Residents throughout the Mid-coast region will go to the polls Tuesday to participate in annual school budget validation referendums mandated by the 2007 public education consolidation law shoved through the Legislature by then-Gov. John Baldacci.

The budget validation referendum, on the heels of a town-meeting-style or public hearing review of education cost centers, intends to engage more citizens in a democratic process of establishing school system spending priorities. However, in practice, the law has failed to draw enough diverse parties into the early numberscrunching phases of school budgeting to achieve real consensus and to avoid what has become an annual source of high anxiety for school officials — a Nero-like, up-or-down secret ballot decision that, if negative, would send them back to craft a new budget less than three weeks before the fiscal year starts.

It’s a flawed system, but one with a voter participation component that behooves Mainers to exercise their civic duty at the polls Tuesday. When they vote, we urge them to endorse the local school budgets as proposed.

The time to send messages has passed. Most local school districts launched public budget preparation work in March, affording multiple opportunities for citizens to affect the bottom line and specific line items.

For example, the Regional School Unit 1 budget that appears on the ballot reflects adjustments in local costsharing and funds a Woolwich soccer program zeroed out in earlier drafts because town officials and residents of the district advocated effectively at the right time for those changes.

RSU 1, along with the Mid-coast region’s other school districts, will still faces significant challenges in establishing a sustainable financial model to meet ever-increasing demands on our public education system. Administrators and school board members have already initiated conversations on how to do so. A “no” vote on the 2012-13 school budget would severely curtail those efforts, leaving students as collateral damage.