Students walk the halls between classes at Scarborough Middle School in April. Voters rejected a $160 million bond to renovate the town’s aging and overcrowded schools last year. Now, the governor has created a commission to study how Maine pays for major school projects like the one facing Scarborough. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer

Maine is full of aging school buildings that are overcrowded and often fail to meet modern standards. But when plans to build a new school or do major renovations come up for a bond vote, they’re often rejected by voters, leaving the community with few options to update their facilities.

Gov. Janet Mills signed an executive order on Friday establishing a statewide commission that will study the state’s system for funding school renovation and construction projects for the first time since 1998.

“Every child in Maine should be able to attend a safe, modern, efficient and accessible public school – regardless of the community in which they live,” Mills said in a statement Friday. “It’s time for a new look at how Maine pays for school construction.”

Mills’ order creates the Commission on School Construction, a group of state leaders and educators tasked with assessing the system for financing school infrastructure projects. The 13-member commission’s job is to identify statewide construction needs, study how other states fund similar projects and recommend statewide policy changes in a report that it must complete by April 15.

Former Maine Department of Labor Commissioner Valerie Landry will head the group. The commission is modeled after a bill that was proposed, but did not pass, in the Legislature last spring, the governor’s office said in a statement. Other members will include several state commissioners, three school superintendents and representatives from the construction industry, the state’s bond bank and educational associations.

That includes Steven Bailey, executive director of the Maine School Boards Association, a statewide nonprofit that advocates for the policy interests of school boards.

“Maine schools are woefully behind in being able to be taken care of in terms of their physical structures,” Bailey said. “So this is a great first step.”

Bailey said he has traveled the state for his work, observing schools with overly compact wooden rooms, buildings with insufficient heat and ventilation systems, and schools lacking modern windows. He hopes the commission helps keep momentum on the issue, which he described as urgent.

More than 500 active Maine schools were built before the 1990s, and 243 of them were built before the 1960s, Eileen King, the executive director of the Maine School Superintendents Association, said in a prepared statement.

“This data demonstrates the urgent need to fund school construction in a manner that will provide our students with healthy and safe learning environments that will meet the learning needs of today’s students and can offer equitable access to resources while serving as central hubs for communities,” King said.

The most direct path for building a new school is through a bond, voted on by local taxpayers. But it’s not uncommon for communities to reject a bond, like the Cape Elizabeth and Cumberland-North Yarmouth districts did in 2022 when voters called the respective measures too expensive.

The only other route is a state grant, awarded every five years out of a pool of roughly $150 million. In the last cycle, just nine out of 74 applicants were given funding. For smaller projects, there are loans available from the state, but in 2023 just a quarter of applicants were approved.

The governor’s office said Friday that despite investments in education infrastructure, construction needs are still much higher than the state can afford.

“Available funding continues to outpace construction and renovation needs and Maine’s aging school infrastructure is expected to require additional investment in the years ahead,” the governor said in her statement.