Analysis of possible school district mergers in Pittsburgh...

[Copanut]

For my two cents, large SDs stink. My Senior class had over 700 kids, I was lucky to ride the pine and be 2nd home room rep. I realize things change, but going back to my last reunion I met 5 people that I had graduated with for the first time.

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by squarian

Well, why not just end the silliness and make the IUs the primary administrative level of public education?

It looks like Pittsburgh/Mt Oliver is one IU, and the rest of Allegheny County another. That would certainly be a plausible plan for two districts in this area, although it would also lead to some interesting dynamics.

[villageidiot1]

Originally Posted by squarian

Readers of this thread might find this post at Keystone Politics of interest:

Why Not Put the Intermediate Units in Charge of Schools? - Keystone Politics



I've made this point, or something very similar to it, here myself in the past; one result of PA's superfluity of school districts is that they are often too small to have the sorts of resources and services school districts are expected to have. The obvious solution would simply be to merge districts until they are large enough, but instead PA created super-districts called Intermediate Units to do the things districts usually do elsewhere but can't here because many districts are too small.

Well, why not just end the silliness and make the IUs the primary administrative level of public education?

There are only 29 Intermediate Units in PA. See the map at PA_School_Districts_and_IUs
This would create larger school districts than Maryland, which has 25 districts that are based on counties and one for City of Baltimore. Some of the Intermediate units cover 3-4 counties.

I had earlier on this thread (post #12) showed that based on these ratios of districts to population in Virgina and North Carolina, PA would have between 277 and 355 school districts. This isn't to say that they have the perfect school district structure but it points to the idea that PA might be inefficient with its number of districts.

Originally Posted by Copanut

For my two cents, large SDs stink. My Senior class had over 700 kids, I was lucky to ride the pine and be 2nd home room rep. I realize things change, but going back to my last reunion I met 5 people that I had graduated with for the first time.

I had almost 600 hundred in my senior class, but that is definitely not the norm especially in Western PA. There were at least 25 counties in PA that graduated less than 700 students this past spring.

[squarian]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

It looks like Pittsburgh/Mt Oliver is one IU, and the rest of Allegheny County another. That would certainly be a plausible plan for two districts in this area, although it would also lead to some interesting dynamics.

The two big-city IUs (IU 2 City of Pittsburgh/Mt. Oliver and IU 26 Philadelphia) are oddities, it has to be admitted; almost coterminous with their big-city district, so what justifies the duplication? I suspect they exist largely because legislators in 1971 (when the IUs were created) were habituated to special statutory status for "cities of the first class" and "cities of the second class", though no doubt there were particular political exigencies at the time.

Originally Posted by villageidiot1

This would create larger school districts than Maryland, which has 25 districts that are based on counties and one for City of Baltimore. Some of the Intermediate units cover 3-4 counties. I had earlier on this thread (post #12) showed that based on these ratios of districts to population in Virgina and North Carolina, PA would have between 277 and 355 school districts. This isn't to say that they have the perfect school district structure but it points to the idea that PA might be inefficient with its number of districts.

I think district consolidation is necessary in PA for many reasons, but I'm not irrevocably committed to any particular plan. The post at Keystone raises the IUs as a possible framework, but I think county-sized districts might work well too. In my view, the key principle is to ensure that all future citizens have access to some minimally-acceptable public education, while at the moment that is clearly not the case in PA, so I'd be willing to back any plan which offered an end to the zipcode lottery and the wide disparities in school funding and resources in PA.

[captainmidnight]

This piece is three years old, but still relevant to this discussion: The Next Page: For a New Allegheny County -- 26 school districts, 26 municipalities - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette