Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Schoolyard football much like school consolidation

By Josh Salm/Observer Staff Writer
Everyone has their own holiday traditions. Some people celebrate Christmas on the night of the 24th. Others have a big party of the Fourth of July. Others still play football on Thanksgiving Day.
This past year my wife and I were invited to spend the holiday with our friend’s family in Masardis up in Aroostook County, and Turkey Day football is a tradition with that neighborhood that has gone on since they were all kids. I was invited to play in the big game, and I had a blast.
I spent the better part of the time playing quarterback, slinging the football around the yard all morning long and barely breaking a sweat because I made my receivers run circles while I held on to the football for minutes on end until the defense finally wore down and stopped covering the receivers.
There were no plans. We just winged it and it worked out in the end. By the end of the game, however, my teammates forced me to split out and play wide receiver so they could catch their breath by playing quarterback. They were less than thrilled with the workout I put them through.
No plans. Just winging it.
It all sounds a lot like the school consolidation fiasco the Penquis region just wrapped up a week ago with the referendum vote on Jan. 27. The only thing is the quarterback, this time being Augusta, didn’t come out on the winning end.
The wide outs in this drill are the regional planning committees, made up of local municipal officers, school board officials and superintendents. They volunteered their time to come up with a plan that only the state really wanted.
Augusta sent these RPC units running around in circles for months. Do this. No wait, you can’t do this even though it was okay for another district, so do that. No wait, go back to square one.
In the end, however, Penquis region voters said with a fairly unanimous voice not to consolidate schools.
The end result was no surprise, really, when you stop and think about it. School board officials, regional planning committee members and municipal officers in most towns throughout the region told voters flat-out, “Don’t vote for this.” The sign in front of the SAD 41 Superintendent’s Office reads, “Vote No.” The SAD 4 Board of Directors voted unanimously against the plan a week before the referendum vote. Union 60 has told voters from the get-go not to approve the plan. Each town had it’s reason to go against it. I don’t blame them.
But you can’t help but feel some sympathy for the RPCs. More often than not, they did the best they could with a poorly crafted law that changed on a nearly daily basis. They came up with a plan that did its best for the children and the towns involved. In the end, however, all their hard work went for naught because the referendum was voted down.
The school reorganization law, in hindsight, is a law that is best suited for the urban portions of the state and does not work in rural Maine. Big cities like Bangor, Portland and Augusta had to do very little if nothing to comply with the law. It was the towns like Guilford and Dexter, like Dover-Foxcroft and Milo, like Greenville and Jackman that had to bend over backwards to comply with a law that in the end could force them to have a single administrator for spanning from Canada to Schoodic Lake.
Towns in Piscataquis County were not alone against this plan. Heck, you could say that most of northern Maine voted against school consolidation plans. There are very few plans north of Augusta that was approved by voters.
What will happen from here on out is up to the school boards for the local SADs and unions. If they want to reorganize with another district and try to avoid the penalty is their choice, but Ann Bridge with SAD 68 had a good point when she pointed out that all the area towns voted down consolidation so who would they reorganize with?
So, in the end, school consolidation was kind of like backyard football. No plan, just wing it and here’s hoping it works out in the end.
At least with backyard football we didn’t have to deal with penalties.

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