Is consolidation an answer for schools?
In the midst of declining revenues and painful budget cuts, parents and other taxpayers are asking whether consolidating school districts is an idea whose time has finally come.
The idea hasn't gotten much support in the past, when times were good — or, at the worst, only marginally uncomfortable.
A year ago, when we urged school districts to give it some thought, none did.
These days, though, the consolidation idea is being brought up at school board meetings, in letters to the editor and elsewhere, not just here but around the state. But so far there's no serious momentum.
Last year, there were three consolidations, including one in Tuolumne County, but only as a last resort. After its enrollment dropped to about a dozen students, the tiny Chinese Camp School District was essentially folded into the Jamestown Elementary School District in a procedure called lapsation. It happened within a few months.
Typically, however, the consolidation process can take 18 months to two years or more, meaning it offers no immediate relief to the districts trying to figure out how to survive through 2010-11.
Over the decades, there have been plenty of school district mergers in California, most of them when the state was offering incentives or insisting on unification votes.
The carrots disappeared in the early 1970s, and not much has happened since. There's no legislation pending that proposes a new round of incentives for consolidation.
Under Calfiornia law, consolidations must be initiated from the grass roots — through a citizen petition or by a majority vote of a school board.
It's not enough for someone to throw out the idea and expect others to run with it. One or more citizens who want consolidation to be considered need to put it forward as a specific request — I or we want you, our school board, to review the financial impact of consolidating with (name another district).
State law doesn't mandate a financial impact study, although it would be absurd to start the petition process without one. Such a study could be done by the school districts involved, by the
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