Last year when Maine legislators approved Governor Baldacci’s school consolidation plan in an effort to reduce looming state budget deficits, they quietly carved out exemptions for Indian and island schools, where consolidation is widely regarded as tantamount to ringing the community death knell. What mainland school board, after all, would rationally decide to maintain — never mind invest in — culturally distinct schools where per-pupil costs, and local property taxes to support them, are two or three or more times higher than others that are a bus or ferry ride away?
When the Maine Legislature adjourned this April, it nearly voted to scrap last year’s school consolidation plan altogether, but in the end rolled it back further in passing a framework that will allow other school districts to maintain a greater degree of local control. You might wonder why so many Maine communities have fought so hard to maintain their expensive small schools to their obvious financial detriment.
The answer is that place still matters — not just to islanders, but also to many other residents of small towns in Maine, where the traditions of community life have not been thoroughly eroded by the homogenization of mainstream America. Islanders instinctively recognize that the key to maintaining a sense of place is maintaining control over the local institutions that reinforce a sense of place — or not. And schools are the time capsules of community life, where investments in children pay off when, after a look at what the rest of the world has to offer, some of them return and invest their lives in the community, in a cycle of rebirth.
Four years ago Vinalhaven opened three new schools — an elementary, middle and high school, all connected by a beautiful library. Last year, North Haven broke ground for its new K-12 school, where all the funds have been raised in a unique partnership between the town and summer residents. Islesboro is currently studying a major renovation and building program to connect its school with a proposed new community center. And Chebeague Islanders seceded from Cumberland when their mainland school board threatened to close down the island’s K-5 schoolhouse.
In another little-noted vote, the Maine legislature also went on record objecting to the federal government’s fishery management plans under which many Maine communities have lost much of their access to the groundfish industry. Legislators resolved “to advocate for effective groundfish management through community-based initiatives” to benefit all who in days to come shall go down to the sea in ships, and do business upon the great waters.
Like the school battle, this vote also attempts to protect the sense of place vital to small villages along the Maine coast that have been pushed out of the cod and haddock and herring fisheries in favor of the supposedly more “economically efficient” larger vessels. The fact that larger vessels are also capable of causing disproportionate damage to the marine environment, eventually requiring further consolidation, does not seem to register on the fisheries bureaucrats who are looking for cheap and easy ways of managing a little-understood fishery.
If the school consolidation battle was a self-imposed injury to small towns, the federal fisheries battles are more ominous because the opponents who threaten Maine’s fishing communities are more distant and faceless. Seventeen members of the New England Fishery Management Council (only three of them from Maine) have presided over a consolidation of cod and haddock permits, which has resulted in only one remaining groundfish permit in possession of an active fishermen between Port Clyde and the Canadian border. That’s efficiency for you.
If the groundfish consolidation plan brought to you by the New England Fishery Management Council seems threatening, wait until the lawsuit plays out over what types of fishing gear Maine lobster fishermen will be required to use to protect right whales. In the unanticipated ways that lawsuits often play out, this one appears destined to cost the lobster industry millions and millions of dollars while increasing the number of vertical fishing lines, further threatening the remaining right whales that will result in more legal challenges. That’s a lawsuit for you!
What all of these issues have in common is an accumulation of decision making power in more and more remote bodies, further and further from the places the decisions actually play out in local communities. In America, we have learned how to employ ruthlessly efficient economics; what has usually been sacrificed is a sense of place. In Maine, most coastal communities retain a sense of place; the question is whether we can maintain it in the face of powerful, faceless and ruthless forces abroad in the land.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.