AUGUSTA — After several delays and wavering support, the Senate on Wednesday narrowly passed a bill that will shift school funding from larger districts to those in rural areas.
The bill passed 17-15, mostly along geographical lines and with the help of some procedural maneuvering.
The bill was sponsored by Senate President Kevin Raye, R-Perry, who has said the state’s complex Essential Programs and Services funding formula has pulled money from rural schools while increasing funding to more populated, and sometimes wealthier, districts.
But lawmakers representing larger school districts said it was wrong to inject politics into the funding formula rather than conduct a wholesale review of the formula.
It was instituted in 2004 and has since been assailed by school administrators in rural and urban districts for its complexity and unpredictability. Last year, a nationwide study gave Maine an “A” for education spending, but a “D” for distributing it.
Nearly a dozen bills were introduced this session attempting to change the funding formula.
Opponents of Raye’s bill blasted it because they said it pulls funding from larger, growing districts and pushes it to smaller schools with declining enrollments.
Sen. Justin Alfond, D-Portland, said the legislation also allowed one powerful legislator to change how school funding is distributed. Alfond called the move a “terrible precedent,” adding that it set the stage for future lawmakers to alter the formula to favor their districts.
Alfond estimated that Portland would lose close to $1 million in funding because of the legislation. He said 27 other districts, including Lewiston and Auburn, would face similar losses.
“Get ready for the pink slips in your district,” said Alfond, adding that the legislation, combined with the drying up of federal stimulus money, would force some districts to lay off teachers and staff.
Raye and others have said the legislation was a small fix to “an urban formula foisted on a rural state.”
Sen. David Hastings, R-Fryeburg, said the bill made sense. He said the redistributed funding represented a small portion of the current education funding.
The change represents about 2 percent of $914 million in current funding.
Hastings also noted that the recently adopted budget provided an additional $19 million in education money over the next two years.
Opponents countered that the additional funding was one-time money, while the impact of changing the formula would be long term.
Despite significant margins of support during preliminary approval votes in the House and Senate, Wednesday’s enactment vote was decided by a razor-thin margin. The vote was scheduled to run Tuesday, but according to some lawmakers, it was tabled because the roll call would have resulted in a tie, and ultimately, defeat.
The vote was also scheduled to run Wednesday morning but was tabled until the afternoon.
Sen. Cynthia Dill, D-Cape Elizabeth, planned to oppose the bill, but was absent during the afternoon vote. Dill, posting from her Twitter account in the morning, said the bill would remove $1 million in education funding from District 7 schools “and ship it north.”
A spokeswoman for the Senate Democrats said Dill had a family engagement and could not attend the afternoon vote.
Dill could have changed the outcome if Sen. Elizabeth Schneider, D-Orono, hadn’t paired her vote with Sen. Troy Jackson, D-Allagash, who was absent. Schneider had previously opposed the measure, but the rare procedural move Wednesday, approved in advanced by Raye, essentially made it so Schneider and Jackson’s votes were symbolic and couldn’t factor in the outcome.
Schneider acknowledged that Raye had approached her about the move. She said her decision was designed to give Jackson a chance to appear in the legislative record.
Jackson, a logger, has been absent this week while working in the northern woods. He has previously voted to support Raye’s bill because it will provide more funding to schools in his district.
“It just seemed like a really fair thing to do given the predicament Sen. Jackson was in,” said Schneider, adding that the impact on her district would be divided. She said she was philosophically opposed to the funding change in Raye’s bill and would rather see a “global” change.
Schneider said the move would not have been necessary had the Legislature met statutory adjournment two weeks ago.
“The real story is about how this session has been mismanaged (by Republican leadership),” she said. “If we (Democrats) had managed things this way we wouldn’t have heard the end of it.”
Gov. Paul LePage is expected to sign the bill, which will go into effect in 2012.
“If you take a look at the (funding) formula and how it’s worked over the years, it’s hard not to come away thinking that the rural schools got the short end in some respects,” LePage said Wednesday.
smistler@sunjournal.com
How the new bill changes EPS, the state’s school funding formula:
* It removes a provision in existing law that determines state reimbursement for school personnel benefits to the labor market index and reimburses schools in lower income areas at a lower rate than wealthier communities.
* It adds a new provision allowing for a 10 percent increase in the student-teacher ratio for school districts with less than 1,200 students.
* It provides a minimum subsidy for communities with high property values but with low-income population.
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