The first steps into Maine’s busy summer of school administration consolidation starts tonight, with the Department of Education’s first public information sessions. They start at 7 p.m, at Cony High School in Augusta, and the Lake Region High School in Naples.

Meetings around Maine will run through July 12.

In our region, the DOE will hold sessions at Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School in Paris on June 26, Mountain Valley High School in Rumford on June 27, Mt. Blue High School in Farmington on July 11, and Lewiston Middle School on July 12.

All meetings start at 7 p.m.; a complete list of the 26 regional meetings is available on www.maine.gov/education.

The hard-fought school consolidation package is the first major reform of Maine’s school organization in a half-century, and the product of bitter debate within the State House.

Sen. John Martin, D-Eagle Lake, the Legislature’s patriarch, fired the issue’s final salvo, when he brashly issued freedom of access requests with lobbying groups he declared as having worked against the best interest of Mainers.

These groups included the Maine School Management Association, Maine School Superintendents Association, Maine School Board Association, Maine Education Association and the Maine Municipal Association, so-called usual suspects of groups when it came to school consolidation.

Martin’s histrionics, although interesting, are punitive politics, and have little real bearing on the future of educational administration in Maine, which now lies squarely on the shoulders of local schools, parents and voters, who themselves lobbied heavily for influence in the consolidation process.

And while the interests of the respective lobbyists targeted by the venerable senator are debatable, it’s clearly in the best interest of Mainers concerned with the makeup of their local school districts, and the education of their community’s children, to become involved in making the critical consolidation decisions to come this summer.

These public sessions were mandated by statute to invite public ownership into the plan’s outcomes.

Or in other words, communities were given control over consolidation; this control needs to be exercised.

Attending these meetings is the first step.