Sinclair Act recalled by current consolidation efforts
Today’s Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal feature a story on the Sinclair Act which makes use of quite a bit of MHPC research, as in the following clip:
Bob Whytock said Cony High School in Augusta, where he was a teacher and coach, was big enough to stand alone after Sinclair, but smaller communities lost their voice as local school boards merged with bigger communities.
“Everybody’s got a say in what everybody’s going to do,” Whytock said. “The choice to do things has to be voted on by many more people than it was in those days.”
As larger districts emerged, the number of local boards making decisions about local schools was cut in half between 1950 and 1975, says Bowen, of the Maine Heritage Policy Center. As professional administrators and bureaucrats replaced community school boards, administrative costs increased, according to his study.
Per-pupil spending on administration grew 406 percent (in 2002 dollars) from 1950 to 1980, and the number of people working for the Maine Department of Education tripled, Bowen said.
Read the complete article at the Maine Today webpage.