School Reform - School Consolidation

Plenty of chatter is out there with regard to school consolidation. Before discussing any of the merits or drawbacks to school consolidation, I want to warn readers that any sort of consolidation needs to be beneficial in terms of positively impacting students. School reform isn't reform unless improvements are made on behalf of its clients.

The idea of consolidation is, of course, to save money and to close schools that are serving ever decreasing school populations. As I said, consolidation, if it takes place, better have positive effects.

Let me provide some words of caution about school consolidation. First, it needs to be driven by local schools. If the state is 'telling' two, or more, schools to consolidate then there might be some real problems in terms of 'marrying' the schools. Who will be the new principal? Which school will close? Which staff, if need be, will be terminated? How will parents and students react to being 'told' that their school has been shut down after being open for seventy-five or one hundred years? Think it will matter which mascot is chosen? How about the school colors?

My point is this...a higher authority telling schools to merge/consolidate could well spell trouble. It would be better left to area schools, should they desire, to determine whether to consolidate. Having a central bureaucracy making such a decision is likely to be disastrous.

I can think of other areas, particularly in inner cities, where consolidation may be more problematic than people may think. For example, let's say two neighborhood schools, within a couple of miles of each other, are told to consolidate because of dwindling enrollments. Having the population of one school shift to another may result in some safety issues. The students who have to attend another school may go through a part of the neighborhood in which a gang exists that may cause these students some real problems.

Other issues will come up in such a scenario...busing, the issues I discussed in the third paragraph, a loss of parental support, further neighborhood deterioration due to the loss of the school as a neighborhood 'anchor' and more.

These are serious concerns associated with school consolidation. Again, if consolidation doesn't have more positives than negatives in terms of improving education then it isn't really reform.

Many thanks,
Dick