Larger School Districts Will Ensure Resilience

GREENSBORO – In last week’s Hardwick Gazette Paul Fixx shared some quotes from the Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union (OSSU) superintendent Dr. David Baker and a press release from a newly-formed group called the Rural School Community Alliance (RSCA) about Governor Scott’s proposal to condense Vermont’s 54 school districts into just five. The tone of both sources could lead the reader to think that Governor Scott’s proposal is a bad one. I’d like to share some reasons why I’m enthusiastic about the governor’s plan.

In my three decades as an educator in the Hardwick area, I have seen student enrollment and the number of teachers at my school (Hazen Union) decline. When I began my career as a science teacher at Hazen, the school was packed with kids and there were four science teachers at the high school level. Enrollment is down now, and we have only two science teachers in the high school.

Other departments and programs show similar declines, with the exception of our superintendent’s office, which has swelled from four employees when I started in 1994 to 52 employees identified on the OSSU staff directory today. If this amount of administrative growth is typical in other districts, we are talking about a statewide increase of way more than a thousand administrative positions to our superintendencies in the last 30 years, while student enrollment has steadily declined statewide.

The governor’s plan could reduce redundant administrative staffing by 90 percent, saving taxpayers a projected four hundred million dollars.

Schools around the state, including ours, are struggling to find qualified teachers to fill openings. When I started teaching, you had to wait for someone to retire to see an opening, and then dozens of qualified teachers would apply. Now, we have multiple job openings in each school that remain unfilled, leaving huge deficiencies in our kids’ schooling. Most of the superintendencies’ employees are former teachers. School district consolidation will put many hundreds of highly-qualified, experienced teachers back into the market for teaching. Let’s call the program “From the Cubicle to the Classroom.”

Creating larger school districts will also make our school systems less vulnerable to employee turnover. In my experience at the OSSU, the turnover of key employees, especially in the areas of finance, technology, and curriculum, has had crippling effects on the systems’ functionality.

In a tiny school district, a single expert may be responsible for an entire program, and if they leave, there isn’t enough institutional knowledge remaining. Practices unravel as a result. Larger districts will be able to attract and retain highly qualified employees and depend on small teams rather than individuals to ensure resilience.

It would be really easy to let school district administrators and small-school advocates scare us into doing nothing about our school funding crisis, but we can’t afford to wait any longer. Budgets are rising as enrollment shrinks, and desperate school boards are eliminating teachers, programs, and essential services, just to get their budgets to pass for one more year. Families who can are pulling their kids out of public education in favor of private or home-school options. Parents like me wonder anxiously about the quality of programming that will be available to our children. If the people criticizing the governor’s plan want to be taken seriously, let’s hear their alternatives for reducing our property tax burden and improving the viability of our schools. I’m all ears.

Jay Modry is a resident of Greensboro.

Jay Modry