In reading the recent ConVal SAU budget proposal, it struck me that in keeping all of our small elementary schools open, we are bleeding the whole district to death. What are we, as a district, going to do to solve this impossible dilemma? Because no one in our region wants to live in “a town with no school.” But maybe we need to think about it differently. My husband was active duty in the Air Force for eleven years, and I’m a former teacher. Between the kids and myself, we’ve been part of eleven different school districts, from Missouri to North Dakota, and from Colorado to Oklahoma. Most school districts in this country are organized according to the county, not the town; we are unique with our small-town orientation. Countless children all over the country attend school in different towns in the same school district, but because they think about it differently, the towns are not considered to have no schools. They have schools; they’re just regionalized, because that’s what is economically feasible.
In North Dakota, dozens of schools close every year, forcing families to bus kids to different districts entirely. Friends in Texas bought a house in a beautiful subdivision only to be told that just one of their four children could attend the local school; the other three children had to be bused 45 minutes away. Friends in San Francisco bought a house on the beach with a school one block away, but their children – ages 5 and 7 – now ride the bus an hour each way to a rough part of the city due to labyrinthine school funding formulas. Every district has challenges, and every district is simply at the mercy of the numbers.
Even in Massachusetts, my family ran into school assignment issues: the year after we moved into a booming Boston suburb, our schools got redistricted, separating my two boys. My older son, who was “grandfathered” as a fifth-grader, lost busing, while my younger son was re-assigned to a bus stop on a state highway! Rather than leave my 8-year-old alone on the side of Route 20, I hustled my 10-year-old to a stop on a different bus route (where other mothers screamed at me for taking up a parking spot at their bus stop!); then drove my 8-year-old to his new school – a nerve-wracking, 25-minute commute involving two death-defying left turns in rush-hour traffic – at the other end of town (it was at this point that we started to think seriously about moving to Greenfield, where my parents had retired.)
When that re-districting happened, all hell broke loose in town. Mothers sobbed at meetings. Pediatricians screamed at the school board. Families hired lawyers and psychologists. The school secretary kindly expressed concern about my family, knowing my kids had already moved so many times, but I said that apart from the bus stop hassle, the kids were absolutely fine – all the other kids in our neighborhood were redistricted, too; so my younger son kept the same friends, which was all he cared about. Compared to moving across the country, which my family had done so many times, switching buildings was barely a blip on our radar. My younger son never heard us screaming and yelling about how he was going to be psychologically damaged or how we were entitled to attend the school down the street, like some people in our neighborhood – and guess what! – he liked the new school better!
Ideally, each of our eight towns (families in Sharon already send kids miles away to another town!) would have their own village school, but right now, our population can’t support them all, so our district can’t afford it. Aside from the few families who live in town centers, many kids spend 45 minutes on the bus already. All over the country, school districts have to cope with ebb and flow of population, and sometimes it is a serious hardship for parents. But in our valley, we have a district that is already partly regionalized, with transportation already systems in place; we are actually way better off than hundreds of other places around the country. The low population of children here is, hopefully, a temporary situation – but letting our SAU funding be stretched to the breaking point to keep nearly empty schools open will only exacerbate the problem.
I can hear my realtor friends opening up their laptops to write me irate letters: Are you crazy? You try selling a house in a town with no school! What I’m saying is, we wouldn’t have towns with no schools: we’d have a few towns that would feed into amazing regional or co-op elementary schools which could offer our students so much more than we do now – more programming, more support staff, more enrichment and services. This is already the reality in districts all over the country for various reasons, and we, at least, don’t have traffic jams, schools situated in dangerous neighborhoods, or road rage over parking spots.
Ultimately, voters will have to make a choice: keep all of our tiny elementary schools open, and bleed the whole district dry, or, at least temporarily, regionalize/reorganize the elementary and/or middle schools, and keep the whole district strong until we have enough students to fill all the buildings again. The first question from young families looking to move to the area (okay, realtors, maybe it is the second question after “Where’s the elementary school?”) is “How’s the high school?” – because the quality of the high school is the single biggest driver when families choose a school district. You know your kids will make it through elementary school, but when itcomes to the high school, your child’s future is at literally at stake. If we slash the ConVal budget until it’s barely breathing, young families won’t move here – to any town.
Jesseca Timmons, M.Ed. is a writer living in Greenfield. Both her kids attended ConVal.