Dispatches: Lost on the road to reform

By Hank Kalet, Managing Editor
   The state has placed smaller school districts in its sights.
   But that doesn’t mean that anything will — or should happen.
   Patrick Piegari, the Middlesex County executive superintendent of schools, has begun a review of the three K-8 school districts in the county, with the goal being to develop a plan for consolidating into larger K-12 districts.
   Dr. Piegari, who met with Cranbury last week and Jamesburg in the spring, told Cranbury that he would be creating a task force of administrators, board members, community members and officials from school districts familiar with previous consolidation efforts to collect data and make recommendations.
   He said he expects to present his findings — including a list of advantages and disadvantages — to the state commissioner of education and the affected school districts in 2010. Consolidation plans — should they be recommended — would then go to voters.
   There is some logic in merging districts — there are 611 school districts in New Jersey, more than there are municipalities, and many lack high schools of their own. Reducing that number would have the benefit of reducing the number of top-level administrators and creating economies of scale that can expand programming and extra-curricular opportunities.
   But there also are potential dangers, including a loss of local control, which cannot be ignored.
   More importantly, targeting school district consolidation separately from the larger question of streamlining state and local government seems more likely to shift bureaucratic overkill rather than reduce it.
   Schools, of course, are a convenient target. In most towns, school taxes represent between two-thirds and three-quarters of the total tax bill and the school budget goes to voters. So streamlining school bureaucracies is necessary.
   But schools are only a small part of a very large and unwieldy problem that can only be addressed as part of a larger effort to reduce the overall size of government. That means reducing the number of towns in New Jersey (there are 567) and school districts, eliminating independent fire districts and taking some local responsibilities and turning them over to the state and counties.
   The executive superintendent position — and the directive to find cost-saving opportunities — grew from 2006 state budget battle that resulted in the closing of state government. As part of the agreement on that year’s budget, the governor convened a special joint legislative session that was empowered to dissect all levels of government, identify reforms and turn them into legislation.
   The three-month session, however, resulted in only minor alterations and limited reform. Proposals that would have led to real change — including a plan that would have given the Legislature and governor final word on recommended municipal and school mergers — either were tabled or watered down at the behest of state employees, municipal officials and other interest groups.
   Rather than attacking the problem in a direct and comprehensive manner, the effort has been diffused — there is a municipal consolidation panel assigned to make recommendations, the executive superintendents and a variety of other smaller studies taking place with the many impediments to consolidation that have been erected over the years left in place. That means there is little likelihood that these overlapping layers of government will be eliminated.
   This brings me back to Dr. Piegari’s review of Cranbury and Jamesburg and their relationships with Princeton and Monroe. It is possible that consolidation would make fiscal sense, if considered solely on a narrow cost-benefit basis. But there are peripheral concerns that need to be taken into consideration, concerns that will have an impact on the success of any merger. Shared recreational opportunities, for instance, or access to the same libraries, both of which create connections among students and place them on a level playing field both in the classroom and on school athletic fields and in clubs.
   There also are questions of geography — exactly how might a unified Cranbury-Princeton school district deal with having a Cranbury-only school in the middle of a larger district? Or would it ship kids back and forth? And what would be gained by that?
   In the end, I suspect this entire effort is going to fail and probably should and that we will be back where we started, complaining about our tax bills and wondering where all the money is going.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. He cah be e-mailed by clicking here. His blog, Channel Surfing, can be found at www.kaletblog.com.