How Maine’s two-decade old school consolidation effort continues to unravel

Next year, the town of Kingfield will leave MSAD 58 to form its own school district. The move will allow the western Maine community of roughly 1,000 people to keep its elementary school building and operate its own district, which will serve about 80 students.

Kingfield was the only one of more than a dozen Maine towns to successfully withdraw from or reorganize its school district in the Nov. 3 election. At least 12 other communities considered similar changes, driven by concerns that their schools could close, that their local tax dollars were being spent on improvements at other schools in their district, or that they lacked control over school governance.

Kingfield voters overwhelmingly supported the ballot measure to withdraw from the district, with  over 70% voting in favor.

The trend highlights a broader trade-off facing small towns: leaving larger districts can give communities more control over their schools, but smaller districts may struggle to provide the specialized services and academic support available in larger ones. 

It is the latest chapter in a decades-long debate about how to govern rural school districts, since former Gov. John Baldacci signed sweeping school consolidation legislation in 2007, penalizing those that chose to go their own way. 

In a state facing enrollment declines and aging school buildings with insufficient state funding available for improvements, that challenge is only expected to get worse.

“A lot of communities place a really big value on their schools, which is wonderful because schools, in my opinion, are the backbone of public education,” said Laura Columbia, superintendent of MSAD 58.

“But I think what’s really important for people to think about is: At what cost? At what point are we keeping buildings at the expense of not providing services to students?”

The challenges for smaller districts extend beyond student services to the cost of maintaining a certain level of funding, said Janet Fairman, a University of Maine professor and co-director of the Maine Education Policy Research Institute.

“The state’s funding formula gives (small districts) enough money based on a certain staff-to-student ratio, and when these communities choose to be smaller than that, they have to pay the difference,” she said. “That means they have to tax themselves more or they have to somehow come up with more revenue to cover the difference in cost.”

When a town decides to separate, Columbia explained that it can also strain the existing school district.

Most rural districts in Maine are already facing a yearslong staffing shortage, and starting next year, MSAD 58 will have to compete with the newly formed Kingfield district for the few special education teachers, bus drivers and occupational therapists in the area. Under the agreement, Kingfield will still send its students to the MSAD 58 high school, so Columbia expects staffing challenges to be most acute at the elementary level.

“People really like to have local schools, I think that’s kind of aligned with a lot of Mainers’ philosophy on local control,” she said. “But we have limited resources to start with in many of our rural schools, and so it can often stretch those resources even further when we have smaller districts in the same area.”

Financial repercussions

School districts are financially incentivized to leave their larger consolidated school units, according to Amy Johnson, a professor at the University of Southern Maine and co-director of MEPRI along with Fairman. 

Most Maine districts, 109, are typical school administrative units, with more than one school. But there are also 81 districts that have only one school. This typically means these districts operate their own schools for younger grades and use a tuition model, under which the Maine Department of Education mandates towns pay tuition for their residents to go to another town’s public school, or an approved private school. 

One-school districts enroll anywhere between 2 and 600 students, with the median student population being 129, according to MEPRI data.

That’s similar to the plan for Kingfield, where the new school will enroll about 80 students.

But there are also 59 school units with no schools. That means a town withdraws from a school unit and does not form its own, instead choosing to send all of its students to other districts under the tuition model.

“What they gain from that is they only have to pay for the costs for their students, and they only have a handful of students,” Johnson said.

These school districts have the lowest per pupil spending, according to MEPRI data. 

A typical school unit spends about $18,000 per student, not including transportation or career and technical education. Costs jump up for a one-school district to about $21,000, because, as Johnson explained, “you’re not sharing any costs, you’re trying to be an entire school district with one school plus some tuition students.”

But zero-school districts spend the least, about $15,000 per student, which is the higher end of the state average for tuition. But even at that level, that tuition often does not cover the cost of special education or other services that their students may need, leaving the district accepting them to cover those costs.

