“It’s been terribly underfunded forever, basically,” said George Joseph, part-time superintendent for Vinalhaven’s school. “If Vinalhaven goes to a basketball game, it’s not just driving to Waldoboro. It’s a night out with motel rooms, meals and so forth.”
Because of island schools’ distance from mainland goods and services, everything costs more. The per pupil cost on an island can range as high as 600 percent of the state average cost to educate a student for one year. That means as much as $25,000 per pupil.
On Vinalhaven, where a new $13.6 million school is under construction, it costs $12,000 to educate each student for one year, twice the state average.
“About four years ago, I found out Vinalhaven was the most underfunded (school district) and I started to scream,” Joseph said. “I started this coalition of folks from places like Rangeley and Jackman.” Small, isolated schools were getting short shrift, he said, and by standing together, island and small in-shore communities have a stronger voice in Augusta. “The real argument is, you’re not treating the other people that way,” he said.
When it comes to state subsidy for schools, a community like Vinalhaven suffers from the very fact that it has tax-rich shore property; the high valuation means the island can’t qualify for money many other schools receive.
Joseph isn’t the first to recognize the inequity. More than a decade ago, the Legislature tried to compensate island and other small, rural schools through the Geographic Isolation Subsidy. But that program was flat-funded for years, meaning that Vinalhaven, for example, gets $81,000 when by formula it’s entitled to $225,000. The total island school budget is $1.7 million.
Last year, Sen. Chandler Woodcock (R-Farmington) himself a teacher, was prime sponsor of a bill to fully fund the isolation grants. The bill passed, although legislators killed language that would have set up a task force to study isolated schools. Even Woodcock’s bill, co-sponsored by Sen. Marge Kilkelly (D-Wiscasset), didn’t bring the isolation subsidy anywhere close to the level originally set forth in the program.
Rep. Paul Volenik (D-Brooklin), whose district includes seven island schools, faults the whole premise of how Mainers pay for education. “Our entire education system is inadequately funded,” he said. “What we need to establish is a system that adequately
funds all districts.” He called paying for schools through property taxes the worst way to do it, pointing out that a wealthy person might spend one-tenth of one percent of his or her income on property taxes, while a low-income individual could spend 20 percent of hers just to pay the tax bill.
Volenik is pessimistic about spending on education in a troubled economy.
“Cutting government spending at all levels is a recipe for disaster for school funding.” He argued that many people’s incomes are declining as the cost of health care rises, while the rich get even richer.
One small advantage islanders enjoy at the State House, according to Volenik, is that legislators are fond of islands – and perhaps a romantic vision of island life – and want to help if they can.
Rep. Jim Skoglund (D-St. George) a former teacher whose district includes Matinicus, shares Volenik’s view that real estate is the wrong way to fund the bulk of school budgets. “Property taxes shouldn’t be the backbone of any sort of funding,” he said. He said the high valuation of coastal property doesn’t reflect the wealth of most year-round islanders, and there is a disparity between owners of seasonal houses and full-time residents. He warned that “once you sell a place, you’ll never get it back.”
Not all island schools are open this year. On Matinicus, the school has no teacher and no students. A handful of eligible students are either home-schooled or have moved to the mainland for an education.
On Great Cranberry Island, the school is closed and its teacher is assisting at the Little Cranberry Island school, where there enough students to keep the doors open. But neither Matinicus nor Great Cranberry are eager to officially discontinue their schools. Residents say a school is critical to the health, character and future of an island community.
Things are different on Vinalhaven, where Kathy Warren, business manager for the school district, said the current K-12 enrollment is 214, a strong figure for an island community of 1,200 year-round residents (four times that many in the summertime).
“It’s a big enough community to maintain a stable population,”said Warren, whose husband, Robert, teaches sixth grade. The couple has a second-grader enrolled at Vinalhaven, and Kathy said she can see a bulge in class size mirroring that of a generation ago, when Robert attended the island school in a class of 25 students. The current kindergarten class enrolls 18 students, and seven seniors are expected to graduate this spring.
On neighboring North Haven, with a year-round population of 350, the school K-12 school population is holding steady at 70 students, and just one senior will graduate in the spring. Last year, there were 14 graduates, said bookkeeper Bridget Hopkins, who doubles as athletic director.