Maine Gov. Wants Five-Year High School

Following up on a campaign promise, Gov. Paul LePage on Tuesday issued an order that takes a first step toward giving more Maine students the option of a five-year high school education.

The governor's executive order will create a 19-member task force to study and set the stage for changes. The governor chooses 15 members, representing K-12 and post-secondary education, teachers and education associations. The other four members will be legislators.

The task force will survey existing early college opportunities in Maine's high schools, review efforts in other states and countries, and their costs, and make recommendations for funding with existing resources in Maine.

LePage said that while Maine has early college opportunities in place in high schools, it lacks a systematic approach to making them available to students.

"We need to give students some clear options that will encourage them to enter post-secondary education and give them the start they need," he said.

During last year's campaign for governor, LePage floated the idea of having high school students take introductory-level college courses so that in five years of high school, they could graduate with a high school diploma and an associate's degree, or two years of transferable college credits, all for free.

The proposal was part of LePage's campaign report "Turning the Page: New Ideas to Get Maine Working." The report said the proposal for an extra year of high school was borrowed from a similar program in North Carolina. The nonprofit Early College High School Initiative, which promotes systems that blend high school and college, says it has helped bring such offerings to nearly 30 states.

LePage's education commissioner, Steven Bowen, said that Maine does not envision a program as extensive as North Carolina's, where some high schools were built on college campuses.

Instead, the task force looks toward getting a "snapshot" or survey of where opportunities for college courses in high school already exist in Maine, how they work, and what can be done at the state level to make such opportunities available to more students.

Bowen said that during a "listening tour" in which he visited school districts across the state earlier this year, he learned that a patchwork of programs already existed.

"But we just didn't have a good sense from this level what's out there," said Bowen. He expects the study to turn up several different models of how a program can be run. LePage's central goal, Bowen said, is to make college courses available to more Maine students.

"I want every Maine high school student, from their freshman year, to know they have options beyond high school and give them the tools to reach those aspirations," LePage said.

The governor said that in less than a decade, nearly 60 percent of jobs in Maine will require at least some amount of college education. But if more students don't complete high school and earn degrees, "we won't have the workforce required to meet the needs of a 21st century technology- and knowledge-driven economy," he said.

The administration also sees early college courses as an advantage to students in designing career paths while they're in high school. Students pursuing technical fields could, for example, clear away some required courses before delving into their main area of study.