"You know the old saying, 'It takes a village to raise a kid,' but you have got to have the kids to have a village."

Steven Steward

Bingham First Selectman

Maine's school enrollments are going down because Maine's school-age population is declining. In 2000, 26 percent of Maine's population were school-age children; that percentage dropped to 22 percent in 2005. According to the Brookings Institution, there are 13,000 fewer students in Maine schools than a decade ago; in 2015, there will be 24,000 fewer students than in 1995.

The decline is not happening evenly across the state. Maine's most-rural communities are taking the brunt of it. Enrollment in the Somerset County school district that includes Bingham and Moscow dropped 10 percent between last school year and the current one. In the district that includes Phillips, Eustis, Avon, Kingfield and Strong, the graduating class this year is almost 80 students -- but the incoming class of kindergartners will only be about 50 children.

You don't have to be an economist to know why. These rural towns once were home to thriving industries, most of them based on natural resources. There were dowel, lumber and toothpick mills, tanneries and corn shops and dairies. That presence is now largely a dim memory, along with the jobs and many of the ancillary stores and businesses supported by the people who held those jobs.

With those departed industries goes a major part of a community's identity. Wilton was the Bass shoe town, for example; long after that company exited Wilton, the building that housed its operations is still referred to by old timers as the "old Bass shoe shop." It's hard to shake the memory of the central feature of your town, let alone the language that reflected its dominance.

Now, though, what's left of a community's identity rests increasingly in the local school. Without a place where everyone goes to work, without a large employer whose fortunes were bound to the fortunes of an entire town, the one place where local interest converges is an elementary, middle or high school, or all three. That's where a community comes together, where parents can see one another and talk, where the fortunes of townspeople (both their tax dollars and their children) are the focus of intense interest.

Without those schools, what is left?

Yet that's the scenario that may be down the line -- or just around the corner -- for any number of rural Maine schools in economically depressed communities where the lack of jobs means fewer and fewer residents, including children. As reporter Alan Crowell described this past Sunday, "unless young families start moving in, school closures might be inevitable."

That was just the decision facing School Administrative District 74 this year, which includes the towns of Solon, Embden, New Portland and Anson. A small district with only 820 students, enrollments have dropped more than five percent just in the last year. With only 31 students signed up for kindergarten so far (about half the number of recent classes), a district committee devised a plan to close two of the district's four schools. But parents criticized the plan and the school board ultimately rejected it.

It's a decision that makes sense from an emotional perspective. Yet with decreasing enrollments come higher per-student costs, as districts maintain administrative staff and teachers while bleeding students. That's inefficient and a prescription for higher taxes. Keeping rural schools with declining student populations open also poses other costs: when those schools must be replaced -- as many of them must be in the next decade -- that's millions of tax dollars spent on building schools for fewer and fewer kids.

Certainly, legitimate arguments can be made for keeping such schools open -- arguments both educational and emotional. They are the center of a community. A small school with small classes is an educationally more intimate place. But the question remains: Can Maine afford them any more?

As Bingham's First Selectman Steven Steward wisely said, you've got to have the kids to have a village. Declining student enrollment is a symptom of a much larger problem facing our rural communities: There just isn't the employment to keep working families in most of those small towns. Closing a local school is a very painful way to have to acknowledge that fact.