OXFORD – Can SADs 17 and 39 school and town officials find common ground to move toward a school merger?

That’s the question they will try to answer Tuesday night when they meet at the Paris Elementary School with Department of Education Commissioner Susan Gendron.

The meeting, which is not a public comment session but rather a hands-on workshop including a review of financial profiles with both districts, begins at 6:30 p.m. in the school cafeteria.

The commissioner is currently meeting with various school districts that are having trouble meeting consolidation mandates because of the financial implications.

But local school superintendents say they are not sure the meeting can result in any common ground.

“Even if the issues are corrected legislatively, our citizens will still have to answer the question: ‘Do we want to become bigger?'” said SAD 17 Superintendent Mark Eastman.

In August, SAD 17 board members voted to stand alone rather than merge with another school district because of the significant financial ramification to local taxpayers. The directors filed a letter with the Department of Education requesting permission to file an alternative plan that would allow the district to remain in its current configuration rather than merge with another district.

Eastman told the directors at that time that despite months of working numbers and reviewing at least seven different scenarios including merging with SAD 39, which now shares its superintendent with SAD 17, the results were always the same.

An in-depth financial review of merging with another school showed that SAD 17 would experience severe financial penalties in trying to consolidate with the smaller units that operate over EPS (Essential Programs and Services) funding levels. To combine SAD 17 and SAD 39 budgets, the towns in SAD 17 would essentially be subsidizing the tax bases in the three SAD 39 towns, Eastman said.

The effect would be like giving SAD 39 towns $150,000 to $300,000 each, said Eastman at that time. And if SAD 17 merged with both 39 and 44 the effect would be double, he added.

Rick Colpitts, who serves as both superintendent of SAD 39 and assistant superintendent of SAD 17, said SAD 39 was considering its options a year before the school consolidation mandate came out. It recognized that if the district did not see enough cost savings with moves such as sharing some services including administrative with SAD 17, other options such as a school merger would have to be looked at to ensure students received continuing quality education, he said.

“The taxpayers are at their limit,” he said.

The district has contacted every contiguous school district – four school administrative districts and one school union – and each time run up against the same problem.

He said the problems appears to be with the funding formula, which is based on 100 percent of the state’s valuation, not the local assessment, of a town’s property.

“It’s tough to get around that roadblock,” Colpitts said.

The commissioner has expressed a willingness to have legislation filed to allow for tailor-made funding formulas for districts that appear to be not moving forward with consolidation because of funding problems, he said.

Under the old legislation, school districts were allowed to have different funding formulas.