Consolidation, sharing agreements among options for rural Iowa schools

CEDAR RAPIDS - The hyphens stand out on any list of Iowa school districts.

Gladbrook-Reinbeck. Sumner-Fredericksburg. Eddyville-Blakesburg-Fremont.

School districts across the state have been consolidating over the past several decades, meaning Iowa now has 122 fewer districts than it did in 1965.

In many cases, that's due to declining enrollment - with fewer students, rural districts aren't able to make ends meet and still provide the education that's needed. For other schools, consolidating just made sense geographically.

But most school district mergers point to the central challenges that rural Iowa schools face today: low revenue through property taxes and state aid, transportation costs and the problem of maintaining staffing and class offerings when enrollment declines.

'Your expenses continue to grow and your revenues continue to decrease,” said Rob Busch, superintendent of the Edgewood-Colesburg Community School District in Clayton and Delaware counties. 'You're doing more with less people.”

Sharing services

Busch's district epitomizes many of the struggles of small-town Iowa schools. It now has about 535 students, he said, down from 600 a few years ago.

In addition to his role as superintendent, Busch will become principal of the district's elementary school next year. The district reduced its budget by more than $250,000 for the 2015-16 school year, according to school board minutes.

Edgewood-Colesburg schools also share a transportation director and a business manager with a neighboring district.

Other districts have similar sharing agreements.

Ben Petty is the superintendent of two districts near Marshalltown - the Green Mountain-Garwin Community School District and the BCLUW district. The latter, with a total of about 600 students, represents what at one time was five districts, Petty said - Beaman, Conrad, Liscomb, Union and Whitten.

Petty's two districts also share an elementary guidance counselor, he said. And those two, along with the North Tama and Gladbrook-Reinbeck districts, share a director of curriculum and innovation.

Alan Marshall, superintendent of the Center Point-Urbana district, said that type of agreement can provide schools additional funding through state incentives, in addition to the cost savings sharing personnel offers. Center Point-Urbana shares a human resources director with four other districts, Marshall added.

Rural schools also receive some services - including access to research databases for students, professional development and special education and mental health services - from area education agencies, said Keith Stamp, a regional administrator with Grant Wood Area Education Agency.

'It's just a gradual ratcheting up of all the time demands for districts,” Stamp said of the pressures rural schools face.

Funding pressures

Iowa's school funding formula is based on a district's enrollment. For schools with declining enrollment, that can make already tight budgets even more problematic, district leaders said.

In some ways, a lack of funding is 'suffocating small schools,” said Dean Shores, the superintendent of the Exira-Elkhorn district in western Iowa.

Petty and Busch expressed similar concerns.

'It can make it very difficult to continue to staff your districts at the level you'd want to and to be able to offer all the programs you'd like,” Petty said.

In Edgewood-Colesburg, declining enrollment in past years led to budget reductions or using the district's savings, Busch said.

'We were dividing negative money,” Busch said.

In Center Point-Urbana, Marshall said, enrollment has been stable or growing. But the district still has financial difficulty because of its location, he said.

Center Point-Urbana has low property values, Marshall pointed out, and the district is 'property-poor” because it does not include a lot of industry.

The Clear Creek Amana district in Johnson and Iowa counties, by contrast, is projected to grow by about 1,000 students in the next 10 years, superintendent Tim Kuehl said. That would continue a North Liberty population boom that has buoyed the district's finances and helped it develop a good reputation, he said.

The Clear Creek Amana district also is building a new elementary school and a center for science, technology, engineering and math.

'Somehow we still have that small-school feel, even though we're getting to be a bigger school,” Kuehl said.

Class sizes and transportation

Maintaining staffing and class sizes for rural schools is often tricky, superintendents said.

'There's a lot of districts similar to us that have 60, 65 kids” per grade, said Jon Thompson, who leads the Aplington-Parkersburg district near Cedar Falls. That's too big for two class sections, Thompson noted, but having three sections would be difficult budget-wise.

Because rural school districts often cover large geographic areas, some also have to pay close attention to the length of students' bus rides.

While consolidation saves schools money, it can make those trips even longer, Petty said.

'As districts get larger and larger, a higher percentage of those resources have to go into transportation costs,” Petty said. 'You have students on the bus for longer periods of time.”

In Edgewood-Colesburg, the district uses SUVs to drive some students to and from school to keep the duration of bus routes down, Busch said.

'They're spaced every which way, so it's not as (easy) to get them with a bus,” he said.

Consolidation in some cases 'might be appropriate in extremely small schools,” Petty said.

But, he said, 'I think we provide a great education for students in small schools and certainly would like to see that continue.”

Gazette intern Maddy Arnold contributed to this story.