Matt Stone is on the case. Read this Report Card blog entry and see how you feel about what he reports:
A $190,000 grant the Department of Education is offering Pownal will allow the Cumberland County town to study the cost-sharing formula that’s saddled it with a 35 percent increase in its local funding obligation to Regional School Unit 5, the new district the town is joining along with Durham and Freeport.
The natural question, of course, is how can my district get in on this largess? We want to study too! But Matt says that Commissioner Gendron says you can’t get in on the deal.
So this payment, rather than being the result of a policy openly and fairly applied, is apparently a sort of baksheesh, a kind of money used to lubricate the wheels of consolidation. Perhaps by silencing critics? Smells just like corruption.
Of course, I could be wrong. Tell me that I’ve just misunderstood!
*from Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards, Billy Bragg, 1990
It may have been Camelot for Jack and Jacqueline
But on the Che Guevara highway filling up with gasoline
Fidel Castro’s brother spies a rich lady who’s crying
Over luxury’s disappointment
So he walks over and he’s trying
To sympathise with her but he thinks that he should warn her
That the Third World is just around the corner
(full text here, live & modified mp3 audio version here)
Update: Pownal grant pulled, Times Record, 5/13/2009
State Education Commissioner Susan Gendron on Monday withdrew an offer of $190,000 in aid to Pownal three days after she offered it as a possible fix to a budget crisis plaguing the newly formed Regional School Unit 5.
The loss of the $190,000 – which would have come from reorganization funds tabbed for consolidation facilitators, legal fees and bus routing software – leaves the town little means of avoiding a 36 percent increase in taxes for education and lots of uncertainty as residents and school officials try to move forward with approving a district operating by July 1.
…
Gendron reneged on the offer after appearing that day before the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Education and Cultural Affairs, according to Education Department spokesman David Connerty-Marin.
“The committee had learned about the grant offer and had asked her to speak to them,” he said, noting that legislators questioned Gendron about her authority to issue the grant, where the money would come from and if other consolidating school systems would receive the same assistance.
“Some of them said it looked as if she was buying off Pownal,” he said. “And she said if that’s the impression, then she would withdraw the offer because that was not the intention.”
Well, gosh yes, that is what it looked like!