Some trends in last Tuesday’s election were obvious. A less visible outcome, because it was featured only on town election ballots, was the effective end of the school consolidation effort started by former Gov. John Baldacci in 2007, which now has come unglued.

Of the two dozen towns that have considered withdrawing from a new regional district, all but a handful have voted to do so.

Regional school districts have proved to be the one effective form of broad intertown cooperation since the Sinclair Act was passed in 1957. It led to creation of more than 60 school administrative districts over 10 years that have stood the test of time. Most SADs deliver effective education at substantially lower costs than towns and cities that go it alone.

Fifty years after the initial SAD push, it seemed time for another attempt to promote cooperation. Why, then, did the Baldacci push for regional school units prove so unsuccessful? Primarily because of the way it was designed.

The original SADs were premised on improving education at a time when Maine’s hundreds of rural, town-based high schools were seen as behind the times. The state invested heavily in the new districts, offering generous funding for the larger high schools that formed the new districts’ geographical and educational center. Savings were projected and achieved, compared with single-town districts, but that wasn’t the main goal.

By 2007, the emphasis had shifted dramatically. Baldacci’s original initiative was premised entirely around saving money for the state. He had, unwisely, agreed to increase the state’s financial share to 55 percent, at a cost of over $200 million a year, without seeking any new revenue for the purpose.

Halfway through the “ramp up” to 55 percent, Baldacci was desperate to reduce budget demand, and decided to cut support for administrative costs. His program was based on the “too many superintendents” idea while ignoring whether pairing existing districts together, willynilly, would actually work.

Then the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee, which had taken over from a divided Education Committee, decided to install a penalty system for districts that didn’t comply with a mandate for 2,500-student districts.

The penalties aroused widespread resentment over a process that, in the best of circumstances, would have been difficult. Rather than providing rewards, as the Sinclair Act had done, school consolidation provided a kick in the pants, with predictable results.

Many RSUs that did form lack any logic or cohesion. Some united noncontiguous districts, such as RSU 2 — Monmouth, Richmond and Hall-Dale — ensuring that all they’d ever share was a superintendent’s office.

Others, such as RSU 12, including Wiscasset, brought together eight towns over a 40-mile stretch of the Sheepscot River, without any plan for creating an integrated district. Wiscasset, beset by the closure of the Maine Yankee plant and poor decision-making afterward, had seen its oncemodel secondary schools lose more than half their students. Yet none of the partner towns, all of which lack a high school, were required or even encouraged to send students to Wiscasset, making breakup almost inevitable.

There are a few RSUs that followed regional principles and may survive. In RSU 5, for instance, Freeport has a good high school facility but few students, thanks to high housing prices that keep working families out of town. Neighboring Durham has plenty of students but no high school and, until RSU 5 formed, tuitioned its students widely. Passage of a high school renovation bond on Nov. 5, after a previous failure, may be enough to keep Freeport from withdrawing, particularly since going it alone will cost more. But that’s no sure bet.

A “Super RSU” in the Rumford- Dixfield area, which combined three former SADs and has about 3,000 students, may also endure.

But for the most part, the RSU movement, unlike the SAD movement before it, will rightly be seen as a failure.

And a glaring weakness in Maine’s public education structure — many very small schools with declining enrollment and high costs — will persist and probably worsen.

What can be done? First, learn from the two experiments. When the state provides a plan, encouragement and financial assistance, regional proposals can overcome Maine’s strong “local control” tradition. When the state insists locals do all the work, and imposes penalties rather than incentives, communities quickly revert to the local control mode.

Failed experiments tend to discourage others. But candidates for governor ought to be thinking right now about what can be done to encourage, and not coerce, Maine towns and cities to become educational partners.

DOUGLAS ROOKS is a former daily and weekly newspaper editor who has covered the State House for 29 years. He can be reached at [email protected].