Amy Harper, 15, of Seneca Rocks decided to ride the North Fork Express. She likes Petersburg; she’s treated well there. But the bus ride is still long, and she has time to participate in only one extracurricular activity, Future Farmers of America. If Circleville were still open, Harper says she might have tried out for the basketball team, or the cheerleading squad. She might have helped teach first- graders how to read. "I’d love to have Circleville back," she said. "You knew everybody. It was like family. We’d all like to be back at Circleville." from WV Gazette at http://www.wvgazette.com/section/Series/Closing+Costs/2002092811
This was predicted in my previous writing at Consolidation and Bonding
More from the Gazette by Eric Eyre and Scott Finn
When they closed hundreds of West Virginia schools, state education officials promised to save millions of dollars and provide new advanced classes, without making bus rides much longer for students.
A decade later, bus times are longer than ever, few advanced courses are offered to rural students, and those savings never materialized.
Find out why in Closing Costs, a series about the legacy of school consolidation in West Virginia.
Education agency grows while enrollment shrinks
From Tom Rowley column: Rachel Tompkins, President of the Rural School and Community Trust, a nonprofit focused on improving the quality of rural education and community life, puts it this way: "If you look around the country, there are a number of states that think consolidation is the way to save money. But if any money is saved, it’s very short term."
From the Trust's Policy Direct Marty Strange: One of the biggest offsets to savings is transportation. When a school closes, more kids have to travel farther to get to their new school. That means more kids on buses (since many will no longer be able to walk, ride a bike, or even catch a lift from mom or dad), more buses, and more bus miles. All of which means more money. Another offset comes from administration. Contrary to the logic used to sell consolidation, big schools need as many or more--not fewer--administrators per student than do small schools. How can this be? Economists call it diseconomies of scale. For example, when students become just another face in the crowd, it takes more adults—principles, vice-principles, counselors, and security guards—to deal with their alienation and the troubles that ensue.
Rural School and Community Trust http://www.ruraledu.org/
see also Knowledge Works Foundation, Cost Effectiveness of Small Schools at http://www.kwfdn.org/Resources/dollars_sense.pdf
Centralization and Regionalization
Education and Career Advice in Rural Communities
A quick way to gut a community (see this link or below) http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3510764&thesection=news&thesubsection=dialogue
04.07.2003
Comment by ROBIN KEARNS and TIM McCREANOR*
Over the past decade, bigger has become better in schooling. High rolls have often meant more resources and greater reputations. In cities, the costs include traffic congestion and the house prices paid to be "in zone".
The "small is beautiful" perspective on education still prevails in many rural areas. But, increasingly, rural schools are under threat, with 24 set to close or amalgamate this year and the status of a further 90 under review.
We are told the millions saved will be redistributed among surviving schools. It is, therefore, timely to reassess the way schools can be a social glue within the fabric of our nation.
Schools are community assets and not just sites of education. Just as hospitals and clinics are more than sites of medical intervention, so, too, schools serve broader functions.
Such is their power to bring families together that we can say schools create, rather than just locate in, communities.
Primary schools are one of the few portals through which almost everyone passes as children. Later, a large proportion of people return (often to the same schools) as parents of young children.
Schools can be the hub of social life. Parents cluster around school gates throughout the country at 3pm, providing opportunities for information-sharing, shared childcare and friendship.
For those who contribute actively to their children's schools, they become sites at which adults are challenged - perhaps through school camps, fundraising in the parent-teacher association, being a trustee or through sharpening skills for a return to paid work.
From a study of the closure of Surrey Park Primary in Invercargill we know that those most affected by the loss of these extra-educational resources are often those who can least afford it - financially and socially.
The study, by Karen Witten of Massey University, revealed that months after their children had moved schools, many parents felt marginalised within a new school community and distrusting of bureaucracy. For those without a car, the increased distances between home and school precluded the school gate contact that had linked them to community.
Schools are places that become imbued with meanings and associations of their own. They remind us of our childhoods. Often they become sites of peer-group reunions. They can carry and represent local aspirations. School reunions see the renewal not only of friendships but of the life of communities.
In rural settings, where the distances between amenities are often vast, the importance of schools expands. They are often a focus for expressions of community, whether regular meetings, weekend sports, or special occasions such as fairs or celebrations.
They are also storehouses of community memory. This can be the obvious forms of remembrance, such as monuments to local war dead, or the ordinary kind of family histories sometimes stretching over generations. They can also be the sites at which communities rally to resist unwanted change or expend energy and funds on projects of local importance.
Obviously, schools cost money to run and there are limits to what can be funded. Schools change in size, quality and importance over time, mostly in harmony with social and economic change. Generations of New Zealanders have experienced school closures that reflect the shifts of population over time. The postwar shift to urban living saw many schools and other social amenities fall into disuse or be turned to new functions as homes or shops.
Our concern is not to argue against the possibility of school closure. Nor do we advocate a false nostalgia for a golden age of education. What does concern us is, first, the processes of engagement between the state and the places whose schools are under threat and, second, a tendency to construct school closure as the exclusive domain of education rather than broader social policy.
Consultation with affected communities can offer small consolation when there are deep inequalities in power, knowledge and degree of "stake" in the school itself. Too often, according to the Surrey Park study participants, consultation amounted to talking at rather than with.
At Surrey Park, talk of closure was drawn out over several years, creating community anxiety and a slow drop in student numbers that further jeopardised the school's viability.
Even when both parties acknowledge the inevitable, people need to participate in planning rather than simply be consulted. Participation involves an exchange of ideas and co-operative interaction. Consultation can too easily mean just giving up time to hear plans from bureaucrats trained in change management.
Language can be central to the betrayal that communities often feel. In the Invercargill study, the closure came as the outcome of an "education development initiative". Locals were understandably confused when a term suggesting new computers or an adventure playground turned out to be jargon for a plan to close and amalgamate schools. Reconfiguring regional classroom capacity might seem a "development" to a bureaucrat, but can amount to a nightmare for parents or long-time residents.
The costs of closure can be monetary and social. Research by economists has calculated the contribution of medical facilities to rural areas. A small hospital, for instance, not only provides jobs but also can sustain ancillary activities (for example, laundry services) and adds revenues to local petrol stations and grocery stores from visitor spending.
This is also the case with schools. Institutions of whatever kind create multiplier effects. What is often left outside the calculus of school closure is that dollars saved also mean dollars lost to local business.
But not only monetary capital is generated by the presence of rural institutions. Social capital, too, is generated in the way of trust, neighbourliness and all those priceless ways a community is stitched together through purposeful encounters.
It is, therefore, no coincidence that a Southland school closure was followed closely by the abandonment of a church and an end to the volunteer fire brigade.
For all these reasons, it is unfortunate to note that only the Ministry of Education seems to be representing the state in school closure debates. What of health, welfare and regional development? Where is the joined-up thinking and collaboration that has currency in social policy debate?
As the multiple determinants of well-being are increasingly recognised in health policy, there is surely a case to think twice before "home time" is announced for the last time.
* Robin Kearns is an associate professor of geography and Tim McCreanor a lecturer in social psychology at Auckland University.