Education Week - May 1, 2019 - 6

Wealthier Enclaves Breaking Away From School Districts
By Sarah D. Sparks
In the years since the Great Recession, more superintendents have
confronted dwindling resources and
tense arguments over how to allocate them. And in a rapidly increasing number of districts, leaders face
fights to keep wealthier communities
from splintering off entirely.
School districts have always restructured, usually because of significant shifts in student enrollment or
consolidations. Maine alone has seen
eight new splinter districts and one
continuing secession fight, as communities unwind district consolidations
from 2007 and the 1960s. But breakaways might happen more often as
shrinking district budgets meet shifting student populations.
"When state resources get more
scarce, you see less equalization. You
see bigger divides open up ... and you
might have a sharper motivation for
a property-wealthy enclave to put
up a fence," said Zahava Stadler, a
researcher with the nonprofit group
EdBuild and the author of a new report on school district splintering.
Over the past two calendar years,
27 communities in 13 states across
the country began trying to secede
from their districts, the EdBuild report found. Ten of those communities
successfully became new districts,
and the rest are locked in ongoing
battles, most spilling into the courts
and state legislatures.
That's a sharp uptick. In a 2017
study of district secessions, EdBuild
found that while 63 communities
successfully broke away to form new
districts from 2000 to 2017, 10 more
have seceded in the two years since.

school system that has experienced
that sort of resegregation. Since
courts lifted a federal school desegregation order in 2003, three communities have broken away from the district, leaving the remaining district
about $15 million poorer and nearly
90 percent nonwhite as of 2017. (Only
one of the three new districts is majority white.) Since 2013, the district
has been fighting to prevent another
wealthy community, St. George, from
leaving as well.
"It would reduce the per-capita
spending for our population, devastatingly so," said M.E. Cormier, an
East Baton Rouge graduate and the
mother of an incoming kindergartner,
who helped lead a successful fight to
prevent St. George's first secession attempt in 2013.
East Baton Rouge Superintendent
Warren Drake has made "significant
and specific plans for the East Baton
Rouge Parish to improve infrastructure and to strengthen the school
district as a whole," Cormier noted,
"but I don't believe that any of that
movement has delayed any of the
motivation to leave for supporters of
St. George."
East Baton Rouge advocates
stopped the 2013 secession effort
using massive door-to-door canvassing to explain how the withdrawal
would affect students. This year,
St. George secession advocates
changed tack, trying to incorporate
as a new city and effectively remove
property-tax revenue from the East
Baton Rouge district. That proposal
will go to the polls this October,
though if St. George becomes its

Striking a Balance
In southwestern Montana, the
8,000-student K-12 Helena district
had for years enrolled high school
students from East Helena, a neighboring K-8 district about 15 minutes
away. Recently, a growing student
population gave East Helena enough
students to build its own high school.
The city passed a bond to build its own
high school for an expected 600 students and change into a K-12 district.
Unlike some of the other districts,
Helena and East Helena have few

racial differences; more than 9 in 10
students in both districts are white.
But the poverty rate is 10 percentage points higher in Helena primary
schools than in East Helena primary
schools. That means the poverty rate
in Helena High School-now 8.3 percent-would likely rise.
"Part of the decision that parents are making now is, do we send
our kid to a new home school in our
neighborhood that's going to be about
600 students, versus sending our
kid to the big comprehensive high
school," said Helena Superintendent
Tyler Ream. "The large comprehensive comes with bigger classes, ...
but it also comes with the offerings,
the [Advanced Placement], the dualcredit offerings. I think what's been
taking place across the nation for decades now is that ebb and flow from
big to small [schools], or trying to
make big feel small."
Helena High will drop from 1,500
to 1,100 students after the transition,
and Ream said the district is trying
to find ways to keep staff, including changing schedules and asking
teachers to "float" among several
schools.
"We don't want to pare down any
of our offerings but we will have to
get creative in terms of how we provide them," Ream said. "It's realistic I think in our near future that a
teacher could teach one specific course
but maybe not at one specific school ...
because we might not have the total
student capacity to command one full
[teacher] to that subject area."
The break with East Helena has
been amicable, if a bit awkward,

