More on the NYC reforms:
Klein’s management approach has been a bit herky-jerky. While his first years were marked by a tightly controlled, top-down management style, more recently he did an about-face toward decentralization that he prefers to characterize as a natural evolution. . . .
I suspect that busing costs alone will undermine the aspect of the Readiness proposals in Mass. that would further regionalize school districts. Many local officials in the Berkshires (and Hampden, Hampshire and Franklin Counties) felt burned by the state’s assurances that transportation costs would be reimbursed if municipalities created regional districts in the first place.
– Regional school bus transportation funding has never been 100%, the cost does reduce funds available for other school programs. (I know – someone will argue that gas money comes out of a separate pot than local or state appropriations for education, but the connection is there, even if it’s not direct.)
– Legislators with regional school districts are forced to fight at budget time every year to increase (or sustain) the transportation appropriation instead of advocating for other spending priorities for their districts.
The sense of betrayal over the costs of regional school bus transportation may mean that local officials slam the door on the Readiness proposals before they get very far into the text of the document.
Also – There are still non-operating school districts in some of the small towns where the “Live Free or Die” spirit is not just for out-of-state license plates. These small towns would rather pay an annual financial penalty to the state AND pay tuition costs to ship their students to a neighboring school district than join in the politics of active participation in a regional school district.
A few anecdotes about regional school district battles might also elucidate the likely resistance to that aspect of the Readiness proposal. Southern Berkshire Regional School District has had its moments hashing out representation as well as school consolidations and budget.
This will not be resistence originating with teacher’s unions. This will be coming from local officials and from taxpayers who want budget control and who want to preserve property values by ensuring that the local elementary school does not close or reduce its offerings.
Have fun storming the castle!
You may or may not have seen my comment in Mark Bail’s post, but I have to say that regionalization has been a good thing in our five-town Wachusett district. Our district is large, over 7,000 students, and high performing, usually top quartile in performance and bottom quartile in costs. Indeed, our district was the first regionalized district in the state, so our experience is long and rich. Overall, however, despite the budget issues that are not unlike the budget issues in single-town districts, the pitting of towns against one another, the highs and lows of transportation funding, etc., the students in this district are vastly better off than they would have been had regionalization not occurred.
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p>Proposed regionalization initiatives would do well to look at the long history some of the districts in the Commonwealth have had so that they can reap the benefits of regionalized districting and avoid the well-documented traps.
tried to regionalize with neighboring town of South Hadley back in the early 1990’s.
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p>A certain element in South Hadley was very against it for, in my opinion, parochial (not parochial schools) reasons. Excuses included Granby didn’t have a full-time fire department, South Hadley would have to change their mascot (they wouldn’t have), and the plan to make our high school the regional middle school was bad because it was too far away.
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p>One school committee member who was against it and changed his mind was assaulted in front of the grocery story. He eventually moved to Longmeadow.
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p>Our high school is small, but surrounding communities are self-sufficient. They don’t need us. We could have used them.
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p>Mark
why Swampscott and Marblehead didn’t regionalize (whosoever would Swampscott play during the Thanksgiving Day football game?!) Instead of having two small towns (both in land and people) regionalize, we both built huge, beautiful… and most importantly, expensive brand new high schools. Seriously, instead of building one of the best high schools in the state and saving lots of money in the process, both towns decided to spend probably over $100 million while building new high schools within 5 years of each other and being next door to each other. It was absolutely, positively asinine – not only would it have saved the towns money, but a bigger school would have meant more opportunity for the kids with more electives, AP classes, choices, etc.
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p>There were of course some other, small reasons why it never happened (I think the folks in Marblehead were afraid we wouldn’t pass an override to pay for it; though, we obviously did just a few years later), but I swear it was a nonstarter for a lot of the long-time residents of Swampscott (and surely some in Mhead too) because of freaking football.
to put students first.
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p>I taught for years in the tiny town of Shirley, which only had one K-8 school for years. They finally built themselves a middle school in the 5(!)-8 tradition (they were a bit behind the literature on that one), but the entire town is dying on the vine and they have been forced into multi-age classrooms. For YEARS they have bickered with Ayer and Lunenberg about regionalizing, but they could never get beyond their parochial (great word, Mark) sensibilities.
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p>Well, it appears the state has had enough. Somehow, I hear through the grapevine, the DOE is forcing their hands into a clasp, an arranged marriage, if you will. There’s a reason I left teaching in Shirley, though, and I suspect those reasons will be front and center in eighty-sixing any reasonable hope for a sensible solution to the too-small-a-town problem.
Would be great for the Commonwealth but I do not know if it is workable. I spent a great deal of time researching this topic in college.
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p>Fire Departments and equipment are the biggest area that I feel should be regionalized. Mutual aid agreements can only do so much. The fact that almost every municipality is in an agreement for mutual aid shows that there is a need to regionalize. Many cities and towns could bennifit with regional districts from everything from schools to public works to public safety. There is a great deal to bwe gained in economy of scale.
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p>The state could bennifit from regionalism. The big question is HOW does the GOV get this passed when he couldn’t even cut down on police details, get municipalities to join the GIC, get municipalities to join the state pension trust fund.
I like the ides but sooner or later we have to talk about HOW, especially when we are talking about changing the very culture of our current municipal system.
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p>Wow that was longer than I thought.
Several towns in the area where I live are trying to get state funds for varoius types of schools: these towns include Stow, Maynard, and Concord-Carlisle. In some cases there are trying to get money for exactly the same type of school. Regionalization would reduce the costs of school construction. It is possible that in some parts of the state such as in the west transportation costs would increase dramatically, but Mynard is so small in area that adding it to a regional school district would not appreciably increse transportation costs.