Our map and table of how Vermont students actually follow their educational paths from kindergarten through grade 12 is now complete. They show that our schools have organized themselves into 50 K-12 clusters, or webs, of elementary, middle and high schools, based on geography and community settlement patterns. (But not always along town or county lines.)
40 of the webs are neat, well-defined, self-contained, of reasonable size, and don’t overlap. They consist of several elementary schools that send their students on to a single middle or high school. They range in size from 1000 to 4000 students, most around 2000. They include the vast majority of our 82,000 students. They seem to work well.
The other ten webs display inconsistent sending and receiving patterns; or very small high schools, often close to one another; or overlapping or duplicative governance schemes. (Some webs with fewer than 1000 students, for example, elect five separate school boards with overlapping responsibilities and administrative duplication.) These ten webs represent a very small slice of Vermont’s student population.
We might begin our design of an improved governance scheme first by considering each of the 40 well-defined K-12 webs as a school district. Some of these, small and adjacent, may well choose to combine administrative offices for convenience and efficiency.
Second we’d work with the remaining ten to see how each one might be improved, perhaps by joining with a neighbor, or combining their nearby small high schools. In this way we might end up with perhaps 30 K-12 districts, while causing little disruption among the majority of webs that make sense and have worked well.
To govern the district, each of the communities surrounding an elementary school would elect a school board. These community boards would combine to form the middle-high school board. In this way a solid K-12 program could be built, while at the same time preserving community participation at the school level. The board would hire a superintendent, allocate the budget, and set policies for the schools.
Such an approach would cut in half the number of administrative units, while preserving local democratic control and involvement. It would encourage cooperation among communities. It would focus school boards and superintendents on educational matters rather than tax rates. See Toward a Sustainable Education Fund.
Would this save money?
Reorganizing governance along these organic lines would cut the number of administrative units at least in half, which would save money now spent on non-educational matters. Combined with the sustainable education fund at the state level, these organic districts would help focus the efforts of school boards and leaders on teaching and learning.
(However, this approach alone would not alter major drivers of our recent school cost increases: health insurance and special education. These two need a separate analysis.)
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