Imagine Franklin County with only one public school district.
I’m sure that sounds to many like a bizarre scenario bordering on the unthinkable. But it’s a change that may be closer than you realize, if our friends at the state level have anything to say about it.
The official term for it is “regionalization,” and it’s been popping up with greater regularity as rural school districts try to “do more with less” in the wake of shrinking student enrollment and rising fixed costs.
It’s a conundrum that is often confusing to people. In private sector business, reduced demand for services usually allows for downsizing to occur, so it would stand to reason that having fewer kids to educate would allow for a reduction in school operating costs. But that’s not how public education works in Massachusetts.
Let’s say a school district has 25 kids in a classroom and loses five to a charter school or another district via school choice. There still needs to be a teacher in place to educate the remaining 20. The only difference is, said district loses “X” number of dollars per student times five thanks to the current funding system, which assigns a dollar amount per student based on an arcane formula, and then allows that money to follow that student to whichever district he or she ends up attending.
So the district loses thousands per year, making it more difficult to generate the programs needed to educate and retain students, while the expenses to operate the schools continue to go up–as does the cost of benefits like employee health insurance, which, aside from choice and charter, is the single biggest budget buster for any school district.
Given those realities, it’s understandable that the state would be looking at all options for reducing costs, including potentially mandating that regional districts find ways to curtail or share expenses.
The challenge there is that these districts all have separate regional agreements, which have operating rules of their own. Take Pioneer, which right now is being forced for financial reasons to consider combining elementary schools even though their regional agreement specifically mandates that each town have its own elementary building.
The budget debate is so contentious it has towns considering leaving Pioneer, the ripple effect of which has generated discussion of the Gill-Montague and Pioneer districts combining into one, which, if it happens, we may day look back on as the first domino to fall in the previously unthinkable scenario proffered above.
I’m sure there are good financial reasons to regionalize, but what concerns me are the possible unintended consequences of such a change.
I grew up in an era here, unless you were in private school, you attended school in the town where you lived. For me, that was Greenfield, where I went to grade school then high school after attending four years at Eaglebrook. It’s a good thing too because GHS is where I met the woman who is now my wife.
If I came of age today, who knows where I would have ended up. Maybe the aforementioned Pioneer, where I almost landed when my parents were considering buying a home in Bernardston during my junior year.
The larger point is, today’s system of “open borders” for public schools has created a very different social structure than the days before the Education Reform Act of 1993. Nowhere is this more evident than in high school athletics, which is one of the few activities where school identity still remains a big piece of the puzzle.
To that, the academics among us will likely shrug. After all, school is about education, not athletics. Nice theory, except that there are a lot of kids for whom sports and maintaining eligibility for same are their main motivation for staying in school — not to mention the life lessons one learns on the field of play, which can be very different but no less important than those learned in the classroom.
Greenfield is one district which seen its athletic program negatively impacted by school choice. Ditto Turners Falls High School, which this year came very close to not being able to field a football team for the first time in its history, despite establishing a cooperative program with Pioneer one year earlier.
The issue is obviously bigger than just sports. I’m sure parents aren’t wild about having their kids sitting in larger classrooms after spending a couple of hours a day riding buses, any more than would be at the concept of losing the positive community identity that is so often a by-product of a having thriving and functional school district.
I’m not sure how much this matters to our friends in Boston, but it should. Otherwise, I fear we are headed toward a potentially huge loss in pursuit of an era of “fiscal solvency” which may or may not ever materialize.
Chris Collins is a Greenfield native and a former staff reporter for the Recorder. He can be reached at sourcechris.collins@gmail.com.