“There is this real financial benefit to pulling out of a school unit and becoming your own district, because then you can pay less towards the cost of education because you have fewer kids,” Johnson said. “Because all they’re doing is taking their tax dollars and sending their kids elsewhere.” 

Similarly, Kingfield’s withdrawal from MSAD 58 will create a financial burden for the district, Columbia said. 

Not only will it reduce per-pupil state funding, but also because Kingfield’s local contribution to the district was relatively large because of the town’s high property values. 

And because the roughly 60 students being pulled from the district are spread across multiple grades, Columbia said it won’t result in any reduction in staffing or classroom space, and their associated costs.

Towns attempting joint withdrawal 

Three towns about an hour south of Kingfield also attempted to leave their consolidated district, RSU 10, to form their own smaller school unit. 

Buckfield, Hartford and Sumner proposed forming their own district because RSU 10’s central office is about a 40-minute drive away. Buckfield voters approved the change, but since the other two towns did not, all three will stay with the district. 

This is not the first withdrawal from that regional district. In 2017, four towns — Canton, Carthage, Dixfield and Peru — withdrew from the district to form their own. 

In the case of the Buckfield-area towns, they did not want to spend tax dollars on improvements within the district that their students would not benefit from, said RSU 10 Superintendent Matt Gilbert. 

“They’re the smaller communities within our district, and they also have the smallest tax base,” Gilbert added. “They were focusing on the desire for control of their tax dollars to be closer to home.”

If the three additional towns had withdrawn and formed their own school district, Gilbert said they would have had about 500 students, which may have been a challenge, “and they would have lost all the benefits that they get from being part of a larger district and the economy of scale that comes with that, like central office services and supports.”

In the aftermath of last week’s election, the withdrawal committee discussed an alternative budgeting model with Gilbert, under which they would have more autonomy over improvements to schools in their communities, but share administrative costs with the larger district. 

That means if they want to build a track or add a foreign language program to a school in their community, they would not rely on approval from the entire district school board. 

“We were all forced into this consolidation because of the threat of being penalized financially,” Gilbert said.

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According to Johnson from MEPRI, school consolidation is a reality many towns have to face due to declining enrollments, due to aging populations and people moving away from rural areas. 

Baldacci attempted to address this challenge by mandating that roughly 300 districts be consolidated to 80. Even though that effort was not completely successful, as there are now more than 200 districts, Johnson said it’s not realistic to expect all towns to be able to independently meet their students’ needs.

“In small communities, you don’t start with an economy of scale. If there’s only one school to begin with, it’s much harder to close because there would be nothing left,” Johnson said. “But it’s more expensive to operate that way, and it’s less efficient.”

Consolidation vs. local control

Mount Desert Island-area schools still operate under an alternative organizational structure or AOS. That model allows each of the 10 schools to pass their own budgets but share a superintendent. 

The AOS model was offered as an alternative to Baldacci’s consolidation mandate, but there are currently only eight AOSs left in Maine, according to the Maine School Management Association. 

Several towns and islands around Mount Desert Island considered consolidating into a regional school unit, but many communities last week rejected the plan.

Superintendent Michael Zboray said many communities were reluctant to give up control over their community schools. 

“I tried to argue that all the same people that are caring for your school now will continue to be the people caring for your school, you’ll just have a larger pool of money to help in that care if something catastrophic happened to your building,” Zboray said, “rather than having to rely on the tax base just within your town.” 

Zboray said at least some communities on the island as well as neighboring Tremont agree they will eventually need a consolidated school unit because of declining class sizes and lower enrollment in all schools except Bar Harbor.

“It’s a very challenging situation, and we can apply that to police departments, fire departments and school departments,” said Maine School Management Association Executive Director Eric Waddell.

Waddell said he heard from people all over the state struggling to maintain local services amid affordability challenges and declining populations.

“I don’t know what the answer is other than to find alternate revenue sources for funding schools other than leaning so heavily on local property taxes.”