and I don’t hear a whole hell of a lot of good from any of the gubernatorial wannabes.
Here’s the story, Officials see moves toward school district mergers (Barre/Montpelier Times Argus, 06/27/10), and it’s all about centralizing command and control over our for now local schools … you know … the ones that have Vermont consistently ranked at or near the top when it comes to national standards.
A constant bitch theme seems to be the administrative overhead. Yet I hear so much adoration for a system (Act 153) that encourages MORE spending on administration to figure out how to spend less on administration.
Although Shumlin did try, I haven’t heard a single sensible answer to the question: if consolidation makes such eminent fiscal sense, why does the state have to offer financial incentives for schools to do so?
The truth is it doesn’t. School districts have looked at it over the decades and a huge majority have rejected it.
I haven’t heard anyone really attack what I see as the issue with mergers below the union high school level: In many communities, the school is the center of town life. It is the place where the town comes together. It serves as the meeting location for the town. It provides the recreation fields. It may provide the workers who maintain the fields. It probably hosts music and theater events for the town. It is often centrally located, and ideal to serving these diverse purposes.
If a town gives up local control of their school system, then whether that school stays open or not is dependent on a neighboring community. It can be hard to trust that neighbor (especially if larger) to appreciate all that the school does for the town. In this time of declining school enrollments, many believe that the ultimate cost savings will come from school consolidation — and, to be honest, I’m not sure that they aren’t right. Certainly smaller towns are not going to want to risk merger with larger towns, unless they are truly desperate. Add in the distance between towns, and not wanting young kids on buses for long period of times, and it is no wonder there has been resistance.
Our current school set up may not be cost wise sustainable in an era of declining student counts, but that is an extremely difficult argument to make, when recognizing it means we have to find new ways to organize our towns, not just our schools.
Sigh…