EDITORIALS

New lines on the map

For a Jacksonville School District

MOST OF the time, a new school district in Arkansas wouldn’t be a good idea. Most of the time. The state has too many school districts as it is.

Instead of having hundreds of school districts spread out over every valley and around every bend in the river, a better idea would be to have one school district per county in this state. And the taxpayers could hire one superintendent per county. And one assistant superintendent for transportation per county. And one assistant nutrition manager per county. And so efficiently on. While making sure each locality-and its close-to-home interests-get represented on the school board.

Efficient education doesn’t have to mean loss of local control. When it does, that’s not an indictment of district consolidation but of a lack of imagination and generosity on the part of educational administrators. Cut back on administrative costs, and more money-not less-could be used in the classroom. A classroom not too far from home, parental influence and small-scale, personal education.

One bright and sunny day, Arkansas might actually find that happy combination of efficiency and personal connection in our schools. That is, if ever our political class could be convinced to put the interests of students, parents and taxpayers above those of the educational bureaucracy. Which includes teacher unions, that bane of any real progress in education.

(Sigh.)

We can dream.

But until that dream comes true, parents and taxpayers will just have to improve the schools as best can be done within this current, all-too-inefficient system.

Now comes a group of folks from Jacksonville, Arkansas, a postmark that has a nice local sound to it. The name Jacksonville has been a favorite ever since Mark Twain and his friends decided that pronouncing all those furrin’ names in the Holy Land was too hard for monolingual Americans, and so in The Innocents Abroad, they decided every town they came upon would be called Jacksonville.

Some folks in Arkansas’ own Jacksonville want their own school district. They want to break away from Pulaski County’s, draw their own district map, elect their own leaders-and generally say good-bye to the bigger, financially strapped, now state-run school district. Such a break would require a vote in Jacksonville, and now that the state’s Board of Education has approved one, that referendum can go forward.

WHY IS a Jacksonville School District a good idea? Especially since merging school districts has been the good idea over the years?

First, a school district of Jacksonville’s own would cover about 100 square miles of northern Pulaski County and have about 4,400 students. It would not be one of those undersized and underfunded little school districts with 300 kids and a senior class numbering only in the dozens. Even if those smallest of school districts somehow found a way to educate the kids and offer them a broad curriculum, the financial challenges would be insurmountable.

Jerry Guess, who’s the state-appointed superintendent of the Pulaski County Special School District, says he’s not opposed to this separation. Indeed, he says such a change would benefit both Jacksonville and the rest of the county.

Superintendent Guess points out that a new Jacksonville School District would be eligible for millions of dollars in state money to repair and maintain its schools. Because the state considers his district among the richest when it comes to property taxes, Dr. Guess says that additional money is now unavailable to schools inside the current county school district.

Dr. Guess adds that, if a separate Jacksonville district is created, the county’s school district would be released from its obligations to upgrade Jacksonville’s older campuses-obligations it became responsible for in its desegregation plan. Nor is the federal judge presiding over the county’s school-desegregation lawsuit opposed to this new district.

So let’s vote. Something tells us that, after the ballots are tallied, and justice and good sense triumph, principals in several schools in northern Pulaski County are going to have to redo their stationery.

Editorial, Pages 16 on 03/26/2014

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