Jackson Free Press

Since a flare-up of attention last winter, the issue of school district consolidation has received only limited public attention. This is unfortunate, as a governor-appointed panel is set to issue a report next month that will lay out a path for dissolving 18 small, rural school districts.

The evidence for benefits of school district consolidation is mixed at best. Studies have shown that mergers of small districts with fewer than 300 students can save administrative costs, while districts with more than 1,500 students save almost nothing by merging. And the academic benefits of consolidation are even spottier. Larger districts tend to offer a wider variety of courses, but they also tend to have higher dropout rates and lower attendance rates.

The Commission on Mississippi Education Structure, created by Gov. Haley Barbour, is drafting a report for Barbour on potential benefits of consolidation. Using private funds, the group commissioned a Colorado-based consulting firm to study the feasibility of merging some of the state's 152 school districts.

That firm, Augenblick, Palaich & Associates, settled on a list of 18 school districts—most of them majority-black and rural—as ripe targets for consolidation, based on their low academic performance, low student enrollment and high administrative costs per student.

A group of public-school advocates, including Southern Echo and the Mississippi Delta Catalyst Roundtable, has requested the raw data that Augenblick used to identify target districts. So far, staff for the governor's commission has refused to release the data on the grounds that no single table of raw data exists. Commission members have also offered other defenses—that the relevant data is already publicly available and that the data needs to be presented in context, with an opportunity for questions and answers.

These evasions are plain wrong. While district-level data may be available for most of Augenblick's criteria, the formulas that the consultants used are not. As a body created by executive order, the commission falls under Mississippi's open meetings and public-records laws. Records for a public body should be made public, whether or not they would benefit from context. More importantly, community members have a right to know how a consultant—in the service of a public body—compiled a list of school districts to be dissolved.

Many commission members seem aware of the emotional nature of consolidation. Commission members Rep. Cecil Brown of Jackson and Sen. Videt Carmichael of Meridian have both indicated that they respect the importance of community support in making any kind of school district merger work.

If the Commission hopes to gain the trust of community members and public school supporters, though, it must make its process more transparent and release the Augenblick study data now.