Sherry Pineau Brown, Ph.D., is the director of the Central Maine Education Consortium (CMEC). She spent over two decades as a high school English teacher and academic dean of students. She is currently a lecturer in education and coordinator of teacher education at Colby College. Katie Rybakova, Ph.D., is the assistant director of the CMEC and a former middle school English teacher. She is currently a professor of education and chair of the Lunder School of Education at Thomas College. The views expressed in this op-ed are the authors’ alone.

May is here. For most Mainers, that means daffodils are up, lilacs are budding and the long, dark days of winter are finally behind us. For those of us in education, however, May has a different meaning: It’s school budget season.

And, oh, what a budget season this year’s is.

With gas approaching $5 a gallon, inflation creeping back up and housing prices soaring, the pressures on Maine’s taxpayers to fund local public schools feels, for so many, like that last straw breaking their backs. This is true for all taxpayers, but especially for those who either have no children or those whose children have long graduated. Why should they care about the schools?

That feeling is understandable — it truly is.

Narratives pushed by some that our schools are “failing our children” make it harder these days to trust educators. If you listen to what is told to us in the news, it’s hard not to believe that our schools are filled with incompetent folks with nefarious intentions.

At a recent particularly contentious school board meeting in Augusta, for example, teachers were described as “activists” after 200 students in a student-organized protest walked out of Cony middle and high schools to protest proposed cuts to their schools. Those cuts include over 20 positions that would effectively eliminate the middle school music program, gut crucial mental health support staff and dismantle the school hockey program. It would also create a mandatory pay-to-play structure for school sports alienating so many local youth who cannot afford the cost.

What’s humorous about the recent comments at the Cony school board meeting is that
students were described as “political pawns,” as though teachers had some immense power over students’ protesting cuts that would have devastating effects on their future education.

The idea that any adult, including teachers, can make adolescents do anything (as anyone who is either a parent of a teen or pre-teen can tell you) is laughable. We have spent our careers working with middle and high school students; if we had a penny for the number of times we had difficulty making students bring a pencil to class, we’d be rich.

What is not humorous are the implications that these school budget decisions have on both the future opportunities for all of Maine’s children and the financial struggle of Maine’s taxpayers. By stripping schools of programming and personnel, we are in essence shaping the future careers and lives of our students. These funding cuts have the potential to limit not only postsecondary options but also who they may become as adults.

For those wondering why that matters, consider the lack of availability of primary care physicians in Maine.

It is our students, exposed to an enriching education, like exposure to music classes, who go on to college and then medical school to become doctors. We have known for decades that music classes “equip students with the foundational abilities to learn, to achieve in other core academic subjects and to develop the capacities, skills and knowledge essential for lifelong success.”

It may seem silly to say “no music, no doctors,” but the disproportionately high number of doctors with a background in music education shows us it is far from silly.

At the same time, we fully understand that the struggle is also real for Maine taxpayers who are increasingly unable to make ends meet.

So, what do we do?

In the long term, Maine needs to rethink even more deeply how our public schools are funded. That has never been so apparent. Strong first steps were made in this session’s first school funding reform in 20 years, but as a recent Maine Education Policy Research Institute (MEPRI) report found, some rural schools are still at a disadvantage.

Skowhegan’s MSAD 54, for example, stands to lose money in the new structure — and that district is far from wealthy. Shifting the funding structure of public education must still be a legislative priority for the next Maine Legislature as we continue to look for innovative ways to alleviate the burden on taxpayers.

These legislative changes, as we all know, take time.

As Mainers, however, our strength has always been in our ability to come together as a community to support each other, understanding that no one from the outside is coming to save us.

We did it in the Ice Storm of 1998, when neighbors with generators plugged in extension cords giving power to the families freezing next door. We did it in 2023, when the state was rocked by unimaginable violence in Lewiston and Mainers provided not only financial support, but also founded the Maine Resiliency Center within 19 days of the shooting to provide support to those most impacted. And we can do it now, when those outside of our communities are working so hard to convince those of us within them that our public schools are just not worth the money.

In Central Maine, a grassroots effort to bring together all of those passionate about education is trying to reimagine how we can come together to support education at all levels in our area. In 2024, we founded the Central Maine Education Consortium (CMEC) with nothing more than the idea that we have so many community resources in our area that are often overlooked, due in part to the vast number of separate school districts in the state.

For reference, at last count there were nearly 600 schools and over 260 districts for 172,000 students in the state. Massachusetts, in contrast, has just over half the districts (395) for over 900,000 students.

With the mantra taken from organizational theorist Margaret Wheatley, “Whatever the problem, community is the answer,” we began to organize local educators from different districts, different colleges and different community organizations to consider how we can support our entire Central Maine community and all of our educators and students within it.

With a mission “to collaborate, inspire and support growth throughout our educational community,” we are doing what Mainers do best — support each other. This often means looking beyond those people-made boundaries of town lines and past rivalries and creatively coming together to share ideas and resources so that all of us can thrive.

Asking tough questions and thinking outside of the box to consider innovative ways to engage youth is what educators — used to working on a shoestring budget — do best. Our goal is to bring people together in a way that both alleviates the fiscal stressors on school systems by sharing community resources and ensures the education that our Maine youth experience an education that sets them up to be whatever they yearn to be — be it the doctors, farmers, biologists, even teachers that Maine needs.

We aim to look past the contentiousness of the budget season and the conversations at school board meetings to ask — what’s in it for the kids? And if that means budget cuts — how do we still serve Maine youth?

Remember COVID-19, when educators and school administration pivoted on a dime to deliver instruction when the rest of the world stopped, and when that instruction failed because there were gaps in internet access and supplies, figured out a way to transport mobile internet and materials into the gaps, and when kids didn’t have enough to eat because they usually were fed in school, so local teachers jumped on buses to deliver meals to their students. We’re just scrappy like that.

But while we are scrappy, and while we will do everything we can possibly do to serve Maine youth, we’re also tired. Tired of the red tape. Tired of the politicians who often do not have direct classroom experience nor understand what it is like to work with children in a classroom on a daily basis, some of whom are two grade levels behind, some two grade levels ahead, some who have not had dinner the night before, some of whom go home to a loving home and some who do not.

So this is our plea to the public: Stand by your educators. Encourage your local businesses, your community stakeholders, your “people,” to stand by those who serve Maine youth. The future of our state depends on it.