Editor’s note: This commentary is by Carin Ewing Park, of Barnard, a new member of the Barnard School Board who is chair of its Alternative Structures Committee. Her family runs Heartwood Farm and works with three other family farms to put on the Feast and Field Market each summer. She is also the proprietor of Carin’s Kombucha.
[S].122 recognizes the need for flexibility in unifying structures due to specific circumstances that make unification challenging: geographic or structural isolation, and the financial-political challenge of trying to accommodate uneven indebtedness. But the strategy for this bill addresses these select few challenging scenarios, while failing to recognize other challenges that are just as real to districts that have taken the same steps to attempt unification, and have failed.
In the case of my town of Barnard, the challenge is an intractable political one: a larger town with more representation on the study committee pushed through a plan that involved restructuring the two smallest elementary schools, including Barnard’s, in order to fund programmatic improvements elsewhere. Undoubtedly bolstered by the state’s seemingly dismissive attitude towards the value of small schools, the study committee first planned to cut Barnard Academy down to a preK-2 structure, and only later shifted this to a preK-4 after significant pushback. Still, this plan brought little to the table for Barnard and arguably degraded the educational experience for our students, who would have to make an extra, awkward transition between schools in fifth grade, and then another two years later. Even more distressing, the sustainability of the Barnard school was compromised by this restructuring, and quite unjustifiably so: Through responsible and responsive local governance, we have maintained student enrollment numbers for over 10 years (unlike the largest town), have the second highest staff:student ratio in our supervisory union, and the second lowest per pupil spending. Our school has been a model for successful small school governance in the state. Barnard citizens voted to reject the study committee’s merger proposal, as voters wielded the only real power they had within this proposal process.
Our voters deserve an explicit acknowledgment that our proposal will be judged not against an abstract idea of a preferred model, but rather against the real options politically available.
But now we’re left in a vulnerable position. While districts with debt (and their supervisory unions) are given specific protections under S.122 to usher forward more mergers, our academically strong and fiscally responsible school district is left uncertain about the state’s sanctioning of an Alternative Structure that supports and protects our students while promoting the goals of Act 46. We need more flexibility in demonstrating the efficacy and adequacy of our alternative proposal in the context of the local process that brought us here. H.15 does much better here, for example by instructing the Board of Education to evaluate an Alternative Structure proposal on the basis of a demonstration that it is better suited to the member districts than an Education District, and will meet the goals of the act. In this way, the board is not attempting to push districts down narrow pathways of compliance, but rather allowing the unique characteristics of a region to inform an analysis of how best to achieve the goals of the act. This week I, along with a multitude of strong voices from around the state, urged the committee to put H.15 back on the table for discussion. (Editor’s note: H.15 was killed by the House Education Committee on Thursday, after this commentary was written.)
The Baruth amendment to S.122 includes a revision in Section 9 of the act, to include a requirement for remaining district proposals to describe its consideration of mergers and other models of joint activity. I am happy to see that the state requests this information. However, this must not be seen simply as evidence of our good faith efforts to work with our neighbors towards the goals of the act. Rather, this information provides the context for and informs the landscape of the real structural options before our district now, and so needs to factor into the state’s assessment of the three other proposal requirements listed before it.
Our voters deserve an explicit acknowledgment that our proposal will be judged not against an abstract idea of a preferred model, but rather against the real options politically available. We need more explicit support of all districts continually working towards Act 46 goals – not just those particular few acknowledged in S.122. Indeed, it is the goals of the act that should be at the forefront of our local efforts, and the state’s assessments – not the administrative shapes our relationships take.
