Gordon Donaldson: School unions a good option

Bangor Daily News, April 4, 2007

(excerpt) Recent proposals to find education efficiencies through administrative centralization have included an outright ban on one form of school district, the school union. What are school unions and are they deserving of such recommendations?

School unions were Maine’s first form of administrative consolidation. By requiring every community to be part of a school union in 1917, the Maine Legislature achieved a long-sought-after goal: to ensure that every community would be served by a paid superintendent of schools. School unions, however, did not require consolidation of services, merely what we today would call collaboration for central office functions.

Today, Maine has 34 school unions serving 131 towns (by comparison, 269 towns are served by SADs). Most are located in rural parts of the state. In brief, school unions:

• Provide a superintendent and other administrative and instructional services to the school boards and schools of the towns within them;
• Provide direct supervision and management for primary and elementary education and administrative services to contract for secondary education.
• In a number of cases, the superintendent also serves as the superintendent for a community school district which runs the secondary school serving the same communities.
• Offer direct taxpayer oversight of educational programs and budgets through the town meeting system.
• Permit school choice at the secondary level.

A cost analysis that compared 2005-06 expenditures in the 12 school unions in Hancock and Washington counties with 16 like SADs (Rural with enrollment ranges between 400 and 2,200) revealed the following:

• The variations among all 28 districts showed that school unions can be more economical than SADs.
• All the predominantly rural districts studied — SADs and unions alike — spent more than the state average per-pupil expenditure except for SADs enrolling between 700 and 1,600 students. (The range of enrollments ran from 400 to 2,200.)
• If the School Union and SAD expenditures are averaged and then compared: .Average per-pupil expenditures for all costs were in general higher in the School Unions than in SADs; average per-pupil costs for "regular instruction," for "system" administration, for "school" administration, and for transportation were in general higher in school unions than in SADs; average per-pupil costs for "student and staff support," for "career and technical education," and for debt service were in general higher in SADs than in school unions.
• Comparing the percentages of expenditures devoted to different functions: School unions spent a higher percentage of their budgets than SADs for regular instruction, for system administration and for transportation but the same percentage for school administration and facilities management; SADs spent a higher percentage than unions for student and staff support, special education, and debt service.