A lobbyist for the Arizona School Boards Association warned a panel tasked with designing new school districts that the consolidation plans it is considering are poised to fail because of disparities among existing districts.
Even so, the panel’s chairman says it doesn’t have a responsibility to address the issues.
“I think they’re using this forum to talk about issues that have been talked about at the Capitol for decades,” Marty Shultz said a day after the Nov. 6 School District Redistricting Commission meeting. “They are clearly injecting a discussion about public policy issues that is certainly not within our scope.”
Arizona School Boards Association lobbyist Janice Palmer told members of the special commission that all of the 92 districts being considered for consolidation have their own policies and procedures, including how much teachers and staff are paid and how much district residents pay in property taxes.
Other critics of the unification proposals questioned how other elements of the state’s complicated education funding system that only apply to certain school districts — including a program that pays select teachers higher wages, funding for high utility costs and special property taxes levied under a desegregation agreement with the federal government – would be incorporated if districts that take advantage of a special program combine with those that don’t.
Shultz says the discussion is worthwhile, just not for his commission, which isn’t responsible for addressing those issues.
“I think that’s a legitimate debate, but we have the upcoming legislative session to discuss it,” he said. “Our lawyers tell us, based on the law [creating the commission], we have answered those issues.”
At the Nov. 6 meeting, the commission reviewed a majority of the plans for the 92 districts. The commission will begin voting on the consolidation plans at its Nov. 13 meeting and it has tentatively scheduled meetings for Nov. 20 and Nov. 27 if additional time is needed to vote or alter the plans.
Any consolidation plans approved by the commission would be voted on by residents of the affected districts in the November 2008 elections.
In April, the commission asked the districts for comments on the proposed recommendations to form K-12 districts out of non-unified elementary and high school districts. It received 69 replies from school governing boards in September; a majority of the school boards disapproved of the proposed unification plans.
Instead, many favored keeping the current districts, saying the plans would create poor districts. Others conducted their own research and found larger districts don’t improve student achievement.
Some also questioned who would pay for a transition if voters approve the ballot measure or found that the whole idea would violate the rights of minority representation on certain boards.
Shultz believes unifying districts would pour more funds into classrooms, align K-12 curriculum, unify tax rates for each district and begin to address leveling salaries of elementary and high school teachers.