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Officials see moves toward school district mergers

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MONTPELIER – The bill encouraging voluntary merging of school districts that the Legislature approved this year is hardly the first attempt to reduce the number of districts in Vermont.

Politicians have long criticized the state's system of school governance as unwieldy. In 1846, Horace Eaton, Vermont's first state superintendent, attacked small districts as "the paradise of ignorant teachers."

In 1968, Gov. Philip Hoff decried the large number of districts as "ludicrous, utterly ridiculous and wasteful. It may be political suicide, but I am determined to end this sort of provincialism."

He didn't succeed, but school officials say the new law may prove a watershed in the long quest for governance reform. Already they report seeing a surge in merger interest from school administrators across the state.

The law, Act 153, aims to promote voluntary district mergers by offering financial incentives.

Gov. James Douglas, who had lobbied to make consolidation mandatory, allowed the bill to become law but without signing it.

"Not only does H.66 fail to recognize the immediacy of our need to control property taxes in Vermont, it will, frankly, do little to encourage consolidation of districts," Douglas said. "I cannot endorse this timid approach with my signature and hope future Legislatures will finally act on meaningful education reforms to rein in property taxes."

Jeff Francis, head of the Vermont Superintendents Association, has a very different take, calling Act 153 "the most substantive piece of legislation with regard to governance change in school districts in the last half century."

"I think we should allow this process to play out with a hope and expectation that we accomplish more in the next four years than has been accomplished in the last 50," Francis says.

In the three weeks since the bill became law, the Vermont School Boards Association has convened formal talks about it with a quarter of the state's 60 supervisory unions, according to Associate Director Winton Goodrich. Many supervisory unions have long considered district merger, Goodrich says, and some were well along in the process even before the passage of Act 153.

But the new law, he says, might provide the carrot that education leaders need to actually make the change.

"The last time I saw this kind of groundswell of school leaders coming out of the woodwork to learn more about the implications and impacts of merger was in 1997, when Act 60 got passed," he says.



Closing and sharing

The new law looks to meld some of the 280 school districts in Vermont by offering financial incentives to the taxpayers ultimately responsible for approving any consolidation plans.

While elected officials tout the educational benefits of merger, stark fiscal realities fed the political will needed to pass the legislation. Mergers would, in theory, reduce the number of central offices and, consequently, the number of superintendents, business managers and other administrators required to run Vermont's schools.

But central-office expenses account for only 2.4 percent of statewide education spending, and policy makers in Montpelier generally agree that district mergers alone will accomplish only modest cost savings.

The real savings potential with district mergers, many argue, will derive from the closure of small schools and reductions in personnel that consolidation would supposedly facilitate.

If schools can share teachers and buildings in a unified district, they will be able to reduce the human and physical overhead needed to educate a dwindling student population.

"The governance issue and school-closure issue are kind of wrapped up together," says Dan French, superintendent of the Bennington-Rutland Supervisory Union, which is in the midst of merger talks. "Our approach here has been to look at both of those things together."



Tough sell

Goodrich says schools don't need legislative incentives to consider merger. Over the last eight years, the Vermont School Boards Association has helped 40 districts navigate the merger process.

But they might need those incentives to actually succeed. Merger failures far outnumber successes – Goodrich can count only four successful mergers in the past eight years. The travails of the merger process are evidenced by the recent setbacks in the Addison Northwest Supervisory Union, where residents in one town rescinded a previous vote to meld the five-town union into a single district.

Goodrich says school boards will be especially tempted by the promise of financial incentives – the law slashes 8 cents from education tax rates in the year after a successful merger vote – at a time when budget drafters are facing unprecedented fiscal pressures.

Later this summer, Commissioner of Education Armando Vilaseca will deliver budget-reduction targets to school boards across the state. Collectively, districts will be asked to voluntarily shave $23 million in school spending – a 2 percent cut in the overall education budget. The budget-reduction process was laid out in the session's signature government-restructuring legislation, called Challenges for Change.

"With the convergence of tough economic times, the financial incentives and the voluntary targets for budget diminishment in Challenges for Change, I think we can call it the perfect storm," Goodrich says. "Districts are really reaching out to find out how they might think about doing business more effectively and efficiently."



Help is needed

Incentives notwithstanding, completing mergers will not be easy, says John Nelson, executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association. Experts in quantitative financial analysis and school governance will be needed to shepherd districts through the often tortuous merger process, and it's unclear who will fill that role.

"There's an element of this that simply requires getting out to school districts the information they need about (Act 153) to make a judgment initially about how it might help them," Nelson says. "There isn't any mechanism in the law for this to happen."

Nelson lobbied legislators to include new funding for the Department of Education, money he said would be necessary to marshal the resources to assist districts.

"That's not in the bill," he says. "And it's a problem."

But he thinks associations like his will be able to fill that void. And the $20,000 merger-study grants that are available in Act 153, he says, will provide districts the means to engage in serious merger consideration.



How many is enough?

Not everyone is so optimistic about the new law. Douglas says intractable tendencies toward hyper-local control fed his support for a competing bill that would have mandated consolidation. Historically, the most sweeping change in school governance came in the late 1800s, when elected officials imposed a "one-town, one-district" act that tidied a statewide system that, until then, had more than 2,000 individual districts.

This year, lawmakers opted for the bottom-up approach championed by school boards, superintendents and principals. It could be some time before voters know whether the law works – it's unlikely, according to Nelson, that most districts will even hold merger votes until well into 2011.

"I would consider this effort successful if we had responses from a variety of school districts and supervisory unions … that were, at this point next year, at least doing the formal study that needs to be done to present a merger plan to their voters," Nelson says. "As to the question of how many does it take for this to be successful, it's hard to say. If we had a half-dozen successful mergers from this, I'd say that's a success."