Buckfield adult ed in danger of demise?

BUCKFIELD/OXFORD — The dawning of the new year in Buckfield also marks the fifth month of a contract standoff between SAD 39 directors and the local teachers’ union.  But now according to Superintendent Richard Colpitts, the district faces a new concern. 

As the school board begins to hammer out a budget for the coming fiscal year that will both satisfy teachers and serve students, there is a very real danger that the district could lose services for adults.

At the December school board meeting, Colpitts told school board members that, while he has yet to receive an  official notice, the word has come down that SAD 17 will sever its adult education union with SAD 39 at the end of the current fiscal year.

Since 1999, Judy Green, the adult education director for SAD 17, also has run SAD 39’s program. 

The origins of the partnership vary according to who one asks.  Colpitts says SAD 17 wanted extra income to hire an assistant adult ed director.  Officials in SAD 17 say Green’s motives were more altruistic — she stepped in, they say, because SAD 39’s adult ed program, at the time, was in “such disarray.” 

Asked following a recent school board meeting about the future of the management deal, SAD 17 Superintendent Dr. Marc Eastman confirmed that it is headed for the dustbin, but would offer few specifics.

“I haven’t met with Rick [Colpitts] yet,” he said, “so I’d prefer not to speak.”

This year, SAD 17 hired Jane Courcy as co-director of adult education for the two districts.  Come July 1, she takes over full time and Green, having spent a year grooming her replacement, will retire.

Colpitts told SAD 39 directors at their December meeting that they will have decisions to make, since the state mandates the oversight of a director.  SAD 39 can hire one of its one and take back management of its adult ed program, said Colpitts, or, it could find a similar arrangement with another school district, most likely SAD 52 in Turner. 

The other option, said Colpitts, might be to eliminate adult education in SAD 39.

“Of course, we will always have adult ed available to us through Region 11,” said Colpitts.

However, if that is the plan, SAD 39 may have to overcome more than its historical resistance to send adult students “over the mountain” to the regional vocation school that shares space with SAD 17 inside Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School.

Some SAD 17 officials fear that changes in educational philosophy at the state level could lead to the demise of the vocational curriculum.

At the December 18 school board meeting in SAD 17, Don Gouin, of Norway, who also sits on the Region 11 board, had strong words.  He said the “common core” concept currently being pushed by Maine’s Education Commissioner, Susan Gendron, could prove “devastating” for the technical school.

Eastman explained after the meeting that the “common core” drive includes increasing the number of credit hours required for academic classes.  The intent, he said, is to better prepare students for placement in a typical four-year liberal arts college, such as the University of Maine system.

However, the increased focus on academic classes, from 13 to 22 credits in SAD 17, including foreign language classes, will mean fewer hours in the day for vocational or technical programs. 

“If classes are not in the 'core,' they are electives,” said Eastman.  “And if you reduce the number of hours available to any student to take electives, that reduces the amount of time they have available to take a tech program.”

In a very real sense, the plan could take the “comprehensive” out of Oxford Hill Comprehensive High School, he said.

Moreover, some people, like SAD 17 school board Chairman Dale Piirainen, of West Paris, fear that Gendron’s plan, designed to raise the overall socio-economic well-being of the state by funneling more students into college, could blow up in the face of the local labor force.

“If kids do not get the type of education they want to get, those kids will get frustrated,” he says.  “I think you’ll see the dropout rate go up.”

”I think we are seeing that now,” says Eastman.  “I’m looking at the numbers now — we’ve got the dropout rate down to 2 percent and I think you are going to see that start to go back up.

“The commissioner’s bandwagon is ‘college ready for every student.’  What scares me about that is that we have a lot of our kids who learn in what I would call an applied way,” says Eastman.  “They learn hands on.  They learn by doing.  An academic-only program will not meet their needs.”

Eastman and Piirainen agree that Gendron has had to do some “tremendous backpedaling” on the common core concept, given the heat she has reportedly taken from a number of employers who count on the students who come out of the regional vocational school, and the community colleges, as well as any number of apprenticeship programs.   

“What they [the Department of Education] will argue is that you need to prepare kids coming out of [high] school for the maximum number of options, and if they start at ‘college ready,’ then whatever profession they go into, they can handle all of the technical aspects,” says Eastman.  “They are saying that technical jobs require more and more academic skills, today.”

However, even barring any changes that may alter the look of the regional vocational schools over the long term, there also are other plans afoot in Augusta that could influence what becomes of SAD 39’s adult ed program.

According to Eastman, a number of reports, such as a recent Brookings Institute study, urge consolidation of school administration, including both SADs and regional vocational schools. 

With that change looming on the horizon, Eastman says he is nervous about dumping SAD 39 too quickly, only to have the program boomerang back into his lap.

”We have to be careful about saying we are going to send this piece of this program that way, say to SAD 52, when we may be legislatively mandated to turn around and run that program,” he says.  “So, we need to be a little cautious about acting too quickly.”

Still, the wheels are turning at the state level.  The trick for SAD 39 is to not get caught in the gears.  Because SAD 17 is not interested in having Courcy run adult ed for both districts, as Green did, that may force SAD 39 to act before it’s clear exactly what's ahead.  At any rate, what’s coming, cautions Eastman, could be big.

“It’s a pretty drastic change,” he says.  “It’s on everybody’s plate.”

According to Colpitts, Green will be at SAD 39's February school board meeting to address adult education issues.  That meeting will be held at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, February 7, at the school district’s central office in the Buckfield Municipal Building.