Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter for 40 years. The author of four books, his new study of the Ken Curtis administration is due next year. He welcomes comment at [email protected].

As I wrote last week, Maine needs to renew its once state-of-the-art public school construction program that has languished in recent decades. Many students attend schools that are dilapidated, overcrowded or both, and many buildings are more than 60 years old —  hopelessly out of date.

If the next governor and Legislature are serious about this goal, however, we need more than new funding. As a vital component, we must reconfigure Maine’s school districts. There are far too many to effectively serve students and reduce operating costs, especially in high schools.

And  that means going back to the principles of the Sinclair Act passed in 1957 under Gov. Ed Muskie — the only creative response Maine has mustered to the age-old problem of too many administrators and too few students per district, reflecting  our highly decentralized municipal governments. That’s another topic for another day. 

The Sinclair Act built the original school administrative districts (SADs), the first truly regional governments in Maine, with the guarantee of a new common school that now serves as many as 11 towns. Before that, with every city and town its own district, there were almost 500 districts. By the 1970s, a total of 269 towns — a majority — had joined SADs. The new system was so popular that lawmakers considered a bill in 1973 requiring municipalities without their own high school to join one; it narrowly failed.

The new system worked because the Legislature was willing to make a substantial commitment to increased operating subsidies as well as the common school guarantee. Republican legislatures first increased the sales tax, then in 1969 agreed to a progressive income tax championed by Democratic Gov. Ken Curtis. The income tax fulfilled the promise of the Sinclair Act while substantially lowering property taxes; voters retained it in a 1971 referendum by a 3-1 margin.

It took vision and perseverance to make this happen. Since then, unfortunately, it’s been mostly though not entirely downhill. While the state has maintained a strong funding commitment, it has largely abandoned any effort to create more regional school districts.

The one attempt, under Gov. John Baldacci in 2007, ended in failure, in large part because Sinclair Act principles were forgotten or ignored. Rather than offering incentives and new schools to reluctant towns, the consolidation law penalized towns if they didn’t meet an arbitrary standard of 2,500-pupil districts, with no state plan or even technical assistance offered.

Predictably, though enough towns joined new regional school units (RSUs) to reduce the 290 existing districts to 164, RSUs quickly fell apart, since many towns joining them had nothing in common but a superintendent’s office. Today, we’re back where we started, with 277 districts using a confusing array of administrative systems.

There’s been a significant cost to inaction. The Sinclair Act buildout lowered per-pupil costs while improving teaching standards and student performance. It began at a time when Maine  spent 22% less per pupil than the national average. Today, Maine spends substantially more than the national average, yet student performance has declined sharply compared to other states.

Teacher salaries are also low, and the small size of many secondary schools makes it virtually impossible for them to offer a comprehensive curriculum, hurting prospects for graduates seeking to continue their education.

There’s no magic solution for this malaise. Rebuilding our public schools will require substantial efforts from the community on up. But rationalizing our poorly organized school districts would help across the board, reviving the quest for equal educational opportunity Mainers have long and generously supported. Lawmakers can provide structure and funding, and an underperforming Department of Education also must be reinvigorated with new leadership.

Economic prospects for too many rural towns are dim, and even many cities, small by national standards, could benefit from cooperation with neighboring towns. Better schools are essential. Even in southern Maine, where the economy seems strong, soaring home prices push out working parents, who live in towns that can’t offer comparable schools.

If Maine recommits to building better school facilities, it must spread the benefits fairly, best achieved through districts large enough to be economically and demographically diverse. Incentives for regional cooperation will be vital to success — not only to improve public education, but to satisfy restive property taxpayers, who will want results to validate the benefits of new investment.

Much more will have to be done, of course, but curtailing unproductive and circular policy debates too many school boards are now engaged in is long overdue. We need public policies that bring people together, not drive them further apart.

Among the tools that will be needed, the principles of the Sinclair Act could be surprisingly powerful.