The Maine Citizen’s Assembly on Education Priorities will bring together 64 residents from all 16 counties this month to develop shared recommendations for PK-12 education in the state. The assembly is organized by the Center for Education Policy, Applied Research, and Evaluation (CEPARE) at the University of Southern Maine in partnership with the Maine Education Policy Research Institute (MEPRI).
A citizen’s assembly is a deliberative process in which a representative group of residents studies an issue and develops recommendations. Here, that means a set of priorities for Maine’s next governor and Legislature to improve PK-12 schools. These assemblies are designed to find common ground on potentially contentious issues, and a supermajority of delegates, in this case two-thirds, must approve all final recommendations.
The assembly — a first-of-its-kind in the state — is part of Maine Education 2050, a project whose first phase gathered input from more than 1,000 Mainers about their future goals and challenges and how education and schooling could evolve to help them reach their aspirations. Those conversations, captured in a recent MEPRI report, pointed to three questions now framing the delegates’ work: what students learn, how they learn it and where learning happens.
Jennifer Chace, assistant director of CEPARE, said that while Mainers tend to share a vision for what schools should be, the day-to-day reality varies sharply from community to community, which is why it’s essential to draw delegates from every county.
Chace recalled a student in a rural school who described being able to buy a soft drink from a vending machine at lunch, but had to ask permission to leave the cafeteria to find drinking water. Similarly, some seniors in smaller schools described leaving school for work at 11:00am, because their school doesn’t employ enough teachers to provide seniors with in-person learning on higher-level academic subjects. She says stories like these may not always reach decision-makers in the state’s more populous south.
The 64 delegates were chosen by lottery, four from each county, through a process called sortition. The group is balanced across geography, politics, and age — ranging from teenagers to residents 55 and older.
The assembly will be held on June 17 and 18 at the United Technologies Center, a career and technical high school in Bangor that is donating the space. The first day will open with remarks from USM President Jaqueline Edmondson and be devoted to learning, as panelists and experts discuss the educational landscape in Maine and the system’s challenges and opportunities. On the second day, delegates will deliberate in small, moderated groups to produce a prioritized list of recommendations for action.
The assembly uses an open-source digital platform being developed in parallel for the Scottish Government. Before arriving, delegates will work through a repository of background materials on Maine’s schools, with a built-in AI tool that can answer questions and explain complex information in plain language using only that repository. During the assembly, the platform’s voting tools let delegates weigh options and record the priorities that become their recommendations.
What sets Maine’s assembly apart, Chace said, is what happens after the delegates leave.
“In most citizens’ assemblies, people say, here’s what we think you should do, and the answer is, thank you very much, we’ll take it from here,” Chace said. “That’s usually where it ends. There’s no real path from those ideas to action, so we built one in.”
That path has two more stages. Over the summer, CEPARE and MEPRI researchers and Chace’s USM doctoral students will turn the priorities into draft policy proposals and distribute them to statewide education groups and unselected volunteers for structured feedback via the digital platform. Delegates will reconvene virtually on August 28 to weigh that input, refine the proposals, and vote to approve by a two-thirds supermajority their final recommendations.
The second stage runs through the fall, when a bipartisan group of lawmakers plans to use those recommendations in strategy sessions ahead of the next legislative session.
Chace and her colleagues hope their citizens’ assembly model may be used and improved upon by others to make progress on some of the harder issues facing Maine.
“Both sides have found they have a lot of common interests,” Chace said. “That’s really what we’re hoping happens at the assembly.”
Learn more about the assembly on the Maine Citizen’s Assembly on Education Priorities website.