Jennifer Chace, Ph.D., is assistant director of the University of Southern Maine’s Center for Education Policy, Applied Research and Evaluation and Maine Education Policy Research Institute.

If you’ve ever tried to weigh in on an education issue, you know how it goes: three minutes at a school board meeting, if your issue is on the agenda and if you can get there. Or a trip to Augusta for a public hearing, where you speak into the record and leave without knowing whether anyone was listening. It’s discouraging, so a lot of us just stay home.

But this is not a failure of civic spirit. Mainers volunteer, we organize and we care about our neighbors and our schools in concrete, committed ways. The problem is structural: the formal channels for public input weren’t designed for discussion. They were designed for comment. And comment, however passionate, is not the same as being heard.

Maine is preparing for a new governor and anticipating decisions about the future of education that could shape the state for a generation. The challenges on the table — student outcomes that aren’t where we want them, a youth mental health crisis, overburdened educators, rising education costs, property tax pressures and the difficulty of preparing students for a workforce and, frankly, a life none of us can fully predict — are complex and deeply interconnected. They deserve more than citizen voice fragmented into three-minute chunks. They deserve careful consideration and informed deliberation — by the Mainers they affect.

That’s the case for a citizens’ assembly, and it’s why our team at the University of Southern Maine’s Center for Education Policy, Applied Research and Evaluation (CEPARE) and Maine Education Policy Research Institute (MEPRI) is organizing one.

A citizens’ assembly isn’t a public hearing or a focus group. It’s a structured deliberative process, increasingly used in Europe and now beginning to take root in the United States, in which a representative group of everyday people is brought together to learn about a complex issue, deliberate across differences and produce recommendations for elected officials that reflect genuine public judgment.

The Maine Citizens’ Assembly on Education Priorities will bring together 64 delegates: four from each of Maine’s 16 counties, representing four life stages — a high school student, a young adult, a parent of a current pre-K–12 student and an adult 55 or older. Delegates are selected by structured random draw from a volunteer pool, with attention to balance across geography, gender, race and ethnicity, educational attainment and political leaning.

No special expertise is necessary. To ensure that participation is genuinely accessible, delegates receive a $750 stipend and additional support for those traveling to Bangor. Geography and cost should not determine who gets a seat at this table.

So what happens with the results?

First, a bipartisan group of current Maine legislators is listening. The Legislative Strategy Team, led by Rep. Holly Sargent and including Reps. Sheila Lyman, Kim Haggan and Dan Sayre — has committed to taking the assembly’s priorities into active strategy work. Working with MEPRI, this group will translate delegates’ priorities for education into concrete legislative action, connecting the voice of 64 Mainers from across the state directly to the people in a position to act on it.

The delegates priorities’ will also be shared with gubernatorial candidates for response in a live public session and local school boards will receive them too. Our team will keep the public informed through regular updates, ensuring citizens’ know how their voices are influencing action. Citizens’ voices will be heard.

Maine is ready for this. We’ve survived the pandemic, achieved the long-standing goal of 55% state funding for public education and updated the school funding formula for the first time in 20 years.

We’ve got a new administration coming in. There’s a real sense of having cleared one set of hurdles — and of not yet knowing exactly what comes next. You can volunteer to participate in the citizen’s assembly at this link. What we do know is that we want to be heard.