The state has now experimented with regional school units for four years. The results have been mixed, to put it kindly.

The very first partnership was forged here. No one held a gun to the towns of Regional School Unit 1 back then. With the exception of Georgetown, the towns that had already banded together to use Bath’s large middle and high schools believed consolidation would bring costs down, allow greater use of purchasing power and permit wider use of communal resources, such as art, music and foreign language teachers while eliminating duplication in administration.

That’s how it was sold, and it all made sense. It still does.

It just hasn’t worked out that way.

Part of the reason is the economics of the times during which the RSUs were put into place.

But a large part of the reason is that Maine likes its local control, and RSUs do not allow for it.

Towns that don’t have high schools and must send their children to the regional high school feel like they are losing local control.

Towns with school choice don’t have the same feeling about it. For example, even though most of Georgetown’s children attend Bath Middle School and Morse High School, their parents and the town retain choice about where to send them.

RSU 1 has entered into an agreement with Georgetown, and the tuition rate is set for the term of the agreement, so until the contract expires, Georgetown will not share in the financial pain for Morse’s makeover. This gives Georgetown, which never entered the regional school unit, options that the other towns don’t have. Georgetown could choose to send their children elsewhere if the next contract cost is too high. And if the parents don’t like the choice the town has made, they can send their kids to private school and pay the difference in the tuition rate.

It also gives Georgetown greater choice about what happens in their own elementary school. Georgetown had to pay a significant penalty for that local control, but it was a price they were willing to pay.

Many of the state’s RSUs are showing signs of fraying.

In our own region, West Bath is considering withdrawing from RSU 1; Wiscasset voted to leave RSU 12; and Freeport is considering a vote to withdraw from RSU 5.

Further up the Mid-coast, six towns are in the process of leaving RSU 24. Some of the state’s towns will pay the penalty and remain unaffiliated; others will join other RSUs.

The withdrawal committees are studying how much each town will save by leaving the district, and in some cases, coming up with projections of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If Wiscasset, with its tiny number of students, chose to close all its schools and pay the difference in tuition to send their elementary kids across the river to Edgecomb’s Center for Teaching and Learning, and perhaps worked out a day school program for high school students at Chewonki, it would save the town a fortune.

But for most of the towns, this has little to do with money, and everything to do with what they perceive they have lost — local control — which is why Wiscasset is unlikely to make such a move.

Some towns have seen their local schools closed or repurposed by the RSU and their children bussed to faraway schools. Others have seen the costs of maintaining the large high and middle schools fall, in their view, disproportionately, on the backs of the more rural towns in the school units.

In our view, these issues go beyond growing pains. It’s time to re-examine the nature of the regional school unit system. It should be possible to have the projected cost savings with shared administration and agreed-upon resources while allowing for important local control. If the system can’t be amended, it will be only a matter of time before it fails completely.