By DOUG SCHMITZ
Iowa Correspondent

HARLAN, Ky. — Iowa’s move toward rural school consolidation has been a growing – and often unwelcome – trend across the Hawkeye State, as well as other Midwest states as rural and suburban families are choosing city life.
“From what we know anecdotally, there seems to have been an increase in school consolidation initiatives in the last couple of years,” said Robin Lambert, editor of Rural Policy Matters (RPM) at the Rural School and Community Trust in Harlan, Ky. “Most of these seem to be in school districts with several schools, and most seem to involve the closure of smaller, more remote schools; often elementary schools, after the high school has already been consolidated.”
In fact, a 2009 school consolidation proposal – which was later rejected by most parents and most Iowa school systems – called for drastically reducing the number of school districts from 362 to 144.

“People are very reluctant to give up their schools,” Steffen Schmidt, an Iowa State University professor of political science, told the Des Moines Register in February 2009. “It means you lose your team, your community identity, everything that makes people happy to pay taxes, because it’s their school that gets lost.”

David Peters, ISU assistant professor of sociology and extension rural sociologist, said economically, a K-12 district is also often the largest employer in the community, “so a loss of the district or even a school building means loss of jobs and its associated spending in the local economy.

“Socially, for many rural towns, the ‘community’ is defined by the school district,” he added. “A place’s identity, culture, history and sense of its place in the world is often tied to the high school.”

But Lambert said first it’s important to distinguish between the two types of consolidation: school and district.

“Most of the initiatives that I saw in (the Midwest) are state proposals to encourage or force the consolidation of districts,” she said. “Many claim that district consolidation saves administrative costs by reducing the number of superintendents; and most claim that district consolidation would not mean the consolidation of local schools.”

She said evidence suggests otherwise on both counts. “In reality, district consolidation almost always leads to school consolidation, and states with the most heavily-consolidated districts also have the most heavily-consolidated schools,” she explained. “If local communities want to keep their schools, they need to keep school governance as close to the community/school level as possible.”

The bottom line, Lambert said, is when districts were merged, “the communities that lost governance had a high rate of subsequently losing all or most of the grades in their local schools.”

She said the most recent research that looked at what actually happened post-district consolidation comes from Arkansas, where the state mandated a minimum district size. “Smaller districts had several options for getting bigger (i.e., annexation, consolidation, etc.),” she said.

In Illinois, Gov. Pat Quinn has proposed mandatory consolidation to dramatically reduce the number of districts, while leaving some larger city districts intact. “By some counts, the proposal would establish countywide districts, but some reports say about 300 districts,” Lambert said.

While Lambert said Quinn indicated that district consolidation won’t close schools, but would eliminate administrators, “other proposals in the state clearly suggest that the real goal is to eliminate schools; there is also a proposal (maybe already enacted) to cut state support for transportation.

“This would likely hurt rural districts more than others because rural districts generally have higher per-pupil transportation costs, for obvious reasons; and, school consolidation raises transportation costs in rural areas, again, for obvious reasons,” she added.

Indiana is already heavily consolidated for a Midwest state. While Lambert said she didn’t find anything on consolidation initiatives this year, she found research from Indiana University that suggested “there would be few benefits from district consolidation.”

In Michigan, there were proposals to consolidate earlier this year. In a Sept. 28, 2010, RPM article, Lambert said a fairly extensive analysis explores some of the ideological issues that sometimes arise when consolidation is debated.
Then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm included in her state budget recommendation a proposal to set aside $50 million of Michigan’s School Aid Fund for a competitive grant program, to encourage districts to consolidate or develop shared services arrangements. The grant money was to be “used to defray up-front expenses, like buying common administrative software incurred when districts merge or combine certain operations.”

Last year, there was a report recommending consolidation of Ohio school districts, Lambert said. But she added, “I did not find much movement on consolidation this year.”

A Feb. 25, 2010, RPM article cited a report recommending consolidation for at least 200 of Ohio’s school districts: “Previous task forces and other groups have studied the issue in Ohio without resolution,” the article read. Currently, neither the Ohio Department of Education nor the state Board of Education can force districts to merge under current law.

“The study recommends that school districts enter shared services agreements,” the RPM article read. “It also recommends the creation of a commission to mandate best practices in administration and a reduction in the number of Ohio school districts by at least one-third.”

Like other Southern states, most of Tennessee’s rural schools are in countywide school districts, Lambert said.

“Much of the debate that’s in the news is focused on the potential consolidation of the Memphis city schools with surrounding Shelby County,” she said. “The issues related to urban consolidations are very different from those in rural areas.”

Much research is available on the impact of school size on student outcomes, which Lambert said is surprisingly consistent: smaller schools are better for student achievement, graduation, student behavior, student involvement in extracurricular activities and parent involvement in their children’s schools and education.

In the end, the culture emphasizes students are a reflection of the community, and this pressure to not “let down” your community in part explains better educational outcomes in rural districts, Peters said.

“For course offerings, the most important part of K-12 education is to have a solid foundation upon which students can build their skills through higher education,” he said.

(This is the second of a two-part series; the first part was printed in the June 8 issue.)