Consolidation Harms Students and May Not Save Money, Studies Find

In several states, lawmakers intent on keeping taxes down are focusing on school district consolidation as a potential cost-saving measure. In recent years, consolidation pressures have been felt keenly in rural areas losing population, most commonly in the Midwestern farm belt. Proposed consolidation was a highly controversial issue in Arkansas in 2003 -2004, where advocates successfully pushed back against a massive consolidation proposal, and only the state’s smallest districts were ultimately consolidated. A proposal this winter to consolidate districts in Maine met with strong opposition from the public. Recently, Governor Mark Sanford has called for district consolidation in South Carolina.

Consolidating districts, however, can be harmful to students. Consolidation of districts according to Marty Strange, policy director of the Rural School and Community Trust, “always” leads to the closing of some community schools within the consolidated districts, and this can cause hardships for students. A recent report from his organization has highlighted the excessively long bus rides faced by children who live in consolidated districts in West Virginia and how long commutes appear to contribute to lower extra-curricular participation. Also, a recent analysis by the Dayton Daily News presented the idea that consolidating districts may not even save money; a finding that is supported by a great deal of research. Small districts have “hidden efficiencies” that make up for the potential cost savings of consolidation.

Long Bus Rides in West Virginia

The Rural School and Community Trust, a policy and advocacy organization for rural communities, released a report in March entitled, “Slow Motion: Traveling by School Bus in Consolidated Districts in West Virginia.” West Virginia has county-wide school districts, and many of these districts have closed small rural schools in efforts to save money. The report compares travel and extracurricular participation by high school students who live in two “high consolidation” and two “low consolidation” districts.

The report found that students who rode school buses (57 percent of total students and 64 percent of students in high-consolidation districts) had average commutes – each way – of 48 minutes in high-consolidation districts and 34 minutes in low-consolidation districts. These results are particularly troubling because the West Virginia legislature has set guidelines recommending bus rides of a maximum of 60 minutes for high school students. In the two high-consolidation districts, almost one-third of the students who rode buses traveled more than an hour each way, compared to 10 percent in low-consolidation districts.

Such long bus rides can be detrimental to students’ health and their ability to learn when they have to wake up extremely early to catch buses. The Rural Trust also found a relationship – and likely a causal one – between long bus rides and decreased extracurricular activity participation. Students in high-consolidation districts participated less in extracurricular activities than students in low-consolidation districts, and in all districts, students who participated in extracurricular activities had commutes that were shorter on average than students who did not participate.

The Rural Trust has produced many reports describing the problems associated with consolidation, which can be found on their website.

Consolidating May Not Save Money

Though Ohio is not always thought of as a particularly rural state, one in five of Ohio’s 613 school districts has fewer than 1000 students. As a result, district consolidation “is one of those things that gets talked about a lot,” according to House Speaker Jon Husted, as reported by the Dayton Daily News. However, the Daily News, in order to determine if this would result in any savings, collected expenditure data from Ohio districts and found that larger districts did not spend significant less per pupil – and often spent significantly more – than small rural districts. Preble County, Ohio, for example, has five small districts that enroll approximately the same number of students as Kettering City School District, but Kettering had expenditures approximately 41 percent higher.

Some of the increase is likely due to higher costs in urban areas – including higher percentages of high-needs students or higher costs of living – but Marty Strange says that this is not the whole picture. School consolidation, Strange told the Daily News, drives up administrative costs as superintendents need to start hiring more assistants and specialists. In West Virginia, he said, a ten-year period in which 300 schools were closed saw administrative costs jump 16 percent. The Rural Trust has several studies on its website that have produced similar findings.

Consolidation has the potential to harm students by creating longer bus rides and also has the ability to harm communities by undermining the traditional link between community and school. If lawmakers are serious about increasing the amount of money available to go to classrooms, they should avoid shutting down schools and harming children for what would be very little – if any – gain.

Prepared by Matthew Samberg, May 1, 2007