July 4th celebrations worldwide
Wire walker at Kings Island
Annual hot dog eating contest
Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2007 > March > 18 > Entry
Consolidation: Savings may be fleeting
By Scott Elliott and William Hershey
Staff Writers
RUSSIA, Ohio — There’s another way that might save education dollars — a strategy more states are trying — but in Ohio it’s practically a dirty word.
Consolidation. Michael Moore has heard that one before.
Moore is superintendent in Russia, the Dayton area’s smallest school district with 460 students. The Shelby County district is one of seven rural districts surrounding the city of Sidney. Six of them have fewer than 1,000 students each.
In fact, one in five of Ohio’s 613 school districts is equally small. In other states, incentives or less friendly nudges are prompting small districts to merge in an effort to free up badly needed cash.
“It’s one of those things that gets talked about a lot,” said Ohio House Speaker Jon Husted, R-Kettering.
State Sen. Jeff Jacobson, R-Butler Twp., said consolidation could be the “third rail” in solving school funding woes.
But would merging small districts really bring significant cost savings? A Dayton Daily News analysis says maybe not.
To Moore, savings from consolidation wouldn’t be worth it anyway.
“That does get thrown out quite a bit,” he said. “But there is something to local control, local school boards and a sense of community.”
Close-knit and education-minded Russia is an especially good example, he said.
“We have many people who graduate, go on to college and career elsewhere but still find their way back here,” Moore said. “They like the experience they had in school and they want their kids to have that, too.”
Since Ohio three years ago began calculating a “performance index score,” a measure of achievement across all state tests, Russia has always ranked in the top five of 82 area school districts.
Russia is also one of the lowest spending districts. In 2005-06 it spent $3.5 million, 10 percent less than the next closest Shelby County school district.
Russia spends about $500,000 on administration. If that much could be saved by consolidating each of Ohio’s 122 smallest school districts, it could bring in more than $60 million a year.
But some studies have shown larger consolidated districts add administration costs that eat up any savings.
When the Daily News combined the spending of Shelby County’s seven rural school districts, the 2005-06 figure came to approximately $38.7 million. Compare that to the spending of Warren County’s Lebanon schools — also with just more than 4,900 enrolled — and the cost savings is only $400,000.
Using slightly larger districts tilts the balance the other way. Preble County’s five small school districts enroll 6,900 — roughly the same as Kettering. But the combined school spending in Preble County was $51.9 million. Kettering spent $75.2 million — 41 percent more.
Howard Lee, chairman of the North Carolina State Board of Education, said consolidating large numbers of districts saves money by eliminating “high-dollar” jobs, such as superintendent salaries.
But larger districts also have more administrative costs.
“You may be looking at 10 or 11 superintendents in a territory and if you are you can make a case for huge savings when you cut that personnel,” Lee said. “But you will still need a fairly strong central office. A lot of those superintendents would end up as assistants in charge of various areas.”
Since 1991, North Carolina has aggressively merged districts so that most of its 100 counties have only one school system. But the motivation for mergers there was equal opportunity.
“Several communities had allowed their systems to become racially separated,” Lee said. “There would be a poor, black, low performing city system surrounded by a good, white, wealthy school district.”
The state forced mergers by funding only one school system per county. North Carolina has since gone from 135 school districts in 1991 to 117 today.
The results, Lee said, were mixed. Academic gains were made when mergers were embraced. Cost savings were modest. But there is potential for big savings, he said.
“I am a big advocate of consolidation,” he said. “I think there is an advantage at least of having the schools under a central system serving a larger area and then having that area broken down so communities can have some ownership on the local level. But that requires local school boards to make tough decisions about assignment of students.”
Those decisions will include closing effective and efficient small schools, said Marty Strange, policy director for the Rural School and Community Trust.
“I can flatly say that district consolidation is always a prelude to school consolidation,” he said. “There is just not enough to be gained from district consolidation alone.”
Consolidations will drive up administrative costs, wiping out most savings, Strange said. He pointed to West Virginia, which closed 300 schools in 10 years after a 13 percent drop in enrollment. At the same time, administrative costs jumped 16 percent.
“In small districts, the superintendent is a jack-of-all trades,” Strange said. “They do a lot of functions that are done by specialists at larger districts.”
Small schools are cost effective, he said.
“On a per-graduate basis, a high school with as few as 100 kids has a lower cost-per-graduate than a school with 1,000 kids,” Strange said.
Moore said a merger involving Russia could hurt the quality of education.
“It would change the culture,” he said. “Things are different in different communities. You would lose some of that synergy between community and school.”
(Image credit: Chris Stewart, DDN)
Permalink | | Categories: My Favorite DDN Stories, School Funding
