As the 1993-94 school year started, I had just moved from Texas to North Carolina to start work as the managing editor of a community newspaper. Like many small papers, The Reidsville Review thrived on a steady diet of cops, obituaries, features about small-town fairs, high school sports, more cops, and coverage of school and municipal government.
Except this time, the coverage of school governance came with a twist.
Fourteen days before I arrived, four school districts had officially consolidated into one. And the new district, Rockingham County Consolidated Schools, was heading for some dark days, faced with questions about its finances, central office alignment, facilities, student assignment policies, board and administrative politics, and the like.
It was a massive undertaking – and a big mess for some time. Some teachers, administrators, and board members embraced the new district, which had 25 schools and 14,500 students. Others stubbornly refused, believing that the old way was better.
Within two years, the first superintendent – chosen from one of the four former districts – resigned under pressure. A huge battle over redistricting, which would have corrected racial and economic inequities in terms of student assignment, resulted in no action by the board. Personality clashes were common.
In the fall of 1996, I left newspapers and became the district’s public information officer. Having been on the outside, looking in from a distance, I did not know how difficult this merger had been. Over the next four and a half years, however, I saw this rural district work through its growing pains firsthand.
Several months ago, American School Board Journal was approached by Gene Broderson, who manages the National Affiliate program for the National School Boards Association, about a project involving the newly consolidated Twin Rivers Unified School District. In July 2008, after six failed attempts and 60 years of acrimony, three elementary school districts and one high school district finally were unified into a single PK-12 entity in this area north of Sacramento, Calif. Or was unification just a word?
Gene’s idea was to examine the challenges a first-year district faces through stories in ASBJ and podcasts and webinars posted on the National Affiliate website. The first print story, “The Long Road to Unity,” appears in the September edition of the magazine – available at www.asbj.com on Aug. 20; the multimedia portions of the project are available at www.nsba.org/natwinrivers.
Through this project, which will be ongoing through next summer, we hope to provide a snapshot of how you merge four distinctly different communities together amid fiscal challenges and political rancor. We hope to provide readers with resources and tools they can use if they are faced with a similar circumstance.
And chances are that small districts eventually will face consolidation, though not on the scale of Rockingham County or Twin Rivers. As the story notes, the U.S. had 117,000 school districts and 25.5 million students in 1937-38; today, the number is closer to 14,500 and 50 million, respectively.
Still, half of the nation’s school districts enroll less than 1,000 students, and with a tight economy pinching budgets, legislators in several states are eyeing consolidation as a way to cut costs and provide expanded services to students living in far-flung rural areas.
Working with Gene on the interviews that we are using in ASBJ and online is an exciting challenge as a journalist and an opportunity to take a fresh look at a subject I’ve lived through. It’s also a reminder of how schools, more than just about any other institution in America, can incite deep-seeded passions in communities and those toiling behind the scenes.
I hope you will join us in this journey.
Glenn Cook, Editor-in-Chief