Nineteen to five. No, it’s not the final score of a one-sided baseball game.
They’re key numbers in the latest round of discussions about consolidating Delaware school districts — shrinking the current 19 districts down to no more than five.
State Senator Michael Katz (D-Centreville) has introduced a resolution, SJR 4, that calls for a nine-member task force to complete a report by June 1, 2012, on how to implement a consolidation by July 1, 2014. Last week, the Senate Education Committee discussed the proposal and decided it needed amendments, primarily relating to how task force members would be chosen.
With the Delaware General Assembly now on a two-week break while the Joint Finance Committee works on the FY2012 budget bill, no further action on Katz’s proposal is likely until June. Katz said he hopes the measure will come to a vote before the legislative session ends June 30.
Katz’s resolution comes fast on the heels of a proposal by Senate President Pro Tem Anthony DeLuca (D-Varlano) to merge the state’s three county vocational-technical school districts into one.
[caption id="attachment_11689" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Delaware's school consolodation history (Click Image to enlarge)."]
District-level school officials, as might be expected, are responding cautiously to Katz’s proposal but they’re not dismissing it outright. Daniel Cruce, the state’s deputy secretary of education, states bluntly: “It’s driving the right conversations up and down the state.”
With the state facing another lean budget year, Katz contends that reducing the number of school districts would shrink administrative overhead and allow school districts to redirect the money saved into classrooms. However, Katz says it’s not just about the money. “In education, as in the rest of government, we should regularly look at what we can do differently, how we can do it better and more efficiently,” he said.
The administrative overhead argument has been made consistently by one of Delaware’s staunchest school consolidation advocates, Republican State Auditor R. Thomas Wagner, who has already done some basic research on the subject.
In December 2009, Wagner released a report which claimed the consolidation of the existing 19 Delaware school districts into four districts, including one consolidated Vo-Tech district could save the state $50 million per year, largely through elimination of redundant administrative and supervisory positions. (See also The consolidation question: How much money could be saved?)
“We have to try to eliminate a management structure that does not put enough emphasis on the classroom and puts too much on administration,” Wagner said.
The savings, however, may not be as significant as Wagner’s report projects and the political strength of the education establishment, not to mention the deep sense of community loyalty to the many local school systems, could prove an insurmountable hurdle for consolidation advocates.
“Beware of unintended consequences,” warned Joanne Christian, president of the Appoquinimink Board of Education.
“This is a big deal, just ask anybody who’s been involved in a corporate merger,” added Jeff Raffel, a University of Delaware professor who has been closely monitoring Delaware school politics for nearly 40 years. (See also The consolidation question: Is now the time?)
Raffel, who examined Delaware’s last experience with school consolidation in 1978 in his book, “The Politics of School Desegregation,” cautions against a repeat of some of the missteps that occurred a generation ago. “In desegregation, think about all the effort that did not go to education, but was more about who did what to whom,” he said.
Educators, even those who see some value in consolidation, are quick to note two significant flaws with Wagner’s estimates.
One is that Wagner hypothetically combines districts, tallies the number of students in the new district, and determines the number of administrators and support staff needed by making comparisons with similarly sized districts in other states. However, in Delaware, staffing levels are determined by the state’s “unit system,” a formula based on student enrollments.
Consolidating four districts into one, for example, might eliminate three superintendent jobs but the funding formula would generate about the same number of administrators anyway, said Steven Godowsky, superintendent of the New Castle County Vo-Tech School District. “Consolidation may sound good in theory but the reality is that positions saved would be few and far between,” he said.
Wagner responds by saying that if it’s necessary to restructure the state’s school finance system to achieve significant cuts in administrative positions, he would “absolutely” favor it.
But what happens to teacher salaries, an issue Wagner’s estimates did not address, could be of greater consequence. In 1978, the year desegregation began, northern New Castle County teachers went on strike over a concept called “leveling up,” which involved raising salaries for teachers from the lower-paying districts to match the salaries for teachers with identical experience and qualifications in the highest-paying districts involved in the consolidation.
