Gov. Paul LePage pushed an agressive education reform agenda in the last legislative session and walked away with some clear victories. They include an expansion of career and technical education, tough new teacher and principal evaluation rules and the switch to a proficiency-based high school diploma. The governor's school choice proposals did not fare as well. This afternoon, members of a special study group began meeting to figure out what role, if any, school choice ought to play in Maine.

The governor wants to see the the state move in the direction of greater school choice. One proposal from last winter -- that the choice work group will spend a lot of time discussing -- would create an open enrollment system in the state, where parents could send kids to so-called "schools of choice" outside their home districts.

"We did have a couple of choice proposals. The education committee wasn't prepared to move on those," says Maine Education Commissioner Stephen Bowen. "I think what the Legislature felt comfortable doing is saying, 'Why don't you put a group together to sort of dig into these issues a little more?'"

Over the next few months, Bowen will be working with members of special school choice work group. The panel is made up of officials from the state's four major education unions and six gubernatorial appointees. Bowen says the group will devise a school choice system for the state and forward the recommendations on to the Legislature.

"You know, what do we mean by school choice? What's the public policy objective we're trying to solve here? Why do we want kids to be able to go to school in the town next door if they want to?" Bowen says. "You know, there's some issues we're going to wade into. You know, we've got models. This model we came into the Legislature with was a model in a lot of other states -- this open enrollment model."

Maine has had a form of school choice for decades. Superintendents can approve transfers between districts. There are also the town academies -- private independent schools that accept kids from towns and districts that don't have their own high schools.

An open enrollment system, though, would be substantial change in policy. If a child is stuck in a struggling school, for example, open enrollment would allow the parents to pull the kid out and send them to a better public school 60 miles away.

"I would say that it's up to that parent who lives in a community that has schools that are struggling, they should step up to the plate and do everything possible to work to improve those schools," says Jackie Perry, who serves on the school board in Scarborough and is representing the Maine School Boards Association on the choice panel.

Perry, like many critics of open enrollment, worries that such proposals would lead to a two-tiered education system, where wealthier families could flee their districts for better ones, leaving poorer children behind, stuck in schools receiving less and less state money with each passing year.

Gov. LePage's open enrollment bill would have required families to shoulder the cost of transporting their kids to other districts. Don Reiter is Principal at Waterville Senior High School. "Generally, transportation is not a part of open enrollment policies," he says.

Reiter, who's representing the Maine Principals Association on the panel, says the administration would be be smart to come up with a way to pay for the transportation piece. "I think it would frame the conversation differently," he says.

Commissioner Bowen says the administration is committed to looking at creative ways to provide more support for transportation. It's just one of a range of tough school choice questions the panel will tackle in the coming months.