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2007 Model Legislation
School Privatization

The Maine View

Vol. 5, Issue No. 8

 

Saving Our Small Schools: Is Privatization an Option?

 

By Hon. Stephen Bowen, M.Ed.

 

Maine’s small schools are in danger. Though legislators deliberating Governor Baldacci’s school system consolidation proposal could have found other ways to generate administrative savings within and among Maine schools, they instead voted to force existing school units to join large regional school districts. The boards of these large new Regional School Units, which by law will take possession of all the public schools in their districts, will no doubt one day decide that it is too costly to keep open the many small schools under their administration. With the state giving school construction funding preference to those districts that consolidate schools, and with the legislature’s ongoing failure to provide meaning property tax relief, the pressure will mount to replace small community schools with large regional ones, much as was done fifty years ago under the Sinclair Act, when hundreds of schools across the state were closed in the name of consolidation.

 

Click here to read the report.

Maine's Uninsured

The Maine View

Vol. 5, Issue No. 7

 

Affordability, Accessibility or Priority?

Defining and Understanding Maine's Uninsured

 

by Tarren Bragdon

 

Today, the U.S. Census Bureau released figures on the uninsured rate for Maine, the other states and the U.S. as a whole for 2006.  This paper provides analysis on who are Maine's uninsured and poses questions of why they are uninsured.

 

Click here to read the report. (PDF)

 

Maine Issue Brief 22

Maine Issue Brief

No. 22

 

How Consolidation Threatens School Choice:

The Bath/Union 47 School Merger Proposal and the Future of School Choice in Maine

 

by Hon. Stephen L. Bowen, M.Ed

 

What the people of Arrowsic, Georgetown, Phippsburg, West Bath, and Woolwich are being encouraged to do would shock supporters of school choice across the nation, who are working diligently to win the very school choice rights that people of these communities are being told they must give up.

 

Residents of these five towns currently, and for many years, have had the opportunity to send their children to schools of their own choosing, public or private, under Maine’s Town Tuitioning program. Georgetown, Phippsburg, and West Bath operate K-6 schools and Woolwich operates a K-8 school. Students in these towns, once old enough to leave the public school systems, are able to attend a school of their choice for the remainder of their K-12 education, paid for by the towns. Arrowsic, the fifth of the five towns, operates no school at all, and therefore tuitions all its students.

 

Click here to read the report.

 

The Sinclair Act

The Maine View

Vol. 5, Issue No. 6

 

The Sinclair Act at 50: What History Tells Us about the Consequences of Consolidation

 

by Hon. Stephen L. Bowen, M.Ed

 

How much of the following sounds familiar? Maine people were told by the “powers that be” that the state’s schools were too costly. The problem, it was said, was that the educational system supported too many different schools and school districts, which resulted in wasted resources. It was argued that the solution was to create larger school districts and larger educational bureaucracies. Legislators in Augusta enacted laws eliminating countless community-led school boards across the state and handing over more power and influence to bureaucrats in Augusta. Though many people across the state protested this move, it went ahead anyway, despite few solid predictions about what might result.

 

This sounds very much like current efforts to consolidate Maine’s many school districts into fewer, larger ones, but it is actually what happened 50 years ago, when Maine last undertook a dramatic restructuring of its educational system with passage of the Sinclair Act. Though the 1957 law has often been heralded as a great step forward for Maine’s educational system, the Sinclair Act had many negative, long-term consequences that should throw a dose of cold water on the current debate about whether continued consolidation of our schools and school districts is right for Maine’s schoolchildren.

 

Click here to read the report.

Maine Issue Brief 21

Maine Issue Brief

No. 21

 

State and Local Expenditure Growth Surpasses Personal Income and Population Growth

 

By J. Scott Moody

 

Mainer’s household budgets are increasingly under stress due to government spending growth that exceeds Mainers’ income growth. There are significant growth differentials between real, per capita state and local expenditures (expenditures) versus real, per capita income (income) and population changes from calendar years 1960 to 2004 (all years of available data). Expenditures have increased 358.6 percent over this time-period while incomes and population have lagged behind, increasing 201 percent and 34.8 percent, respectively.

 

On average, expenditures double every 9.25 years while incomes double every 10.25 years.

 

Click here to read the report.

Maine Piglet Book

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