With local control comes local responsibility.

This should become the Legislature’s new mantra, following approval of hard-fought school consolidation plans within the state’s $6.3 billion biennial budget. Gov. John Baldacci signed the cooling piece of volcanic legislation into law on Thursday at the State House.

Rural lawmakers, led by independent Rep. Tom Saviello of Wilton, pushed to strengthen local control within the process, in the interest of their constituents, who feared mandated consolidation could sound a tolling bell for small schools, the traditional hubs of village communities.

(A more likely death knell for small schools is plunging student populations, as Maine – which lost some 17,000 students from 1995 to 2005 – projects to decline a further 10 percent through 2014, predominantly in rural Aroostook, Franklin, Washington and Piscataquis counties, according to the Maine Department of Education.)

Yet by fighting for their rightful say in consolidation, local districts have assumed some ownership of its impact. If fears of rampant school closures or declining educational quality, as eloquently posited by lawmakers during the budgetary debate, do come true, local districts and voters will carry responsibility.

Enough of the final version of the consolidation legislation depends on local approval, so its results, if deemed unpopular, cannot be blamed entirely on the state. The plan is compromise in every sense, and still too lenient and loopholed – for our taste, at least – in forcing school administration to consolidate.

Relaxing fiscal penalties for nonconforming districts, for example, although politically necessary to approve the budget, could still result in a gulf between educational haves and have-nots, and allow so-called wealthy districts to buy out of the process, and make consolidation seem punitive for the complying, “poorer” districts.

Either way, communities have ample opportunity to define consolidation, without heavy-handed mandates.

There’s little time to waste. Consolidation should largely cancel summer vacations for school administrators, as information sessions about the process by the DOE must begin by July 15, and district notices of intent to consolidate by Aug. 31. Final consolidation plans are due to the state by Dec. 1.

Local input is within each step of this process, as crusaders for the preservation of “local control” extolled its necessity to avoid unintended consequences.

Lawmakers agreed and gave communities a strong voice in shaping their consolidated districts within Maine’s brave, new world of educational administration.

Packaged with this influence, however, is responsibility.

For consolidation to succeed, the process must be embraced and managed locally. If it fails to meet expectations, or causes local unrest, local districts must realize the responsibility they sought is also theirs to shoulder.