MDIschools.net

PUBLIC HEARING TESTIMONY

IN FAVOR OF

LD 1227: An Act To Equalize the Regional Salary Cost Index under the School Funding Formula, Rep Johnson; Co-sponsors: Clark, Crockett, Eaton, Knight, MacDonald, McFadden, Schatz, Thomas

...requires that, beginning in fiscal year 2010-11, the regional adjustment to the salary and benefits costs of teachers and other school personnel that is based on labor market areas in the State must be 1.0 for all labor market areas in the State.

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Monday, April 13, 2009

Senator Alfond, Representative Sutherland, distinguished members of the Joint Standing Committee on Education and Cultural Affairs:

My name is Brian Hubbell.  I am the chair of the Mount Desert Island Regional School System, an Alternative Organization Structure constituted of eight municipalities of Bar Harbor, Cranberry Isles, Frenchboro, Mount Desert, Southwest Harbor, Swan's Island, Tremont, Trenton, and the four-town CSD that administers the Mount Desert Island Regional High School.

As I am unable to attend today's public hearing in person, I would like instead to offer this written testimony in favor of LD 1227: An Act To Equalize the Regional Salary Cost Index under the School Funding Formula

• Labor market ratios provide higher EPS allowances to higher income areas and reduce subsidy to areas of the state with lower incomes. 
  
• For example, MDI's regional labor market of Ellsworth, is indexed at 0.93 while that of our educational peers in the Portland region is indexed at 1.08 -- a spread of 15%.
  
• To draw good starting teachers from the state-wide market to the MDI region with its high housing costs, our schools must pay more than the state average in salary.  Applied against equivalant salaries, the lower index puts MDI schools automatically at a relative disadvantage in relation to the EPS formula compared to schools in high income areas.
  
• So, maintaining parity in teachers' salaries requires an additional commitment of local property taxes from areas with lower income.  This appears to represent an inequitable distribution of resources, contrary to the stated intentions of General Purpose Aid to education.
• For the six of the MDI towns which are minimum receivers, the depressed labor market index has no bearing on GPA.  To these towns, the only consequence is an artificial inflating of the dollar figure in the budget article to approve over-EPS spending at town meeting and at the budget validation referendum.
  
• Two of our towns, however, are not minimum receivers.  Trenton and the outer island of Frenchboro still receive direct (if modest) GPA allocations based on the depressed index and suffer measurable hardship from the differential between the lowered allocation and the real salaries that they pay as part of this region's school system.