Grand jury urges districts to merge
With school districts strapped for dollars and looking for pennies to pinch, the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury is urging smaller districts to consider one money-saving option that most won’t like: consolidation.
The Mercury News reported that the 19-member jury, an investigative body that issues advisory reports, estimates annual savings of $51 million if the county’s 31 school districts were unified and consolidated. “Achieving School District Efficiency Through Consolidation” recommended that small elementary feeder districts combine with four high school districts – Fremont Union, Mountain View-Los Altos, Los Gatos-Saratoga and Campbell Union – to form four K-12 districts.
The jury contends that the proposed school district mergers would reduce both school board costs and administrative costs. The report points to the successful 2007 merge of four north Sacramento-area school districts into the Twin Rivers Unified School District.
Some administrators working in smaller school districts, such as the one-school Luther Burbank School District and the Loma Prieta School District, which employs just two administrators excluding principals, doubted whether the savings would outweigh the loss of community and autonomy. Becki Cohn-Vargas, Superintendent of Luther Burbank, located in a corner of San Jose, told the Mercury News it didn’t make sense to consolidate.
California has more than 1,000 school districts, ranging from districts with one school to gargantuan Los Angeles Unified, the nation’s second largest district with more than 600,000 students. Consolidation of small districts was recommended in the Governor’s Committee on Education Excellence. And it’s been talked about for years in Santa Clara County, where district boundaries were formed when Silicon Valley was still largely farmland.
But there has been little movement toward it. Residents in higher performing or higher income districts would likely resist merging with districts with poorer and lower-performing districts. And they have cited advantages of local control.
The Santa Clara County Office of Education already handles adminisrative functions for some of the districts, such as payroll.
Reporting by Educated Guess intern Annie Shuey.
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I can’t even remotely comment on whether this is an effective idea or not. But I read a couple of recent Grand Jury reports on public schools here in San Francisco, and was shocked by the lack of understanding and research skills. The grand jurors are volunteers whose primary qualification was availability and willingness to serve. The reports I read — one on the school assignment process and one on truancy and dropouts — were marred by factual errors, situations and background that the grand jurors simply failed to comprehend or just got wrong. I don’t mean *things I disagreed with,* I mean *things they just utterly got wrong.* It’s a weird system, because there’s no “oops — never mind” or do-over, and no boss or editor who can spot the problems and send it back for revision. The report is issued, it’s treated as credible and important by the press et al. without regard to its flaws, and that’s it. Maybe that’s entirely irrelevant to this Grand Jury report. Just sayin’.
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The civil grand jury serves as an ombudsman for the community, however imperfect, by pursuing issues on people’s minds, like consolidation of districts, and inquiries into possible waste and abuse of public funds. My sense is that there is a wide range in quality of the work of civil grand juries. They are volunteers, as you point out, and the makeup changes. Eric Premack has pointed out some of the blind spots of the current report. But the report will serve a useful purpose, if only to force districts to respond within 90 days. If there are errors and incorrect assumptions, the districts will present them. I doubt whether any of the districts will pursue consolidation without financial incentives from the state. The grand jury could have suggested alternatives to consolidation — other ways districts could save money together via legal costs, staff recruitment, medical insurance — that wouldn’t take years of hearings and divisive campaigns that will likely go nowhere.
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Consolidate or not! There is a better way. The fear of small districts and the communities they serve is that the very powerful and important sense of community ownership of “their” school will be lost in a consolidation. Unfortunately, in my experience the fear is well grounded. The loss of the sense of ownership, by the faculty and staff, by the families at the school, and the community is not some esoteric and non-substantive detail. It is the difference between people feeling a true personal stake in a school and being a insignificant cog in a larger bureaucratic structure. Creating a structure where the individual elementary schools and their communities can retain a great deal of autonomy – allowing them to be different, while providing a structure of support services (e.g., special ed, back office) – a district office that serves site needs instead of “commands and controls” is a much better approach. As a charter school developer and operator, I can tell you that educational leaders wise enough to implement an approach like this have a much better chance of success than trying to jam a old-school top down school district structure on communities.
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The Grand Jury’s report is the analytical equivalent of a drive-by shooting. Their “analysis” blithely assumes that creating larger districts will generate huge reductions in the numbers of administrative staff and fails to acknowledge increased costs related to required staff salary and benefit adjustments.
As one who used to make his living as a school district unification consultant, I learned that some administrative cost savings are achievable, but that larger districts are also more complex–and economies of scale are very elusive in public education. These complexities grow geometrically as district size increases, leading to a corresponding increase in the number of administrators–often sharply limiting any savings. The Grand Jury did not take this into account.
More important, the “savings” from reduced administrative costs are usually dwarfed by the mandated costs of “leveling-up” salary and benefit levels to the highest of the districts being merged–as required under state law. With most districts spending 85% or more of their budget on such costs, these increases nearly always outweigh any savings from administrative costs (which usually constitute less than 10% of total costs). The Grant Jury “drives by” this point, carelessly noting “there are issues about disparate . . . labor agreements that need to be addressed,” but failing to investigate these issues.
A dunce cap for the Grand Jury–or at least send ‘em back to do their homework.
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It was ironic that I was dissecting the work of the SF Civil Grand Jury while it was blasting SFUSD schools, since I had a pretty good opportunity to compare the quality of their research, comprehension and conclusions to the standards my kids were held to in SFUSD schools. They definitely would have flunked Mr. Addiego’s 8th-grade honors Social Studies if they had done the same report at Aptos Middle School (SFUSD, not town of Aptos).
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