Entrepreneurial Advisor

A BOLD APPROACH TO SCHOOL CONSOLIDATION IN IOWA

The Iowa General Assembly passed legislation in 1858 providing for county high schools. Until the early 20th century most public high schools in Iowa were countywide where township elementary schools would send their graduates, unless they planned to attend church run academies that were prevalent in the 19th century.


During this same period states around the nation were establishing county superintendent's offices to oversee the township schools and county high school. In many instances the county superintendent was also the principal and a teacher in the high school. The county superintendent acted as a go between for the local districts and the state board of education. They supervised teachers in the country schools, provided teacher continuing education, administered 8th grade county board tests and made certain that the local districts adhered to a curriculum that met state requirements. In 1879, thirty-four of the thirty-eight states had county superintendents.

Starting in the 1920's towns in Iowa's counties had grown large enough to have two or three independent school districts with their own superintendents and the capacity necessary to report directly to the state board of education. Gradually, township or country schools were replaced by school district grade schools in town. This lessened the need for county superintendents. County superintendent's offices were replaced in almost all states by multi-county educational service agencies during the 1960's and 1970's. In Iowa, the replacements were the 15 Area Education Agencies.


Even though Iowa's population has grown slowly over the past century, rural populations have declined. This along with a growing senior population in Iowa has meant significantly fewer children of school age in most of Iowa's school districts. Over the past forty years there has been a significant number of school consolidations, but the consolidation has not kept pace with the declining enrollment.

Thirty-one states have more public school students than Iowa but only thirteen have more school districts. Iowa has Only seven states have more districts than Iowa on a per pupil basis. Iowa's average district has 1,422 students K-12 or 109 students per grade level. Remember this is the average, not the smallest. Iowa currently has 362 public school districts, 333 of these with high schools.

K-12 public school enrollment has dropped from 660,000 students in 1970 to approximately 515,000 today.10 This is a 22% decline in 38 years. Add to this that enrollment in many urban and suburban districts has grown significantly during the same period and you can understand the how dramatic the enrollment drop must be in rural districts.

According to data from the Iowa Department of Education, fifty of Iowa's ninety-nine counties have less than 2,600 students. This is less than 200 students per grade level and yet these counties may have four or five school districts within its boundaries. There are 14 counties with 100 or less students per grade level! An example is Palo Alto County, the county I grew up in. It has four school districts with the vast majority of  each districts enrollment from the county and yet it only has 1,390 total students. More disturbing is that 69% of the school districts reported a decline in enrollment in the 2008-2009 school year and this trend has been occurring for 20 years.
 
We have 53 school districts with less than 300 students, up from 34 in 1997! About half of these do not have high schools but without high schools the average grade level has less than 34 students and with a high school 23 students!
 
There has been some consolidation over the past twenty years but far too little. Too often the consolidation is of two very small districts combining so as not to be consumed by a larger one. This has left the state with a quilt patch of districts that has little to do with efficiencies, comutting patterns or retail trade patterns. The smallest districts have a teacher to pupil ratio of less than 10 whereas the larger districts have a more reasonable ratio of 14-15 students per teacher. Most of the time a low pupil to teacher ratio is good but if it gets too low it means the school district is paying too much for teachers. Another issue is how broad middle school and high school curricula can be with so few teachers and resources?
 
Enter county school districts, as was the case early in the 20th century. County school districts are not the answer for larger counties but for 60-65 of Iowa's counties this makes the most sense. I come to this number by establishing county districts for the 50 counties with less than 2,600 students. I then add to this all counties that have more than 2,600 students but where one district has over half the students enrolled, leaving a district too small to be viable. There are some districts that are close to this today Clark and Davis Counties are virtually there. The reason for choosing a minimum of 2,600 students is that below this number a county could not have two districts that averaged over 100 students per grade level, meaning at least one district in the county would be extremely small.
 
In most cases the high school for these districts would either be in the country seat or the largest community in the county. This does several things - It minimizes time on the bus since most county seat communities are near the center of the county, it allows the one community that is most viable in the county to increase economic activity but most importantly is makes education in Iowa both more economical and ultimatley of higher quality. School districts in the 35-40 counties without county districts would act as independent districts much as they do today. However, counties dropping below the 2,600 student level for five consecutive years would need to be re-organized into a county district. Small districts inside these counties that dropped below 1,300 students for five consecutive years would need to consolidate with a neighboring district in the same county.
 
Of course one could argue that the break off should be 2,500 students or even 2,000. This is not as important as the concept. My plan takes the number of districts in the state from 362 to approximately 160. Would 120 or 200 districts be better numbers? Possibly but 362 or anything near is not. The governance of these districts is also open for discussion but could impact how we look at county consolidation. See future blog on county government.
 
Notes:
I must correct a statement in my last blog about only eight states having more school districts than Iowa. As is stated in this article, the correct number is thirteen.
 
Data in this article comes from the Iowa Department of Education website.