Only in Maynard

The people who care about Maynard's schools are in a tough spot. The voters, by a narrow majority, have persistently rejected all building plans that would partially address the accreditation probation that the high school is under, no matter how overdue and no matter how much of the tab the Massachusetts School Building Administration would pick up.

Here we have the school administration exploring the end of their own jobs, that's how bad it is. Maynard is ringed by regional school districts that might in theory take Maynard on as a partner. That would mean the end of Maynard's central administration.

Of course, Concord-Carlisle, Acton-Boxborough, and Nashoba are not interested. Maynard's drowning its schools in Grover Norquist's bathtub. Why would anyone with excellent to good schools want that problem?

Regional schools districts are an idea whose time has passed for the most part, though Maynard's high school of only 350 students is too small under current fiscal constraints and could use a region. Maynard missed the boat fifty years ago when the other regions were forming.

Nashoba doesn't want to average its better MCAS scores with Maynard's. It doesn't make any mathematical sense to judge a school's impact by its average score

On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised to find that another 50 kids would come back out of interdistrict public school choice and private schools if Maynard High were replaced with a spiffy new building. They might be wrong to do so, though - the bricks and mortar don't do any teaching, and the Maynard electorate's history is not one of great support, especially not assuming a big ticket capital item like a school made it to the tax rolls.

All in all, not an enviable position for people who care about public education.