There are enough empty buildings. Schools shouldn’t be among them.

Two pieces of legislation, in the nascent days of this session, have proposed four-day school weeks for districts to cope with budget deficits. The idea is one fewer day would garner savings in energy, transportation, maintenance and other daily costs associated with running a school.

Four-day weeks are available to districts across the country; some use them, some don’t, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. They returned to vogue last year as gas prices inflated, for cutting busing costs. Now, they’re back as a budget-saver.

Proponents espouse the savings for school districts, with the greater flexibility of a four-day schedule, but concerns should exist about it. A shuttered school is a poor image of fiscal responsibility – what is a state that can’t keep its school doors open?

One with school districts that have chronically overspent their spending limits, that’s what.

This week, the State Planning Office released its annual assessment of LD 1, the four-year-old citizen initiative that prescribes Essential Programs and Services funding formulas to schools for tax relief. Schools, towns, counties and the state were all given limits to meet.

And all complied, the SPO found, save one: the schools. Eighty-eight percent of districts overspent their limits under LD 1 in 2008, for a total of $220 million. Meanwhile, every other governmental unit measured by the SPO decreased their spending accordingly.

“Nearly one third of the state’s total General Fund appropriations are now devoted to schools,” said Martha Freeman, director of the SPO, in releasing the study. “This year’s LD 1 report shows once more that all the relief available isn’t making it to property taxpayers.”

These are the taxpayers who, under a four-day workweek, would wonder why their tax bills can’t afford to keep their schools open for five days, just like years past. Or why, in some communities, their taxes have increased to pay for new schools that must now darken.

The effect on academics from four-day school weeks is unproven. There are anecdotal successes elsewhere, according to Time Magazine, but a comprehensive study hasn’t been done. While this benefit is unclear, the effect on working parents is palpable: one day per week when their children must be cared for, while parents work.

It’s a notion that could be more strongly sold if it were a last resort, the only thing left in the legislative or educational idea-box to bring costs under control.

But given the LD 1 reports, which are not glowing about school fiscal management, a four-day week seems like a luxury Maine taxpayers shouldn’t have to afford.