By Gene Meyer
March 12, 2010

(KansasReporter) TOPEKA, Kan. - Consolidating Kansas' nearly 300 school districts into a fraction of that number, with 10,000 students in each district, would cut potentially hundreds of million of dollars in duplicative administrative costs, backers of such a plan told a Kansas House panel this week.

But what would be the most sweeping statewide school reorganization plan in more than 40 years also would ultimately end local control over community schools and erode some of the fundamental qualities for which many parents choose Kansas' smaller-than-national-average school districts, opponents told House Education Budget committee members at a hearing Thursday.

The consolidation proposal is a plan contained in House Bill 2728, introduced earlier this month in the House Appropriations committee, that would merge 292 current school districts across Kansas into an estimated 40 or so districts, each with 10,000 or more students, by the time classes begin in the autumn of 2012. Only seven Kansas districts, in Wichita and the state's heavily populated Kansas City area communities, are that large now.

The plan would establish an 11-member reorganization commission to oversee both the creation of those districts by voters who live in them and a group of regional service centers handling centralized purchasing, bookkeeping, payroll and other adminstrative functions.

Kansas needs to adopt a plan such as this now, to avert an even deeper funding crisis when the last of an estimated $480 million in federal stimulus money for education runs out, Walt Chappell, a Wichita educational consultant and member of the Kansas State Board of Education, told the Education Budget panel.

Some 251 Kansas school districts with fewer than 2,000 students are too small to provide cost-effective educations, he said. Combining these and others into basic administrative units for 10,000 students and more would save Kansas more than $300 million by eliminating many now-duplicated admistrative or other non-teaching costs, Chappell said.

"Rather than waste this $300 million or more each year, we must use these savings to teach our kids employable skills and help fund other vital government services," Chappell said.

But meeting that 10,000-student threshold in more sparsely populated parts of central and western Kansas "would create school districts the size of state Senate districts," said Mark Tallman, an executive with the Kansas Association of School Boards.

Tallman and other opponents of the plan disputed estimated savings, much of which they say would be eaten up by the challenges of managing school districts that, as in one hypothetical northwest Kansas example, might sprawl across 18 counties and nearly 16,500 square miles.

"Perhaps the radical shift in governance and finance proposed in this bill would be justified if there was clear evidence it would either improve student achievement or even maintain student achievement at a lower cost," Tallman said. "We have seen no such evidence."

Similarly, there is no evidence that consolidating small schools hurts student performance either, Dave Trabert, president of the Kansas Policy Institute, which is parent organization of KansasReporter, told the panel.

Four independent studies of Kansas schools systems since 1992 recommend greater consolidation across the state and no independent research recommends against it, Trabert said.

While 10,000 students might not be an ideal number - Kansas Department of Education statistics suggest districts with between 3,000 and 10,000 achieve the greatest operating efficiencies, "we believe that consolidating small schools creates better educational opportunities for all students," Trabert said.