Consolidation: A dirty word?
Someone uttered the “C” word the other day.
And it was immediately rebuked.
“That is not something we talk about,” Jefferson Twp. Superintendent Richard Gates told reporter Scott Elliott.
Elliott was asking, in light of the tiny district’s dire financial condition, whether consolidation with another school system was a possibility.
Consolidation can be like a death in the family.
Everybody grieves when the center of the community closes its door. That’s what a school can and should be.
It’s an identity.
We are the Jefferson High School Broncos, some residents might say.
You are also broke.
According to the district’s five-year forecast, it will have $7,263 in the bank at the end of this school year.
By the end of the next school year, it will be more than $400,000 in the hole.
And even if district voters pass a new 5-mill tax in November, the new money will last the district only to the 2012-13 school year.
If the district is lucky.
Which is why the state declared the district in fiscal emergency and is appointing a 10-member commission to take charge of the district’s finances.
The district is small, rural and poor.
Academically, it has not measured well on the state report card — last year it was rated in the academic watch category, one step up from the state’s lowest. This year’s report card will come out Aug. 26.
As finances and academics have slid; so has enrollment. There were only 625 students enrolled last year.
More than three-quarters of the elementary school students qualify for free or reduced lunches, as do more than 40 percent of the high school students.
Jefferson Twp. schools is just one of four districts — Dayton, Trotwood-Madison and New Lebanon are the others — that serve students in the township.
It’s the smallest, the poorest and the most expensive to run of the four.
Given that, you’d think consolidation would be something you’d need to talk about — whether you want to or not.
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