(Host) Writer and
Commentator Annie Guyon opposes the move in Montpelier
to consolidate school districts, believing the key to reducing budgets is to
keep education local.
Two years ago, the Rockingham School Board was facing the
difficult reality of budget cuts at the middle school, and reductions to
crucial programs seemed imminent.
Concerned parents spread the word, and over 160 citizens
showed up at the next meeting to make their voice heard. After hours of
powerful testimonials–from kids, coaches, parents, grandparents, teachers and
staff-no major reductions came to pass.
This was not due to a sudden discovery of untapped funds; it was because
of the relationships that exist between our School Board, its constituency and
administrators.
The principal was confident that she could pare down other
expenditures in order to avoid making significant cuts to curriculum. Due to her fiscal acumen and awareness of
every paintbrush, book and basketball in her budget, the Board trusted her to
reallocate her limited funds as she saw fit, with one member later attesting
that it is not the School Board’s job to micromanage principals.—
Thanks to certain lawmakers in Montpelier,
however, every school budget in the state could soon end up being micromanaged,
and from afar. Several consolidation
bills being considered would dissolve all existing 280 school districts and 58
Supervisory Unions, replacing them with as few as 14 Supervisory Unions, each
with a sole School Board.
With over 92,000 K-through-12 public school students in the
state, that means there’d be approximately one School Board for every 6,000
kids, who would be spread out over an average of 700 square miles.
As it is, our local School Board works long hours addressing
the unique challenges facing schools with less than a thousand students total
in a 40-square mile jurisdiction. The
notion that one school board would have to serve 6 times as many kids scattered
across 16 times the amount of terrain is not only absurd but goes against core
tenets of Vermont’s educational system, which was founded on the premise of
small schools directly supported by local School Boards. —
Consolidation supporters declare that education is a
business and that installing county-size supervisory unions would allow the
state to achieve the most efficient use of resources on everything from food
services to office supplies, thus reducing cost-per-pupil.
However, numerous studies show that the relationship between
district size and spending is far more complex than the average corporate model
and that consolidation usually proves to be more costly over the long-term due
to school-specific needs that oversized bureaucratic entities simply cannot
predict, much less adequately address.
Consolidation will erode the integrity of Vermont’s
educational ideal, very likely forcing school closures and homogenizing
districts into massive Supervisory Unions that, to me, sound positively
Orwellian. The success and individual
characteristics of our schools will surely be diminished if not derailed by the
misguided and unfounded premise of consolidation as a quick-fix for declining
budgets.
The best way for districts to save money is not to
consolidate but to wisely cultivate the garden in their own administrative
backyards–by hiring good principals and letting them do their jobs.