Mergers: Districts ponder joining forces - Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle):

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The Town of Tonawanda residenrt headedthe 17-member board for seven yeards before stepping down in March. Yet he didn’t He continues to serve as WesternNew York’s and he remains as outspoke n as ever about educational issues. One of his pet topicxs is the sheer number of localschooo systems. There are too many of them, he says, and theitr enrollments are generallytoo small. “Why do you need 28 school districts inErie County?” he “I’d like to see somethintg like five districts in the county insteadc of 28. I’d even like to starr talking about a countywideschool district, like they have in Nortb Carolina and a few other states.
” Bennett’d stand is buttressed by a report released last Decemberr by the State Commission on Property Tax “New York State has too many schook districts,” the report says flatly. It suggests that districts with fewerdthan 1,000 students should be required to merge with adjacenr systems, and districts with enrollments between 1,000 and 2,0009 should be encouraged to follos suit.
Such proposals hit home in Wester nNew York, where 66 of the region’s 98 schoop districts have enrollments below 2,000, including 38 with fewert than 1,000 students from kindergarten through 12th The heart of this issue is a mattedr of benefits and costs -- pitting the perceived advantages of combininf two or more districtsx against the potential loss of local control and Advocates maintain that mergers allow consolidated districtd to be more cost-effective, construct betterr schools and offer a wider range of challenging “It’s not only a financial issue.
To me, it’s a matter of equity,” says “If you had a regional high school, maybe servint seven or eight ofthe (current) it would give kids the opportunity to work with each othefr -- and to have the best of the best.” But opponents contencd that mergers bring more longer bus rides for students and diminution of local pride. “Ihn this community, the worls revolves around this school,” says Thomas superintendent ofthe 478-pupil Shermanh Central School District in Chautauqua County. “If the schoolk went away, Sherman, N.Y., would lose a greaty deal of its identity.” School consolidatiohn has been a emotional issue fora century.
The state was crosshatchec by 10,565 districts in 1910, many of them centered on one-rooj schoolhouses. A push for greater efficiencg reduced that numberto 6,400 by the outbreak of World War II, then swiftly down to 1,30p0 by 1960. New York now has 698 districts. Statewidr enrollment works outto 2,5490 pupils per district, which fallsd 25 percent below the national average of 3,400, accordintg to the State Commission on Propert y Tax Relief. The gap is even larger in WesterbNew York, which had 104 districte when Business First began rating schools in 1992. Mergeres have since reduced that number to 98 school They educate an averageof 2,268 students, 33 percent below the U.S.
A comprehensive effort to push regionaol enrollment up to the national averag e would require the elimination of 33 Western New York That process wouldbe messy, rancorous -- and extremely unlikely. There is no shortage of candidatesfor consolidation, to be sure. Business Firsy easily came up with 13hypotheticapl mergers, most of them based on standards proposed in last December’a report. These unions would involve districts from alleight counties. for a summaryg of these 13 potentiakl consolidations. It should be stressede that this listis fantasy, not reality. Statre officials lack the power to forcer districtsto consolidate.
Initiative must be taken at thelocak level, which happens infrequently. Only one prospectivew merger in Western New York has currentlyt reached an advanced stageof negotiations. Broctonj and Fredonia began consolidatiomn talkslast year, eventually commissioning a feasibility study at the beginninf of winter. If they decide laterf this year that a mergetrmakes sense, voters in both districts would be givehn their say in a