Columbus Dispatch...
Merger math
Expert panel would help determine if Ohio has too many school districts
Monday August 8, 2011 

Setting up an expert commission to determine whether Ohio has too many school districts would be a great help, especially as the state budget has fewer dollars for local governments, demanding greater efficiency and partnerships. 

Gov. John Kasich has asked the legislature to create a commission to explore consolidating the state’s 614 school districts, spread out over 88 counties. Some cover vast geographical regions; others serve tiny communities. Some have just a few hundred students, while Columbus City Schools serves 51,000. 

Such an arrangement results in a lot of administrative overhead. Expert guidance would help districts and taxpayers decide whether this is benefiting students with a smaller, more individualized education or hampering education by siphoning dollars into management when they might be better spent in the classroom. 

A 2010 study by the Brookings Institution and Greater Ohio Policy Center, a smart-growth think tank, suggested Ohio’s educational framework is obese. The study found that Ohio ranks 47 {+t}{+h} in the nation in the share of elementary- and secondary-education spending used for instruction and ninth in the share used for administration. Worse yet, Ohio spends 49 percent more than the national average on school district-level administration. 

“It appears from projections in other states and from actual experience in Ohio that school district consolidation, or, at the very least, more-aggressive shared-services agreements between existing districts, could free up money that can be reinvested in the classroom,” the authors wrote. 

The study recommends a number of changes: making the cost of school-district administration transparent, aggressively pushing districts to share services and creating a “BRAC-like commission to mandate the best practices in administration and cut the number of Ohio’s school districts by at least one-third.” 

The panel Kasich envisions might, indeed, operate like the Base Realignment and Closure process, which the federal government developed to prevent politics from blocking good management decisions. 

Consolidating schools is not for the politically faint of heart. The last time the state consolidated schools was in the middle of the past century; the resulting hundreds of mergers and public angst in communities that lost their small schools likely explains why Kasich is the first governor in decades to attempt to broker such change. 

In education, one-size-fits-all rarely works. But an expert panel would be best positioned to determine which districts might benefit from consolidation. Or, the panel might determine that merging districts wouldn’t work. That, too, would be useful. 

A thorough, nonpolitical study of the consolidation issue would illuminate how Ohio can align spending with resources and yield better results, especially as school districts begin to grapple with cuts in state aid during the next two years. 

Read it at the Columbus Dispatch