing a farm collectivization scheme while Comrade Gendron
looks on approvingly.  What happens to the people thrown out of their homes
and off their farms?  Doesn't matter.  The central planners have more
important things to think about.  And anyway, it looks good on paper.

Among other things this is about divorcing actions from consequences.  I
always tried to teach my children that actions have consequences and that,
as actors, they must be prepared to accept responsibility for the
consequences.  Apparently the people on this subcommittee never learned that
lesson.

John March



-----Original Message-----
From: local-maine-schools-bounces at lists.svaha.com
[mailto:local-maine-schools-bounces at lists.svaha.com] On Behalf Of Brian
Hubbell
Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2007 6:30 PM
To: Local Maine Schools List
Subject: [Local-Maine-Schools] (Still at it): Appropriations Subcommittee,
4/05

The Education subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee held
another work session this afternoon, apparently a continuation of
another one from yesterday.

Where they picked up today was with the matter of "private and special
laws", the specially-tailored individual pieces of legislation by
which a have dozen or so different community school districts were
formed and operate.  The Mount Desert Island CSD, which serves as the
basis for the cooperative operation of MDI's high school between the
four towns of Bar Harbor, Mount Desert, Southwest Harbor, and Tremont
is our local example.

To the more rigorously-minded reformers on the subcommittee (read here
in particular Senator Turner) such laws represent untidy obstacles
that potentially interfere with starting fresh and equalized
relationships on "a level playing field" in any regional plan advanced
by the 'convener' (read here the Dept of Education).  Senator Turner,
for one, believes that leaving any previous special governing laws in
place opens the door to other requests for new special relationships.
This, most subcommittee members seemed to agree, would lead to
"Balkanization", a term generally reserved for the old paradigm.

To those with an eye towards the votes on the legislative floor (read
here Representative Millett) and those leery of "causing civil unrest'
(read here Representative Cain) there may be some good reasons to
retain the private and special laws during regionalization, or at
least not to overtly dissolve them at the onset, while hoping that
they may instead quickly become obviated or irrelevant once the new
districts are established.

After a couple of dos-a-dos, the subcommittee asked its staff for a
draft language establishing the latter view while, at the same time,
offering to the full Appropriations Committee an option for the former
-- which would essentially be cribbed from the relevant section of the
Governor's original proposal, which -- if this is one's desire --
quite effectively nukes the legal basis for all school organizations
neatly right from the get-go.

>From here, the subcommittee moved on to hear from Jim Rier a proposal
from the Department to set a minimum contribution from towns and
plantations that were drawn into the new regional districts but had
zero students.  For these, the DOE suggests a minimum contribution of
2 mils.

Senator Turner inquired about what the cost, in comparison, would be
for a town that was assessed for a single student.  Anticipating that
under the standard SAD the assessment for a single student would in
fact be significantly less than 2 mils, Turned suggested that 2 mils
perhaps ought to be set just as an overall minimum commitment for
every town.

There did seem to be a certain logic to this that might have well
prevailed.  But Rier advised the subcommittee that there were a few
instances of towns with students -- and here he offered sotto voce as
an example: Mount Desert -- which, under special and private laws,
actually operate somewhere south of 2mils.

Only a beat-and-a-half of silence followed this before the
subcommittee uniformly agreed to apply the 2 mil minimum strictly to
the situation of a town or plantation with zero students and left it
at that.

>From here, the subcommittee turned to tidy up the language that would
apply to "collaboration".

Their starting point for this was a substantial (and I gather
formidable) six pages or so drafted by Dick Spenser for the original
Education Committee majority proposal.  For this, you will recall,
collaboration was a centerpiece and the Spenser draft was built to
remove the legal obstacles to inter-school collaboration by detailing
a workable legal relationship between independent self-governing
entities.

In contrast, now that, in the Appropriations model, collaboration
distinctly trails the consolidated horse, the subcommittee members
seemed honestly nonplussed about any necessity for any other vehicle.
So, collaboration no longer being a motive for savings, they solved
this as decisively as Alexander just by shearing the boilerplate free
and jettisoning it -- with the suggestion that perhaps the DOE could
come up with something appropriate as a separate bill.

One last insight.  Senator Rotundo -- who typically speaks less that
the other three subcommittee members with the consequence that her
opinions seem to carry a little more impetus when she does -- said
that she was uncomfortable with expecting the larger established
districts to improve their efficiencies at the accelerated rates
expected from consolidating the smaller districts.  The larger
districts, she said (no doubt thinking of her own area of Lewiston and
Auburn), have presumably already realized their efficiencies of scale.
 It's just the little ones that need to be goaded.

Here, it was the Commissioner, of all people, who came to the rescue,
explaining that the EPS formula would take care of that by rewarding
those who already were operating efficiently and penalizing those who
were operating inefficiently.

***

So tomorrow, Friday, at 1:00PM, the subcommittee is scheduled to
present their final recommendation to the full Appropriations
Committee.

I guess at this point we have a fairly good idea of what their plan
contains.  But, assuming that the full committee doesn't change it
drastically, we should soon have something concrete to talk about.

Then the next stage of politics begins.

--Brian
http://mdischools.net
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