Ream said. Generations of East Helena students have attended Helena
High School-and will continue to
go there, as the new East Helena
school will open only one grade a
year beginning in 2020. Helena will
also continue to accept East Helena
students as transfers, though East
Helena has not yet committed to do
the same.
The EdBuild report suggests district leaders can encourage active engagement of all parents and communities to prevent any one area from
dominating.
"District leaders can arm local
activists with information by saying: 'Here's what it would really do
to us. Here's what it would do to our
classrooms, here's what it would
do to our budgets,' " Stadler said.
"That's the kind of thing where the
passion can come from the community, and the data and the evidence
can come from the district. And together, that's a very powerful combination."
It's also important for district and
school leaders to work to bring different parts of their communities together and to explain their reasons
for balancing resources among different schools, she said.
Cormier agreed. "I think that our
public school system unfortunately
gets a really bad rap mostly by people who've actually never attended
a public school," she said. "I think
that if people were to actually walk
into our schools and take a tour,
they would have a new perspective and a new opinion that they've
never had before."

WHERE SCHOOL DISTRICTS ARE SPLINTERING

Disparities Worsen
In some communities, the separations raise ugly questions about the
growth of economic and racial segregation between the new districts and
those left behind.
"If we're going to look at the effects,
we can see the motivations" for some
communities to break away, Stadler
said. "We can say that a clear majority of districts that successfully seceded have higher median household
income, higher median property values, lower rates of student poverty,
lower rates of nonwhite students,
and clearly higher rates of local tax
dollars for their school district than
the districts that they are leaving behind," Stadler said. "I mean, if you're
going to wind up with less-diverse
classrooms and keeping more local
money for [the schools in the new
district] than they had before [the
break-up], it's not a mystery as to
why this occurred."
Some recent secession attempts,
like one in Gardendale, Ala., have
been thwarted by legal interventions
meant to counter a history of racial
segregation in the area. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that districts
under a desegregation order cannot
split if doing so would increase segregation. But the number of districts
under active desegregation orders
has waned for decades.
Louisiana's 40,500-student East
Baton Rouge Parish district is one

own city, it would still face multiple
statewide and local votes to create a
new district.
State and district policies can often
prevent or encourage these fights before they start. For example, before
2018, Indiana law required judges
to form county committees to create
a new district plan and mandated
a multistep process before a secession proposal could be presented
to the state board of education. In
December, in response to requests
from communities, the board issued
a memo allowing groups to propose
new districts directly to the board,
leading to new secession requests.
Wisconsin requires all proposals
for new districts to take into account
potential effects on school funding
and racial and socioeconomic diversity. And Texas requires communities
from the existing district and the proposed new one to each vote to approve
the split, preventing wealthier communities from unilaterally splitting
from poorer ones.

Since 2000, 128 communities have
tried to secede from their districts,
according to a new report from the
nonprofit group EdBuild. Of these
attempts, 73 have been successful,
17 are ongoing, and 27 failed.
Researchers say the pace of
breakaway attempts has picked up since
the Great Recession.
For the most part, the report says,
the newly formed districts are wealthier,
whiter, and more property-rich than the
larger districts left behind.

Seceded

Ongoing

Inactive

Defeated

East Baton Rouge
Parish, La.
The fracturing in East Baton
Rouge Parish mirrored that of other
districts nationwide. Two of the three
breakaway districts are whiter and
wealthier than East Baton Rouge.
Another white community, St.
George, was prevented from leaving.

SOURCE: EdBuild

6 | EDUCATION WEEK | May 1, 2019 | www.edweek.org

Enrollment

Student-age
poverty rate

Percent
nonwhite

East Baton Rouge Parish School District

40,579

25%

89%

Zachary Community School District

5,417

City of Baker School District

1,479

Central Community School District

4,632

http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - May 1, 2019

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