BY MATTHEW STONE

Staff Writer

During Susan Hodgdon's last year as a school superintendent in Maine, a state law pushing school districts to consolidate their administrative offices consumed much of her time.

Now, as superintendent of the two-town New Hampshire School Administrative Unit 41, Hodgdon finds one of her towns weighing a separation from the other.

"I went for the two extremes," said Hodgdon, who moved to the New Hampshire school system in July after two years as superintendent of School Union 44, which serves Litchfield, Sabattus and Wales.

As Maine continues with its push to lower the number of school districts in the state, New Hampshire is trending in the opposite direction.

By July 1 of next year, the Maine Department of Education is hoping the state will be down to 80 school districts from the current count of 290. In New Hampshire, the number of school districts -- or School Administrative Units, as they are known in the Granite State -- is likely to continue inching up.

Since 2000, eight new school administrative units have formed in New Hampshire, largely the result of individual towns deciding to split from multi-town school units. The state now has 85 school administrative units, up from 77 in 2000. Separate school districts, approximately 175 of them mostly drawn upon municipal lines, make up the larger administrative units.

Unlike in Maine, where the mandate for districts to consolidate comes from the state, New Hampshire's school districts have decided to split independently of any state government push.

Since New Hampshire disburses state funding to individual municipal districts, and not to School Administrative Units, the state would not save money from pushing towns to merge into larger school systems, said Sarah Browning, special assistant to New Hampshire's education commissioner.

New Hampshire superintendents and other school officials cite a variety of factors driving some of the state's school administrative units to separate.

In Hodgdon's School Administrative Unit 41, municipal officials in Hollis have formed a task force to consider separating from longtime partner Brookline.

"The largest issue driving that is a community's identity," Hodgdon said. "I think that's very similar to what I experienced with my work on consolidation in Maine."

In New Hampshire, said Theodore Comstock, executive director of the New Hampshire School Boards Association, many communities seek closer control over their local schools. It's the same spirit that has formed the crux of many residents' opposition to school-district consolidation in Maine.

"We pride ourselves as sort of the bastion of local control," Comstock said of the Granite State.

To be sure, New Hampshire schools rely less on the state for funding than their Maine counterparts.

With no sales or income tax, local property taxes supply the bulk of New Hampshire schools' funding. Public schools received approximately 38 percent of their funding from the state during the 2006-07 academic year, according to Department of Education data.

A 2005 law in Maine obligated the state to supply 55 percent of what it deemed "essential programs and services" funding for the 2008-09 academic year. The state, however, is providing only 52.9 percent of those funds for the coming academic year.

According to Comstock, the Granite State towns that have sought state approval to split from their school administrative unit partners have tended to be wealthy communities.

The state Board of Education must first confirm a proposal to split is legal, said Browning, of the Department of Education. The community seeking to split then takes a vote.

In Maine, Hodgdon noted, the state looked to school district consolidation as a means of cutting back on administrative costs.

"Here, I think there's some sentiment that money could be saved by going it alone and streamlining services," Hodgdon said.

In Barnstead, N.H., voters decided to end their partnership with Pittsfield, N.H., schools and form School Administrative Unit 86, one of two new school systems that came on line in July.

Barnstead paid 52 percent of school costs while Pittsfield assumed 48 percent of the costs, Superintendent William Compton said.

Residents "felt, well, if we're contributing that kind of money, we might as well be running our own show," he said.

The town's split from Pittsfield, Compton said, was also driven by educational considerations. Barnstead, whose schools serve students in kindergarten through eighth grade, did not send its students to Pittsfield's high school.

"They wanted to coordinate their curriculum and their programs and go in that direction," Compton said.

More than an hour to Barnstead's west, in Sunapee, N.H., residents voted to separate their two schools -- which serve students from kindergarten through high school -- from partners Croydon and Newport. Sunapee's new school system, School Administrative Unit 85, began operating in July.

Superintendent Brendan Minnehan said forming a new administrative unit with Sunapee's two schools, which serve approximately 500 students, removed a layer of bureaucracy for the schools' staff members.

"They can contact me directly and not go through anyone else," he said, noting the system's central office was located in a different town.

The change was an easy one for Sunapee, Minnehan said.

"In our situation," he said, "we already had our own high school and our own middle school, so we didn't have to really change our infrastructure too much."

Hodgdon might soon find her time consumed by another school district reorganization in her New Hampshire district. But if Hollis decides to split from Brookline, she said, the decision will have come after a careful, drawn-out series of deliberations.

"I see this process unlike consolidation in Maine," she said. "I see this process unfolding more slowly over a longer period of time. I'm impressed with the thoughtful approach that's been taken."

Maine Gov. John Baldacci signed the school-district consolidation mandate in June 2007.

By July 1, 2009, the merged school districts are expected to be in operation.

"The timeline didn't allow for stepping back and looking at options," Hodgdon said. "The command was that you must consolidate whereas this (separation study in New Hampshire) is a study of what is more feasible."

Matthew Stone -- 623-3811, Ext. 435

mstone@centralmaine.com