Editor’s note: This commentary is by David F. Kelley, who is an attorney and a co-founder of Project Harmony (now PH International) and a former member of the Hazen Union School Board.
With promises of millions and millions of dollars in savings, small, rural elementary schools across Vermont are starting to see their necks put on the chopping block by newly merged boards. When these small schools are closed, it will have little to do with academic outcomes or affordability. It will be about political power. The biggest towns with the most votes win. Without imaginative and visionary leadership the students will lose, and if we look to the experience of states such as West Virginia and Maine, in the end, we will all lose. Here is why:
In the elementary grades small schools provide a better education
Despite all of the talk about increased programs at large schools, schools with enrollments of under 50 students outperform larger schools. A study commissioned by the State of Vermont reported: “Seventy four percent of the principals from small schools report that most of their students (80-100%) were adequately prepared to make the transition to middle or high school compared with only 58 percent of principals from larger schools.”
Economically disadvantaged students fare better in small schools
Four separate studies, in seven different states, all reached the same conclusion: Disadvantaged students do better if they attend a small school. In the most recent four-state study, the correlation between poverty and low achievement was 10 times stronger in larger schools than in smaller ones. Teachers in smaller schools expected more from their students because they knew them better and were more involved with their everyday learning. They also had more contact with parents and did more to keep parents engaged with student learning.
Without an elementary school communities become geriatric
Young families with children are much less likely to buy homes where they need to put 6-year-olds on hour-long bus rides every day. As a consequence, housing values are higher in small villages with schools. Small towns with schools have more people employed in higher paying occupational categories and they have more engagement in civic affairs. Income inequality and welfare dependence is lower in villages with schools.Closing small rural schools results in declining property values, and lost business.
The savings touted by promoters of closing small schools are mostly illusory
West Virginia spent 10 years and over a billion dollars to build consolidated schools, absorbing students from over 300 closed schools. Promises about improved curriculum never materialized. Costs did not decrease. They increased. Administrators didn’t decrease. They increased. There was no independent scrutiny of outcomes until an investigative reporter from the Charleston Gazette (Scott Finn, who is now president of Vermont Public Radio) started looking into the facts. Appropriately, he began his investigation being picked up with a kindergartner by a school bus in the predawn darkness for a one hour ride to school.
Ten years of experience with consolidations in Maine provides the same results: Less transparency, less oversight, expanded administration, and almost no savings.
Twenty-first century schools will not be built with 20th century solutions. More bricks and mortar, more centralization, more administrators and longer bus rides are not the answer in a world where, on average, human knowledge is doubling every 13 months and, according to IBM, the build out of the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours.
The digital revolution changes everything. Today small, rural schools are positioned to be the model of 21st century education, with all the advantages of a small, intimate community, where people all know each other, and with access to mentors, volunteers and neighbors next door and to programs, people and resources from around the world. More than ever, rural is an asset, not a liability. Visionary leaders will understand that “as our case is new, we must think and act anew” and they will seize this opportunity.
