The reasons?

The state’s rule against merit pay for teachers, and top-down inflexibility, said discouraged Southwest Washington program leaders who broke the news Friday.

Victims include Evergreen and Union high schools in east Vancouver. They were among seven statewide that stood to win an average of $114,000 for AP teacher training and courses for the 2008-09 school year.

Despite weeks of talks, no way  was found around teachers union collective bargaining rules to meet the rigid guidelines of the grant organization.

Texas-based NMSI insisted that new AP teachers be compensated directly, including extra pay based on students who pass an end-of-course AP exam and thus qualify for early college credits. There was to have been a sliding scale for poor and more-privileged schools, too.

That’s directly counter to Washington teachers union contracts that require collective bargaining on such issues.

Six other states were given identical five-year grants last September. They are Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Kentucky, Massachusetts and Virginia; some are “right-to-work” states with weaker union laws than Washington’s.

But NMSI protocols proved untenable in Washington.

Among those saddened was state Rep. Bill Fromhold, D-Vancouver, who declared this year that he would not run again so he could instead administer the NMSI grant, in a team with his wife, Marcia. Now, the job has evaporated.

“I’m just disappointed about this, because I had such strong feelings that this could be a success,” Fromhold said.

He did not blame union leaders in Vancouver or in Spokane and Seattle, where five more schools were in line for grants.

Fromhold said NMSI simply wouldn’t budge, no matter how many approaches were tried.

“(They) held fast on how the additional compensation would be calculated … precisely how it got paid, who it got paid to,” Fromhold said. “That gets right in the middle of the employment relationship between the district and the teacher.

“The districts, the (teacher) associations tried hard to get this matter solved,” he said.

Dave Boroughs, Evergreen teachers union president, said nothing in the grant application process hinted at trouble.

“Everybody was kind of blind-sided,” Boroughs said. “What it is, is not what we applied for.”

A private-public partnership, NMSI is bankrolled largely by Exxon. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation are contributors.

A NMSI spokesman could not be reached Friday for comment.

Rich Wood, spokesman for the Washington Education Association, said many nonprofits have granted money to school districts without this outcome.

“Some outside group can’t impose a new system of pay on teachers,” Wood said. “That’s just not the way that schools work in our state.”

Whatever its root cause, the failure pained Vancouver’s Scott Keeney. The president and chief executive officer of nLight Photonics is also leader of the local Mentoring Advanced Placement (MAP) group, chosen to administer the NMSI grant statewide.

While MAP will continue to match a growing number of local math and science mentors with AP students, loss of the NMSI grant is “a tragedy,” Keeney said.

“We knew it would take some discussions, but we didn’t expect not to be able to get through this. This is a major setback for Southwest Washington, and Washington state,” Keeney said.

“The real shame here is that it’s more than $13.2 million: It would have been matched by other private sector (donations),” he said. “It was all new money coming to teachers. It wouldn’t have taken anything away from anybody.”

Marcia Fromhold will wrap up the loose ends of the grant process, then leave MAP, Bill Fromhold said. She retains her local political consulting business; his plans are unclear, he said.

Howard Buck covers schools and education. Reach him at howard.buck@columbian.com or 360-735-4515.