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The In Box blog is a general news and discussion site for the News Department of North Country Public Radio. In Box contact information 
Latest NCPR News
The In Box blog is a general news and discussion site for the News Department of North Country Public Radio. In Box contact information
Latest NCPR News
As a grad of AuSable Valley Central School let me encourage you to find another way.
School mergers rip the hearts out of two communities.
Kids spend hours on buses when they used to walk.
Share administrators, teachers, lunch supervisors, bus maintenance garages, snow plows but leave the kids in their schools.
“Central School” indicates that the school is already the result of consolidation, albeit most of them many years ago. People would do well to remember why those schools were consolidated in the first place: it was no longer feasible to maintain many small schools in every community that originally had one. There is a desirable economy of scale that outweighs the disadvantages. If a community can no longer support a school on a reasonable basis, its heart has probably stopped already.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe that a single consolidated facility is being discussed here, only the merging of administrations and special services. Some of Canton’s students from those far corners of the district already spend too much time on the bus, and far too many parents remedy that problem by driving their kids to school.
Nothing good happens on a school bus, I don’t think driving your kids to school is a bad thing, particularly when as you say kids are sitting a long time on a bus.
But regardless I think consolidation really needs to be studied. I am open to it as a Canton parent, however the whole point is to provide fiscal sustainability over a long period of time, if it does not do that, than there is no point to consolidating. Yes you will have some savings, but you will also have some costs.
There is no doubt that consolidation is what the state of NY wants us to do.
Its like we never get to the bottom of this endless crises of not having enough funding. If something is a crisis for 5 years is it still a crisis or is it just the status-quo
No one seems to be asking if the current model is sustainable financially, energy-wise or any other way. Consolidated schools were made possible by cheap, readily available energy, and that is going away. Local administrators don’t have to face that reality because at present 90% of their transportation costs are paid by the State. For them that is just a revenue stream. There are also those arguing that the current model is no longer financially sustainable. Long term we may well end up with community based schools enhanced by electronic access to classes. In the meantime, further consolidation is a misallocation of resources.
The reason we “never get to the bottom of this endless crises” is that the education industry knows that people are more likely to approve spending increases if they are presented as “emergencies”, “crises” or “unavoidable”. Add to that the inability of people to tell the difference between “nice to have” and “what we can afford” and you have what we have now: unsupportable expenses, over-dependence on inflated budgets and plenty of finger pointing and head scratching.