The debate about the ideal size for a school district begins anew this session of the Legislature. Some lawmakers, the business community and the state’s education chief say too many of the state’s 227 districts are too small, too inefficient and too disconnected.

Arizona districts are something of a crazy quilt. They range in size from five students to more than 70,000. Their boundaries rarely correspond to city lines. Many combine elementary and high school grades. Many don’t.

Some legislators and their allies want to impose more order. Opponents fear it would be at the cost of local control. The issue has resulted in something of an annual shoving match.

The latest push comes from Sen. Linda Gray, R-10. She has introduced a bill (S1068) to create a panel to draft plans to unify school districts. The bill establishes a 13-person School District Redistricting Commission to review existing districts and make recommendations to combine districts. Its report would be due to the governor by Dec 31, 2006. Four commission members to be appointed by the speaker, four by the president and four by the governor. The superintendent of public instruction or a designee also serves.

Last session, then-Rep. Gray introduced a similar bill (H2028). That bill’s first draft ordered the would-be commission to draw up school districts that fit an “ideal” size. That is, between 6,000 and 30,000 students.

The measure was far from ideal for the Arizona School Boards Association (ASBA). Foremost, the association objected to way in which the commission’s recommendations would have been put into effect. The introduced version would have put the recommendations up to a statewide vote, bypassing the districts altogether.

Janice Palmer, ASBA lobbyist, says the group quickly spoke up.

“We sat down and said the state should not be imposing its will on local districts,” Ms. Palmer says.

Ms. Gray retooled the bill to give district voters a say in commission recommendations.

In addition, the bill dropped any mention of school-district consolidation, referring only to unification.

Proponents are quick to point out that the terms are not the same. Consolidation involves combining two or more districts of the same level, such as two elementary school districts. Unification means joining separate elementary and high school districts into a single kindergarten-through-12th-grade district.

As it happens, unification often involves consolidation. Numerous smaller districts might feed into a single larger high school district. Those would have to be consolidated to form a unified district with the high school district. Thirteen elementary districts, for example, feed into Phoenix Union High School District.

While withholding outright endorsement, the ASBA dropped its opposition to last session’s revised H2028. The Arizona Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, ended up backing the bill. The measure passed the House but died in the Senate. The common wisdom is that senators balked at the projected cost of unification.

Citing a number she says she heard floating about the Senate corridors, Ms. Palmer says, “$220 million would be the cost to the state, if all the schools that could unify did so.”

Lawmaker: Incentive To Unify Failed To Work

A fiscal analysis prepared by House staff mentioned no such figure, instead pointing out that the legislation would have largely eliminated what’s known as unification assistance. Under current law, districts that unify receive a 10 per cent increase in state funding the first year after unification, 7 per cent the second year and 4 per cent the third. The idea is to help districts handle the added expense of combining administrative staff and programs, among other things.

It’s an incentive that has failed to work, Ms. Gray says.

“We’ve had that carrot for years, and nobody’s taken advantage of it,” she says.

The same legislative analysis says unification could save money through so-called efficiency gains. Specific savings, in this case, were not cited.

The efficiency-gains argument is one of two usually made in favor of unification. The other argument addresses the quality of education itself, and how well students are prepared when they make the leap to high school.

Bigger Means More Efficient, Some Say

Unification proponents say, generally speaking, a bigger district is a more efficient district. Bigger school districts, for example, have lower administrative overhead than smaller districts, they say. If three districts are combined into one, that eliminates the need for three superintendents, three food-service directors and three finance officers. The money saved could go into the classroom, meaning better pay for teachers, says Tom Horne, state superintendent of public instruction. That, in turn, would bring in better teachers and result in better education.

“Financial efficiency translates into academic performance,” Mr. Horne says.

That bigger districts spend more on students and less on administrative costs is supported by a November 2002 auditor general’s special report on district spending, he says.

