Rooks: School construction in Maine needs a major overhaul

Before leaving for Norway last week, Gov. Janet Mills announced a new commission to study the state’s school construction program and report to the Legislature by next April, to which one might respond, “It’s about time.”

The state’s existing construction model simply isn’t working, and has left towns and cities, and Maine’s regional school districts, with crumbling and outdated buildings and no clear path to replacing or renovating them.

Mills noted that in her first six years, there’s been $580 million committed, which sounds impressive until one realizes a single new high school often costs $100 million.

With dozens if not hundreds of inadequate buildings, replacing a handful won’t accomplish much, and the backlog of applications keeps growing.

The new commission, chaired by King Administration Labor Commissioner Valerie Landry, has a tall task, and should start with two major flaws in how school projects are financed.

The first is a peculiar compromise by which the state reimburses the local districts that actually borrow the money. Rather than a separate capital construction budget, funding is carved out from the mammoth General Purpose Aid account that goes mostly for operating expenses.

Construction is constrained by a debt ceiling – rarely increased – that limits new projects to debt retired from previous awards. Maine ends up being generous with operating support and stingy for capital spending.

The second flaw was introduced through adoption of the Essential Programs and Services (EPS) system in the late 1990s.

Previously, construction costs were shared between the state and the local district on a sliding scale. Towns and cities with robust tax bases, as in Cumberland County, would pay more, while those in Aroostook and Washington were mostly state-funded – but all districts paid something.

Under the EPS calculations the state pays 100% for almost every project, meaning it can fund even fewer projects than when local districts contributed.

Now, a few lucky districts effectively win the lottery, while everyone else is left out in the cold.

The infrastructure crisis has become so severe that some districts have tried to do without state funding and asked property taxpayers to pick up the entire tab. Even in Cumberland County, the results have been dismal.

While some local bonds have been approved, most have been turned down – not necessarily because voters don’t support schools but because they rightly see this as a state responsibility.

It makes little sense for Maine to provide 55% of all approved school spending but make construction projects wait a decade or longer. Students will have started school and graduated by then.

What can be done? There are other models.

When voters turned down several state prison bond issues during the McKernan administration, lawmakers created the Maine Governmental Facilities Authority, operating “off budget” and apart from General and Highway Fund bonds more familiar to voters.

Later expanded to courthouses, the authority has replaced or renovated nearly the entire state correctional system, and has built impressive judicial centers in several counties.

That’s all well and good, but most parents and taxpayers would place a higher priority on schools. That’s not the way things are working.

A School Facilities Authority may not be the answer, in part because we have an existing system, however flawed – but mostly because the authority has no real accountability to taxpayers and citizens.

One possibility: a robust General Fund bond that voters could approve to jumpstart the process, along with a real capital budget for the first time in decades.

There are other matters for the Landry commission to take up. Current rules require a perhaps excessive amount of acreage, eliminating sites close to urban and village centers and creating sprawl.

Kids can’t walk to school, and schools are increasingly remote from the communities that support them.

Finally, no amount of tinkering with construction funding can ignore Maine’s hopelessly decentralized school districts, well over 200 for fewer than 200,000 students – less than 1,000 per district.

A Baldacci administration initiative to consolidate failed because it ignored the proven formula for success: the Sinclair Act, passed in 1957 during the administration of Gov. Ed Muskie.

Implemented during the 1960s, Sinclair created 68 regional districts with generous support for mergers, and provided the first adequate rural high schools in Maine. The 2007 consolidation plan, by contrast, penalized districts for not merging while provided no state plan to do so.

The next administration could dust off Sinclair and see what will work in a high-tech era where public schools face unprecedented challenges.

Mainers have shown time and again they value public education and are willing to pay. Now the state must make sure they’re getting their money’s worth.

Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter for 40 years. He is the author of four books, most recently a biography of U.S. Chief Justice Melville Fuller, and welcomes comment at drooks@tds.net.