[Local-Maine-Schools] Education Committee: Jan 17: (Gang aft agley)

[Brian Hubbell]

Offer here a moment of sympathy for the Education Committee who, under
emergency pressure to repair legislation which was not of their
devising, now finds itself both missing a critical deadline and at the
same time discovering that it matters little as the substance of this
fluid urgency is once again seeping away from their Committee Room.

As you may recall, the Committee opened this session by adopting an
aggressive timetable that was worked backwards from several specific
deadlines given them by the legislative leadership. Specifically the
Committee was charged with reporting out a bill recommending
improvements to the school reorganization law by February 15.

Further, the Committee was directed to ensure that this bill was
inoculated with a full-blown Civic-Center-sized public hearing in
order to avoid the general public grumbling about the lack of daylight
that followed last session when all the substantive policy changes,
already from the onset embedded uncomfortably in the budget,
essentially were detoured underground for development by shifting
groups of ad hoc subcommittees.

To meet the February 15th deadline while allowing at least a plausible
appearance of public comment having the slightest bearing on the final
outcome, this grand hearing has to occur the first week of February.

And, to meet the statutory requirements of public notice, such a
hearing requires at least two previous weekends of public advertising,
which means that the subject legislation needs to be printed by
January 25.

And, in order for the gnomes at the Office of Policy and Legal
Analysis and the Revisor's office to get the bill in shape for
printing, the Committee has to have settled on its recommendations in
concept by -- January 18.  Tomorrow.

And the forecast for tomorrow, frankly, is not good.  So the Committee
has decided to reconvene next on Tuesday when it opens a week of
hearings devoted to bills related to other things than reorganization.

Last year in this process, the Education Committee suffered a grievous
insult to its esteem when, early on, it was unable to reach a unified
recommendation, instead reported out three divergent concepts, and
ended up with policy, rightfully theirs, stripped from them and
settled by Appropriations members.

Remembering that, Committee members surely began 2008 with, if nothing
else, a resolve to improve not only the unlovely law, but also their
own legacy in relation to it. But, just as surely, hardly two weeks
later, at least some among them must be sensing that the Fates again
are toying with them.

For the past two weeks the Committee dedicated itself to the bill the
Department of Education presented last month, LD 1932, endeavoring to
use the impetus of the bill's emergency status to carry through not
only the Department of Education's goals but also the least
controversial mechanisms likely to improve the law's rapidly
diminishing prospects for any sort of timely implementation.

Yet, despite the nominal reporting vote of 11-1, at the end of the
workday the Committee finds itself once again apparently eerily
divided behind three governance models: the "Stretched RSUs" advocated
by Senator Mills (and embodied in the Committee's majority report) and
the competing concepts of "Union School Associations" (as put forward
in a minority report by Reps. Edgecomb, Muse, and McFadden) and
Senator Mitchell's alternate suggestion of "beefed-up unions" which is
now expected to be taken directly to the Senate floor.

So, with substantial drama building regarding how the full legislature
will fall on these issues, the Education Committee is left with a
dawning realization that all policy issues relate substantially to
governance and that the debate on governance now will largely occur
elsewhere than the Committee Room.

Moreover, in stripping out the "issues" that the Committee deemed
either were too discrete or too controversial to be embedded in LD
1932, what is left are matters about which there is not yet sufficient
information to make informed law or else which are too arcane to be
deliberated and settled by Committee members.

Of the half dozen or so issues the Committee discussed today,
virtually all were referred back to the Department of Education for a
recommendation.  Reconciling mismatches between labor markets and RSU
boundaries, gaps in debt between the Career and Technical Education
Regions and reorganized units, clarifications regarding tuitioning
options, mechanisms for reorganizing municipalities to withdraw from
CSDs (or, post-reorganized, from RSUs), guidance on what latitude the
Commissioner should have in assessing penalties – all these were
referred back to the Department for solution.

Interestingly, regarding the possibility of member municipalities of
CSDs diverging into separate RSUs, Jim Rier (standing in for the
Commissioner today) presented one of the day's few emphatic opinions.
Rier says the process for divorcing from a CSD is complex enough that
too little time remains between now and when the underlying CSD law is
repealed by LD499 for a town to successfully disengage.  Therefore,
under the supposition that even an unhappy marriage is more readily
accomplished, all CSD member municipalities will make the transition
to RSUs for better or worse as a single unit.

If so, perhaps some of these even may find, in common disagreement
about such compulsion, sufficient reason to stay allied.