Consolidation of School Districts

Today, there are about 14,200 public school districts in the United States. When compared to the nearly 117,000 school districts in existence in 1940, this seems to be a relatively small number. However, for more than a century, school district consolidation has been, and is currently, an ongoing dilemma for most communities. It is a dilemma without easy solutions. Local community identity is the heart of the debate that has engulfed the longtime move to consolidate smaller schools into becoming larger schools. Pure power politics; fundamental philosophies; targeted, absent, and/or ignored research; and economics have all been key issues in this ongoing struggle.

This national business–industrial model seemed to work very well through two major world wars; an economic depression; rapid population growth, including an explosion of births after the end of World War II; and continued immigration. But the nation's population shifted from rural to urban settings, and political power moved along with the movers.

Districts with small schools were seen as less efficient in terms of their economic costs. Why would a basically rural county with a population of 8,000 need to have eight or more high schools, each with its own costly local administrators and staff? With a greater number of elected officials coming from more urban areas of a state, and with them the desire to reduce unnecessary expenditures, state laws began to enforce requirements and create funding systems that encouraged, if not demanded, school district consolidation.

For many small rural towns, their school was a major social focus of the community. The schools were the cohesive factor that unified the people, even though they often had multiple churches serving them. School activities such as games, concerts, plays, and so forth, were significant community events. In a number of locations the school was also the major employer of the community. Removing such a cohesive-community societal element was often traumatic and painful for the people involved.

Those pushing for more economical use of scarce tax dollars also argued that the quality of the education being given to children would be much improved after consolidations. More teachers would have special content preparation, which would increase pupils' achievement in advanced and specialized subjects such as physics, chemistry, and Algebra 2. Specialists in curriculum design would also become more available to help upgrade the learning in these now larger school districts.

Districts with small schools did not take lightly the impetus for consolidation by those from more urban areas. Supporting their concerns, numerous well-designed research studies were conducted over several years. One such research study was conducted in Nebraska, which at one time had many more school districts than did the state of Texas. But unlike in Texas, the University of Nebraska was the only large university in the state. A lengthy study followed Nebraska's students from rural schools and from larger ones in the 1950s and 1960s to determine whether or not there were any collegiate achievement differences.

In short, the students in small rural schools were found to have a slightly lower grade point average (GPA) for the first year as they acclimated themselves to the larger classes and campus than did those from the larger school districts and cities. However, by the second semester of the sophomore year, there was essentially no difference in GPA between the two groups. For the last 2 years at the university, the small-school students actually had a slightly higher GPA.

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