The expense of leveling up salaries would outweigh any savings achieved by reducing administrative staff, said Mark Holodick, superintendent of the Brandywine School District. “You’d level up both teachers and administrators…. That’s usually what closes the door quickly [in consolidation discussions],” he said.
While Wagner believes leveling up is a concept for which unionized employees would have to bargain, Howard Weinberg, executive director of the Delaware State Education Association, said leveling up is “for all practical purposes, an expectation of everyone…. It’s certainly going to be part of any consolidation.”
“There’s a past history of leveling up,” Wagner said, “but in today’s economy, it doesn’t necessarily require leveling up.”
While the staffing and salary issues may prove difficult hurdles to consolidation, Katz says he’s interested in seeing all the issues put on the table. “I want the task force to go in with the idea that we don’t know what the answers are, but we want to design a school system that’s ideal for our students and for the state,” he said.
And that, he acknowledges, could lead to recommendations to overhaul not only the school finance system but also the State Department of Education.
A major worry for school officials is that a consolidation study would be driven primarily by a desire to cut costs with classroom needs becoming a secondary concern.
“The big question,” Brandywine’s Holodick said, should be “what’s the ideal size of a school district. Is it 5,000 students, or 10,000, or 25,000?”
Appoquinimink’s Christian shares Holodick’s view. “We’re fortunate that our district, with about 9,300 students, is just the right size,” she said. “I’m thinking that 12,000, maybe 15,000, would be the saturation point.”
Delaware’s public school enrollment totaled 129,395 on the official September 30, 2010 enrollment count. Enrollment in the state’s 16 K-12 districts ranges from 2,179 in Woodbridge to 17,190 in Christina. Enrollment in the three county vo-tech districts total 8,203 and Delmar, which serves only grades 7-12, had 1,282 students. Dividing the current school population into five districts of roughly equal size would make each f them about 50 percent larger than Christina, now the state’s largest.
UD professor Raffel thinks that some districts might already be nearing the maximum size. He recalls hearing a Christina superintendent remark several years ago about it being difficult to visit all of the district’s 30 buildings during the school year. “I think that tells you something,” he said.
Holodick, who was principal at Delmar Junior-Senior High before becoming Brandywine’s superintendent, sees some value in small districts. “You can have a meeting on a Tuesday and, with the right stakeholders at the table, you can develop an initiative and implement it on Thursday,” he said.
Although consolidation discussions are at a preliminary stage, they are hardly unfamiliar in Delaware. Godowsky thinks this is the third time the issue has been raised since desegregation; Raffel says it’s the fourth or fifth.
And, at this point, the discussions are entirely theoretical. While there’s a desire to have consolidation bring improvement in education, no one has suggested specifically how that might be done. More significantly, no one has begun to discuss what districts might be merged or whether any schools might be closed or attendance zones realigned.
“When you’re talking about it in the abstract, it’s easier,” Raffel said. “Wait until you get into the specifics. Wait until you say Smyrna gets merged with Capital and Appoquinimink, for example…Legislators can talk abstractly but when the tires hit the road, it’s a lot different.”
Some school officials interviewed suggested a way of reaching a middle ground — one that would encourage saving money without reducing the number of districts.
Rather than consolidating districts, they said, the state should look at means of consolidating back-office functions like purchasing, transportation and human resources. Some districts are already collaborating in these areas, Holodick and Godowsky said.
For example, Brandywine, New Castle County Vo-Tech and Christina joined together for a bulk purchase of natural gas, and the three districts expect a total two-year savings of about $600,000, Holodick said.
“The personnel offices — the HR functions — could be divided into maybe three areas. Every district doesn’t need that,” Christian said.
Katz finds encouragement in these suggestions, and in the examples of partnerships already in operation. “These show that there’s a definite opportunity to find ways to run our system more efficiently,” he said, pointing out that such small efforts could have even greater impact if implemented statewide.
Wagner sees these cooperative efforts as a small but significant start. “If we could consolidate all the back-room operations, I would be extremely happy. That would be a great step,” he said.