It's broken -- let's fix it

In a couple weeks, the more than 30 school districts across the north country will be inviting the public into their houses to discuss the budget plans for the coming school year. While residents in nearly every district will be hearing the words “layoff” and “sacrifice”, in reality those layoffs and sacrifices will fluctuate wildly from district to district, depending on a variety of variables that cumulatively serve to decrease the quality of education in rural schools.

So I have a modest proposal: the state Legislature should authorize counties to consolidate all school districts into one countywide district, and then provide carrot-and-stick incentives to make it happen.

While New York continues to struggle along with its tiny school districts and widely divergent levels of district wealth, tax levels and programs, schools in many states already have districts run by one central administration at the county level. It's not like the concept is foreign here; Boards of Cooperative Educational Services have long operated smoothly on multicounty levels. County school districts would merely kick that up a notch.

There are obvious advantages. The first, of course, is having a single superintendent of schools. This would be a serious position that would attract top-notch talent and pay a significant salary. In return, dozens of superintendents' positions with their highest-in-district salaries could be eliminated. Schools could have building principals, which most already have, and nearly all schools could continue to operate in local communities, without losing their local identity.

Transportation services could be operated out of regional centers, saving money on personnel, acquisition, servicing and other costs. District boundaries could be tweaked to make optimum use of both transportation routes and available classroom space. All of the existing high schools, at least at first, could be maintained. Special services such as speech therapy, psychology and special education could be regionalized, probably providing better, more consistent service at lower cost.

Rather than having a dozen teacher contracts, the county district could provide leveled, fairer salaries between the various schools. The same could be achieved with other unions, and with nonunion personnel. And administration could make staffing decisions viewing the larger scene, transferring some teachers to schools that need them, from schools that probably don't. This would provide greater stability for staff members, who would be less likely to become sudden victims of position cuts due to falling revenues or fewer students.

And the students would benefit from a more consistent, less arbitrary curriculum. It would certainly seem, for example, that a winning strategy for getting troubled schools off state lists could be developed on the larger playing field and smoothly transferred among schools that need it, as they need it.

As for financing of education, this will take the 705 districts down to a much more manageable level, and allow the legislature to come up with an aid-to-education formula that makes sense. It also would level the property tax burden, especially for the paper-rich districts whose residents are primarily not wealthy. And, as an ancillary benefit, it would finally put pressure on municipalities to adopt real true-value assessment — something the state desperately needs. After all, if all assessing units in the county are at full-value, there is a single countywide tax rate under this plan.

Finally, it would take much of the pedestrian local politics out of the school systems. One need only look at situations that have occurred in Carthage Central and General Brown Central in recent years, and in nearly every other district at one time or another, to see that once petty disputes and off-the-reservation behavior are removed, the schools will run better.

New York's schools are not functioning right now. There are too many variables, too many arbitrary and capricious decisions driving too many important issues. Consolidating one or two districts isn't a solution. Going to countywide districts would catch New York up with many of the states where education is working.