For a number of years, the great American state of Maine sold itself with the slogan “The Way Life Should Be”. It’s changed now, the tourism board’s using “It Must Be Maine”. I wonder if they’ve replaced the signs at the state border crossings yet.

The claim is not without merit.

The overall pace of life is slower – not Pennsylvania Amish slower, but way far away from the New York minute.

You can get theah from heah – if it’s not high tourist season, and the one bridge over the Sheepscot River isn’t closed for repairs. And the river doesn’t run pink with industrial waste any more. You can actually canoe it without the canoe dissolving out from under you. Well, almost.

You can leave your car unlocked and unwatched for more than 30 seconds and still have a reasonable expectation that it will be there, complete with contents, on your return from the mall.

The lighthouses are wonderfully scenic.

The leaves put on a gorgeous display in the fall. What’s more, the leaves, and the spring flowers, are the only colors you usually have to think about. Clothes are for wearing.

And there are a couple of months of the year when you can actually stand to be outside, when you’re not driven indoors by the snow, or the mud, or the humidity, or the bugs.

All in all, not a terribly bad place to be. Unless you’re a California dude. I was even considering whether to ask someone, an elementary educator, to come Down East and look over the place with me.

And then I made a mistake. A big one.

I looked at a local paper. The one that said “We gotta close schools.” Why? “So we can save money”. What else?

I already knew that Maine is in a cleft stick economically. It’s a large land area with a small population. That population is used to relative wealth, from fisheries, lumbering and its related industries (especially paper-making), textiles, shipping. Those pockets of wealth were scattered across the state, and that scattered the population.

The population is still scattered. And still has the expectations left over from richer days.

But, all the fisheries are gone, except for lobster – and that only survives because the cod, which eat lobster, have been wiped out. (Fishermen and scientists pat themselves on the back for “good management of the fishery”, but as with so many other elements of human pride in accomplishments, the truth is that lobstermen have benefited from the stupidity of others, and have been lucky. So far.)

Most of the timber is gone. What remains is mostly not economical to harvest.

Ditto potatoes and other farmed crops, except blueberries – which is pretty low-end agriculture.

And, remember that bit about the “river no longer runs pink”? That’s good ecology? Bah. It’s because the paper and textile mills have all closed. They’ve been driven out of business by cheaper competitors in the US and (especially) overseas.

And nothing has come in to replace these income generators. Unless you feel like working at minimum wage for the poncy New York yachters on their craft that could obliterate the coastal towns if they should happen to take flight and land on them. A whole lot of the population of Maine (like 25%, if memory serves) is on part-time work and some sort of public relief. Talk about a tax burden …

The American population is growing by leaps and bounds, right? Not here. It’s static. And the school population is supposed to decline by 25,000 students in the next four years.

All this means a lot of small schools scattered all over the state, each with its community ferocious to prevent their closure, equally ferocious to demand full services, and equally ferocious about anything resembling a tax increase.

Of course, all these small schools have to have leadership. It should be no surprise that Maine has an administrator for every 11 teachers (ninth-highest ratio in the USA) when so many of the schools have, like, 5 teachers – plus, of course, a principal.

Whaddaya mean Maine has 700 students per school district, well below the national average of 3,200? I thought small was good. Serve the students better. Hell no! We don’t care ‘bout that! Save money! Make those districts larger!

Sure. Can we remember, please, that this 3,200 average includes places like Manhattan, which has twice the population of the entire State of Maine? It’s real simple to have a small, densely populated school district in the eastern megalopolis, or Chicago, or the San Francisco Bay.

Maine school districts get any larger, any more consolidated, and some kids will have to spend two hours on the bus each way to get to school. I am not joking. Mine spent 45 minutes each way – in a New Hampshire district with much smaller boundaries than some of the ones being proposed in current Maine redistricting plans. Boarding schools, anyone? And where are we going to get the bread to set that up?!? Even on the assumption that Maine parents will agree to the idea.

And I’m really going to bring somebody up to a state that ranks 35th in teacher salaries, despite ranking 8th in overall school spending? Yeah, three separate, independent panels said that teacher salaries should go up in this state. And where is the money for that going to come from? Even firing every one of those whipping-boy administrators wouldn’t come close to generating the funds required to close the gap between projected school expenses and projected school revenues.

On this evidence, I can only advise the one I was going to invite to remain in the West and continue to deal with colors. Things are shutting down here. And we all know the first and foremost of union rules. Last in, first out.

It snowed today. First snowfall of the season. Not much fell, less than an inch. But howling northwest winds came in right after it, which means that all this half-melted snow is now frozen rock-hard on everything. Days like this, you might not get into your car ‘cause the water’s gotten into the doors and they’re frozen shut. And that might be just as well, ‘cause unless the sand and salt trucks have been out, the roads might just be frozen solid as well, and toss you into the nearest tree without warning.

I’m depressed.

   - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

All opinions are mine as a private citizen.