Local education heads protest school consolidation

Eastern Washington school superintendents are lobbying the governor to veto by May 6 a portion of the state budget that slates $250,000 for a commission that would draw up a plan for combining small schools.

State legislators inserted the wording for a commission in the final hours of the last legislative session. The new commission will be required to report its plan to the state by late 2012.

The governor has so far received a dozen letters from education officials asking she veto the commission. Superintendents of smaller districts say consolidation would destroy small-town education, gut the small-town economy, strain district budgets, and lead to lengthy bus rides for students.

ESD 101 Superintendent Michael Dunn, the Washington state school directors Association, and superintendents of smaller districts have written letters to the governor.

“When you take a small school out of its district, you’re really ripping out the heart of a community,” Dunn said.

Dunn said he objected to the commission for several reasons. The state has a separate, joint legislative audit review committee study underway on consolidating schools. The results are not expected to come out until June.

To order a $250,000 commission to begin working on consolidation before seeing the hard and fast facts of the JLARC study is premature, he said.

“I feel like this is a case of the cart before the horse,” he said. ESD 101 is the education service district which serves 59 districts in this area. Fifty of those districts have less than 2,000 students, making this region susceptible to state plans for consolidation.

Dunn added while $250,000 for a study isn’t a weighty amount for the state, it is still enough to raise eyebrows at a time the state’s budget is hurting.

If the governor goes ahead and signs the commission into law, Dunn said he will learn as much as possible about the new measure before taking any advocacy steps.

“There are going to be a whole lot of people in Olympia that are going to hear from a lot of people from around the state of Washington,” he added.

St. John/Endicott Superintendent Rick Winters said he is not a fan of the commission measure. As superintendent of two districts who share resources in cooperative, he favors a cooperative approach over consolidation. A cooperative allows schools to share the resources and teachers they choose, versus shutting down an entire district and forcing students to commute in, he said.

Davenport Superintendent Jim Kowalkowski also wrote a letter asking Gov. Gregoire to veto the commission. The superintendent, who sat on a government appointed task force for the past two school years, said he felt Democrats had slipped the commission wording into the bill in the final days of the special session. There was no chance for public comment, he said.

“It was snuck in behind closed doors,” Kowalkowski said.