Why are so many Maine school districts rejecting their budgets?
By Cameron Levasseur, The County Staff
More than three weeks into July and the start of the fiscal year for Maine’s nearly 200 school districts, at least 16 are without a new budget after facing rejection from voters in June referendums.
It’s a sharp increase from 2024, when voters shot down at least five budgets around the state, a Bangor Daily News analysis found. No organization keeps comprehensive data on budget referendums in Maine.
Each district had its own idiosyncrasies that caused voters to say “no,” but several blanket themes — ranging from rising property taxes to national debates over education — emerged across the state this summer as school administrators have grappled with whether the recent budget woes are an anomaly or the start of a trend.
“I wouldn’t characterize it as a deluge of failed [budget validation referendums],” Maine School Management Association Executive Director Eric Waddell said. “But I think certainly for the districts that are involved in it, it’s a problem. It’s a big problem.”
Property tax concerns
It’s no secret that property taxes in Maine have risen in recent years, as revaluations and burgeoning municipal budgets have shouldered homeowners with larger bills.
Maine’s property tax burden — the average percentage of personal income paid as property tax — sits at 4.14 percent, fifth-highest in the nation, according to a study by finance website WalletHub.
So when an increased school budget threatens to push that burden higher, more voters are inclined to oppose it.
“That is a pressure that voters are feeling,” said Mark Brewer, a professor who chairs the University of Maine’s political science department and a member of the school board for Orono-based RSU 26. “That leads at least some voters, when the opportunity comes, to go to a town meeting or go to the polls, to reject the school budget.”
Of the 16 districts where voters rejected budgets, 10 were set to increase spending by more than 5 percent over the previous year. In Lisbon, where residents rejected a proposed budget increase of 3.2 percent, the town is facing a $2.4 million revenue shortfall following the discovery of an accounting error last year. Such an increase in the school budget could potentially raise property taxes by as much as 8 percent.
“I don’t think it’s a referendum on support of the schools, necessarily,” Waddell said. “I think it’s a cry for help in communities like those … they’re saying this is not sustainable, the cost of education is not sustainable.”
Low voter turnout and coordinated opposition
Off-year elections, like 2025, historically see significantly lower voter turnout than in even years. That, compounded by the fact that school budget validation referendums are typically held in June, means even fewer residents go to the polls.
Caribou, the largest municipality in the two-town RSU 39, has nearly 6,000 registered voters. Residents overwhelmingly shot down the district’s budget, 443-146, in its first referendum on June 10. That was a total of 589 voters, or 34 percent less than the 887 that turned out to approve the district’s fiscal year 2025 budget last summer, 468-419.
“Obviously I’m disappointed with the lack of support from the community on this budget, but I think I’m more disappointed with the small number of voters that came out,” RSU 39 Superintendent Jane McCall told the BDN on July 9 — after a second proposed budget also failed at a referendum with 711 votes cast.
And in towns across the state, coordinated anti-budget campaigns — many leveraging social media to connect with residents — have become more prevalent.
In Gorham, where the school budget passed by just over 200 votes, a group opposing raising taxes called the Gorham Watchdogs has nearly 10,000 Facebook followers and runs its own website. In Fort Kent and Wallagrass, town councilors and select board members passed resolutions opposing the MSAD 27 budget days before the June 10 referendum.
“The coordination of political efforts can always have an impact,” Brewer said. “But it has an outsized impact in lower turnout elections and school budget elections, because usually there’s not much else on the ballot or at the meeting.”
Rising rhetoric against the state of education
During his third presidential campaign, Donald Trump continuously railed against the state of K-12 schools in the U.S., calling for the Department of Education to be dismantled. In March, he signed an executive order attempting to do just that, telling a joint session of congress that he was “getting wokeness out of our schools.”
It’s the biggest step in a movement spearheaded by the Trump administration to uproot the American education system and remove what it calls “toxic ideals.” Trump threatened to pull all federal K-12 education funding in Maine earlier this year over a conflict with Gov. Janet Mills over the state’s non-cooperation with an executive order banning transgender participation in sports.
It’s not the first time major politicians have called for change in how Americans are educated. But the character of these attacks is new, Brewer said, and could be impacting how Mainers view education in the state.
“If you go back and look at, say, George W. Bush years and you look at the complaints against education that led to No Child Left Behind, that’s different from the tone and tenor of some complaints today,” Brewer said. “Whether it’s, ‘They’re not concentrating on the right things,’ ‘They’re too woke,’ the complaints vary, but the complaints have gotten louder.”
Frustration with municipal budgets
In Maine’s 41 municipalities that operate in a council form of government without town meetings, residents do not vote on the town budget. So the school budget is the only way voters can directly influence local spending at the polls, becoming a possible punching bag for residents frustrated with the overall tax increases.
“In many cases, a ‘no’ vote on the [budget validation referendum] could be as much of a vote on the municipal budget,” Waddell said. “In the absence of an opportunity to cast a vote on that, they’re saying, ‘Well I’m just going to vote no on the school budget.’”
Gray, Caribou and Fairfield — the biggest municipalities in their respective districts that voted down school budgets — operate as council-manager governments.
Education costs are rising. It might not be sustainable.
Waddell, who for 13 years until July 1 was superintendent of the Kittery School District, is concerned about where rising school costs are trending.
“I worry, not specifically about RSU 39 or MSAD 27 or MSAD 70 or any [school administrative unit] in particular, but frankly, I worry about school funding statewide,” Waddell said.
“I don’t see the costs of running a school going down. In fact, I just see them increasing.”
Around the state, from Kennebunk to Fort Kent, voters showed their opposition to shouldering the weight of those increases this summer. Anomaly or not, that pattern puts the spotlight on education funding — and how it may be forced to adapt.
“The way we’ve been paying for schools over the past several decades, I’m not sure that’s a model we can continue to sustain,” Waddell said. “We in education are going to have to become increasingly creative with ways to reduce the cost of education.”