AUGUSTA, Maine - Gov. Paul LePage took aim at highly-paid school superintendents and education union bosses in his inaugural address.
In the final years of his first term, LePage often blamed Maine's education unions - and their alliances with Democrats in Augusta - for his failure to get school choice bills and other conservative reforms through the Legislature. Union leaders shrug off the criticism and say they remain willing to work with the governor to find common ground.
School consolidation began during the administration of LePage's predecessor, former Gov. John Baldacci, a Democrat. The idea was pretty straightforward: Merging school districts would mean fewer superintendents and central office staff, lower administrative costs and more of the state's finite education dollars going directly to classrooms.
But many consolidated districts haven't been able to turn this vision into reality, and in recent years, more and more towns have been opting to abandon these forced educational marriages.
"The attempts to consolidate our schools have failed us," LePage said. "School budgets on the rise - every year. Enrollment on the decline - every year." Consolidation, LePage noted in his inaugural address, has left Maine with twice as many administrators, per capita, as any other state.
Florida, LePage went on to say, has 2.8 million students, 56 superintendents and the seventh-ranked public education system in the nation. "Maine: 180,000 students, 127 superintendents, and we're ranked somewhere around 38th," LePage said. "That is not appropriate."
LePage said it's also inappropriate that many of those superintendents make six-figure salaries, "while teachers have to dig in their pockets to buy school supplies."
"I wonder if the governor understands the full range of responsibilities that superintendents have in Maine," says Connie Brown, who runs the Maine School Management Association.
Brown says the Florida comparison doesn't make sense. Superintendents down there wear far fewer hats than district leaders up here. "Districts that I'm personally familiar with, the district superintendent could also be the business manager, the curriculum coordinator, the HR administrator," she says.
Brown says the question of how many superintendents there should be in Maine is best answered by local communities, "who are de-consolidating because they want their own oversight over curriculum, and feel as though they want better oversight over their local dollars."
In his speech, LePage proposed a controversial idea to ensure that the education dollars flowing from Augusta to local communities actually go to the classroom.
"We should have one statewide teachers' contract, and the state should pay for all the teachers and all the classroom activities," he said. "And that would be about 56 percent of the budget, and I'm all in."
Lois Kilby-Chesley, president of the Maine Education Association, says the union is willing to discuss a statewide contract. "I would say we would be willing to sit down and talk about what the impact would be," she says. "We might have a different perspective on what the outcome should be."
In 2004, voters passed a referendum requiring the state to pick up 55 percent of the tab for funding public education. It's a threshold that's never been met.