Some Mainers just lost school choice - RSU 1

March 17, 2010

Some Mainers just lost school choice


— In an April 18 column in the Press Herald (''Consolidated schools good for kids''), William Shuttleworth, superintendent of the new Regional School Unit in Bath, RSU 1, was full of praise for district consolidation.

His new RSU, he predicted, will save taxpayers money while improving student achievement and will provide ''unbridled opportunities'' for its students.

Shuttleworth neglected to mention that the RSU 1 merger took away a number of opportunities as well, by eliminating school choice options for hundreds of families.

Until the creation of RSU 1, students in Arrowsic, Phippsburg, West Bath, and Woolwich were allowed to attend whichever high school, public or private, best met their needs.

Education Department data from 2004 reveals that while the majority of those students attended the public high school in Bath, fully a quarter of the high school students in the four towns chose to go elsewhere.

Some attended other nearby public schools in Brunswick or Wiscasset, while others chose to attend area private schools, such as Lincoln Academy, North Yarmouth Academy, the Hyde School and Waynflete.

Those days are over, however.

Henceforth, all high school students in the four towns will be forced to attend the high school in Bath, whether they wish to or not. Families of means, of course, may decide to send their children to area private schools and pay the tuition themselves, but less-fortunate families will no longer have any choice of high school at all.

The architects of the merger plan used a two-pronged approach to eliminate school choice, a strategy that is likely to be employed by opponents of choice elsewhere as school district consolidation efforts move forward across the state.

First, it was suggested that school choice caused ''inefficiencies.'' A November 2006 report by the area's consolidation committee claimed that ''both teachers and facilities should be more efficiently employed by requiring all regional students to attend regional schools.''

In other words, too many students who were given a choice were not choosing the high school in Bath, resulting in underutilized educational resources there.

This problem could have been solved, of course, by improving the educational product available at the high school and winning back those students who made other choices. The consolidating committee chose instead to take the simpler route, eliminating the competition by abolishing school choice.

Second, understanding that many area families valued the right to choose, the architects of the merger cleverly included a ''grandfathering'' provision, which allows students currently attending schools outside the proposed new district to continue to do so, along with their siblings. This had the intended effect of silencing choice-supporting parents, making approval that much easier.

The merger plan also gives families the right to choose from among the handful of elementary schools in the new district, which allows merger supporters to claim, as Shuttleworth did in his column, that ''kids get to make school choices.''

With regard to high school, however, the choice is simple -- there is but one.

The swiftness with which a long-held tradition of high school choice was eliminated in the Bath area should cause enormous concern to those families across the state currently enjoying the freedom and opportunity of school choice.

As school districts look to comply with the state's consolidation law, choice has come under ever-increasing attack.

Maine has one of the nation's oldest and most well-established school-choice programs, the envy of parents across the nation wishing for similar opportunities.

Here in Maine, though, consolidation has put school choice in great danger.