Jackson Free Press

A governor-appointed panel is set to issue its final recommendations on school district consolidation in the next month. The Commission on Education Structure met at the state Capitol today to discuss a preliminary report on consolidating some of Mississippi's 152 public-school districts. Barring major changes, the commission will approve a final version of the report by next month without meeting in person, Commission Chairman and Bancorp South CEO Aubrey Patterson said.

"If the draft (report) meets with the general approval of the group, and there are only fine-tuning-type changes, then we'll do that by consent, by circulating the documents," Patterson said.

Gov. Haley Barbour appointed Patterson and the other Commission members in December of last year, and the Commission has met monthly since January. The Commission's meetings have been open to the public, as was the last meeting of the working group that is drafting the final report. Funding for the commission is coming from three private sources, however: the National Governors Association, the Appalachian Regional Commission and the Barksdale Reading Institute, whose CEO, Claiborne Barksdale, also sits on the Commission.

Mississippi law already provides an avenue for two adjoining school districts to merge administrations. The working group's presentation today focused on methods of involuntary consolidation, all of which would require some new legislation.

One possible avenue for consolidation would target districts that fail to meet a set of standards suggested by education consulting company Augenblick, Palaich & Associates, which the Commission hired to study the issue. Those standards include academic performance, student enrollment below 2,000 and district administrative costs above $460 per student. According to the consultants' study, 18 school districts in the state would be eligible for consolidation under these criteria.

Another method would consolidate districts that fall under state control because of repeated low performance. Former state Superintendent of Education Hank Bounds, who is currently the state's commissioner for higher education, said that successful districts may be wary of accepting consolidation with a failing district without incentives.

"When the department takes over a school district, it's sort of very last resort," Bounds said. "We're talking about districts where the wheels have come completely off the wagon. ... The adjoining school districts know how bad the situation is in that district. For obvious reasons there's a real reluctance to take over a district that's been taken over by the state until there's been some serious triage done to the district."

The draft report proposes several possible incentives for the receiving districts that would accept a failing district or one previously taken over by the state, including financial incentives like additional resources, facility bonds and no-interest loans and regulatory incentives like temporary exemptions from accreditation and accountability standards.

The Augenblick study estimated that consolidation of the 18 school districts it targeted at between $12.5 and $13.8 million, far below the $65 million Barbour suggested in his November 2009 budget recommendation for the 2011 fiscal year. Studies of school district consolidation suggest that mergers save little, if any money. A 2001 Syracuse University study found that cost savings decreased when merging larger districts: on average, districts with more than 1,500 students saved no money, the study found.

Any savings through consolidation would come from the elimination of administrators and other central-office personnel, state Superintendent of Education Tom Burnham said.

"It's important to keep in mind that every bit of this consolidation conversation has been around consolidation of administrative functions and not consolidation of schools," Burnham said. "And, of course, the initial savings are going to come from consolidation of districts, because you eliminate district functions, which means you take personnel, usually higher-level personnel, out of the cost equation."