In the executive summary, the report says: “The primary factor affecting per-pupil administrative cost in any one year is the number of students. Most districts with particularly high costs had fewer than 600 students, while most districts with particularly low costs had more than 5,000 students.”

Business groups say such savings result from an economy of scale. Wal-Mart has economy of scale. The corner grocery store doesn’t. Perhaps then it comes as no surprise that the business-friendly Arizona Chamber of Commerce and large companies like Pinnacle West Capital Corp. have come to embrace unification and consolidation.

“We don’t have unlimited funds, and we’ve got to organize ourselves more effectively,” says Martin Shultz, lobbyist for Pinnacle West, parent company of Arizona Public Service Co.

On the other hand, it might come as something of a surprise that the business-friendly Goldwater Institute opposes unification and consolidation.

Districts Need To Think Small, Think Tank Says

Vicki Murray, the institute’s education analyst, questions the assertion that bigger districts are necessarily more efficient. Most administrative costs, she argues, are not found at the district level. That was an oversight by the auditor general, she says. The report, she adds, “doesn’t address the major source of administration costs, because those costs occur at the school.”

Some big-city districts, she adds, are finding they simply are too large and unwieldy to be efficient. In some cases, communities have moved toward smaller, not bigger districts, she says. A January 2004 Goldwater Institute report co-authored by Ms. Murray, for example, says “efforts are underway to divide … the Los Angeles Unified School District, with 905,020 students, into 30 separate districts.”

In an interview, Ms. Murray says state education leaders are not thinking small enough. If they’re serious about cutting costs, she says, they should take a harder look at charter schools. They are publicly funded, but they operate outside the regular public school system, often housed in small campuses, converted office buildings or older strip malls.

“They’re getting the job done, and they’re doing it at $1,500 less per pupil,” Ms. Murray says. “Consolidation would save $17 to $35 per pupil under the best of circumstances.”

She adds charter schools promote higher student achievement, though other studies have given charter schools mixed reviews.

Mr. Horne himself supports charter schools, but says Arizona has done more than
any other state in promoting them.

“Arizona’s already the country’s leader in charter schools,” he says. “With 2 per cent of the country’s population, we have 20 per cent of the charter schools.”

The other argument for unification has to do with what educators call articulation – or how well the elementary-school curriculum dovetails with what is taught in the high schools.

Districts Provide Continuity, Sen. Gray Says

Sen. Gray says unified districts provide a “continuum of curriculum.” The same administrators work with all K-through-12 teachers to ensure a smooth transition from one grade to the next, on up through high school. It’s more difficult for an elementary school district to prepare departing eighth graders for a high school under a different management, she says.

Mr. Horne agrees. In addition, he says, it’s easier to fix responsibility in a unified district.

“You avoid buck-passing,” he says. “The high school can’t say, ‘it’s not our fault the kids were not prepared.’”

Having a unified district, however, is not a panacea, says Tamara Hall, assistant principal at Sunrise Mountain High School in Peoria. Ms. Hall cites the example of her own district, the Peoria Unified School District. All incoming freshmen at Peoria high schools, she says, are expected to know level-one algebra, as measured by a proficiency exam. The unified district has designed eighth-grade math, in part, to prepare students for the test.

Even then, students fall through the cracks, Ms. Hall says.

To help bring them up to speed as freshman, last year she implemented what she calls a “learning community program” as part of her doctoral dissertation. The program at Centennial High School – part of the Peoria district – placed about 100 freshman students together in special classes. In these classes, students stayed with the same teachers throughout the year. When they were ready, they took the proficiency test.

“They were awarded their beginning algebra credit when they earned it,” Ms. Hall says.

Using A Hammer To Kill Flies?

Arnold Danzig, an education professor at Arizona State University, cites programs like Centennial’s as a way to prepare students for high school standards – without having to resort to unification. Mr. Danzig, who was Ms. Hall’s dissertation adviser, regards unification as something on the order of using a hammer to kill flies. He says politicians should consider other less disruptive approaches to ensuring Sen. Gray’s “continuum of curriculum.”

“Maybe the Legislature should begin by seeing what kind of bridges you can build from elementary districts to the high school districts,” he says. “It wouldn’t be a terrible idea to ask administrators of high schools to meet more regularly with their elementary-school counterparts.”

Ms. Palmer of the school boards association says a mechanism is already in place to provide a more uniform curriculum – the state education standard, as measured by the AIMS test, she says. All schools are required to meet state standards, Ms. Palmer says.

“The standard is still the state standard,” she says.

But Rep. Steve Gallardo, D-13, says standards alone don’t compel elementary and high school districts to talk to each other. He’s been there, he says. Mr. Gallardo sat on the Cartwright Elementary school board from 2001 through 2004. The west Phoenix district feeds into Phoenix Union.

“There wasn’t that communication that should have been there to help and benefit the students,” Rep. Gallardo says.

Just the same, as a Cartwright board member he opposed unification. He voted against H2028 last session. But that was then. He says now he’ll keep an open mind if similar legislation comes before him this time around. That’s probably due in part to a change in perspective. Mr. Gallardo was elected to the Phoenix Union school board and sworn in earlier this month.

After talking to Phoenix Union teachers and administrators, his opposition to unification has softened.

“I’d have to say I was not as informed as I am now,” Rep. Gallardo says.

That’s the perspective, some say, of the whale about to swallow a guppy. In any wholesale unification plan, Phoenix Union could end up swallowing a lot of little fish, creating a super-size district of more than 100,000 students – more than 200,000 by Rene Diaz’s calculations.

Sorting Out The Details

Mr. Diaz is superintendent of the Phoenix Elementary School District.

It’s not just the size that bothers Mr. Diaz. It’s the complexity of unification.

For example, he says, “All the districts have different calendars.”

His counterpart at Madison School District wonders how a newly created district would handle the disparity in teacher pay. Phoenix Union high school teachers make more money on average than the elementary teachers, says Linda Schmitt, interim superintendent for the Madison elementary district, which also feeds into Phoenix Union.

“I would like to know how people are going to solve the issue of different teachers’ salaries,” Ms. Schmitt says.

For merger proponents, these are details that can be worked out. As mentioned, Mr. Horne says money for higher teachers’ salaries would come from savings in lower administrative costs.

In any case, Sen. Gray does not foresee a Phoenix Union mega-district coming out of any legislation she sponsors. Although S1068, as introduced, shies away from specific numbers, Ms. Gray says newly proposed districts should not exceed 30,000 students. To that end, a unified Phoenix Union would have to be divided into smaller districts.

However districts are reshuffled, if the proposed commission does it job, they’ll make a lot more sense than they do currently, proponents say.

“We have to achieve what’s good,” Mr. Horne says.

It’s a good Mr. Horne would like to see imposed on districts. Though he’ll back legislation that lets districts have a vote, he’d rather see a commission with power to require district mergers. That idea doesn’t sit well with the ASBA, Ms. Palmer says.

Ms. Palmer says she “has an absolute mandate from membership to oppose those efforts.”

Mr. Horne replies that the school board association is dominated by small districts with an agenda to save their own skin.

Educator Fears Loss Of Community

Not everyone sees self-preservation as a bad thing, however. Mr. Danzig says loss of a local school district can mean the loss of community, especially in rural areas.

In the end, politics will likely dictate against the creation of a school-redistricting commission with the power to impose its will from the top-down. It would have to sell any unification plan district by district. Bills proposing to eliminate districts without their consent would certainly get a cold shoulder by one key player – Sen. Toni Hellon, R-26, chairwoman of the Senate K-through-12 Education Committee.

“If it’s something I think is going to be detrimental to the schools of Arizona, I don’t have to hear it,” says Sen. Hellon. —