It wouldn’t be the first time four financially-struggling Geauga County school districts came to the table to talk consolidation — both with each other as well as with bordering school districts.
In fact, this game of “Find the Pair” has been going on for quite some time.
The difference this go-around?
Kent State University Geauga has decided to deal itself in.
Nov. 18, two weeks after Cardinal and Ledgemont school boards rejected a transfer of territory, a meeting was arranged by Kent State University Geauga and Geauga Growth Partnership leaders to discuss a different tack — creating a regional school district.
One or two board members from Cardinal, Ledgemont, Newbury and Berkshire school districts met at KSU to discuss the idea of a joint high school to be built on the Kent State-Geauga campus, Newbury Schools Board of Education President Marty Sanders told the Geauga County Maple Leaf Friday.
He explained discussions are in the very early stages and the meeting was the preliminary step to any movement forward.
“We had to get everybody together to see if we could all be in the same room,” Sanders said, adding the board members who attended agreed to allow KSU-Geauga interim Dean Jarrod Tudor to take the concept of a joint high school to all four full boards in public session.
The districts are all facing declining enrollment and increasing costs, often due to unfunded state mandates, Sanders said.
However, many residents in those districts are extremely loyal to their schools and object to losing their school identities in any kind of consolidation, he said.
But that isn’t the only reason past efforts have failed and combining four high schools into one would face the same challenges.
“We’re going up against so many different variables,” Sanders said, adding it will take time to work it out, even if the boards agree to proceed.
“This is a new concept with KSU involvement,” he said.
Just working through the details probably would take a couple of years, said Sanders.
Cardinal Schools Superintendent Scott Hunt said he was not at the meeting at KSU, but agreed with Sanders.
“It’s a great concept, but we’d better have a pretty detailed plan,” Hunt said, explaining the boards and communities would all have to buy into the concept.
Having been involved in the effort to combine the Ledgemont and Cardinal school districts this year, Hunt said he knows it is not an easy sell.
“I’ve gotten a little taste of that,” he said.
However, the idea of a larger, newer high school has a definite appeal for everyone, he said.
Hunt said he hopes Tudor and GGP President Tracy Jemison have a good presentation Monday at the Cardinal board meeting.
Newbury Schools Superintendent Richard Wagner was skeptical about the proposal, which will be presented at the Newbury board meeting Dec. 15.
“Frankly, I think his presentation is unlikely to be a joint high school presentation. There’s no governance for it,” Wagner said.
He referred to the protracted negotiations Newbury Schools Board of Education undertook in an effort to consolidate with Berkshire that failed when Berkshire board voted against the idea.
“We’re going to listen. That’s all I can say about it,” he said.
Ledgemont Schools Superintendent Julie Ramos said the concept is attractive in theory, but has serious doubts about its application.
The Proposal
“Right now, there is an opportunity on the 87 acres that the Kent State campus is on in Burton, to build some type of a consolidated school, whether it is K-12, 7-12 or 9-12,” Jemison said Friday. “The possibilities are really endless here.”
To move forward, Jemison said the time is right for each school district to be part of the planning process, if they are interested.
So, beginning tonight, Jemison and Tudor will embark on a weeklong “school board tour” to pitch the concept.
They are scheduled to meet with Ledgemont and Cardinal school boards tonight, the Berkshire board on Dec. 10 and the Newbury board on Dec. 15.
“I felt at the meeting we held on the 18th there was enough interest in that room to continue discussions and that’s why we’re moving them now to the school board meetings,” Jemison said.
He said the concept of a consolidated school district at KSU-Geauga originated from a presentation he made in August to new Kent State University President Beverly Warren on behalf of GGP and the business community.
It was one of five things discussed, he added.
Other things included a grade 7-12 STEM school, an innovation center, the Blackstone LaunchPad — a model for fostering entrepreneurship through higher education — and creating KSU-Geauga as a resource of businesses.
“It is unique in this state, there’s no doubt about it,” said Tudor Friday of the combined high school proposal. “But we’re not reinventing the wheel. Many states out west do a lot of this. They don’t mind parking a new high school next to a community college or a four-year university.”
He said the new high school and STEM school to be opened at Auburn Career Center would be “all under one administrative umbrella.”
“It would be its own separate school district,” he said.
If Not Before, Why Now?
Jemison said the Geauga County Educational Service Center raised the idea of a consolidated four-school district in January 2013.
That idea went nowhere.
“Maybe the timing wasn’t right at that point in time, but now that there’s been attempts to consolidate or to merge districts — and they haven’t really gone anywhere — maybe now is the time to look at this opportunity,” Jemison said, noting Kent State has a new university president and a new interim dean at the Geauga campus.
“I think what’s new is Kent State’s participation,” Tudor said. “Essentially what we’re offering residents in those four school districts is an opportunity to create something that is unique, but also better than anything else they’re going to be able to give their kids.”
Berkshire Schools Board of Education President John Manfredi echoed Tudor’s sentiments
“This is Kent State. Kent State is willing to partner with us and is able to offer something we couldn’t do ourselves,” he said. “The things that they can do, there’s no way our little districts can do. They can help us and there’s funding they get that we don’t.”
Manfredi said right now, all the districts do is trade students with open enrollment.
“Is that really changing and improving the opportunity for the kids to learn,” he said. “When Matt Galemmo brought us together (in 2013), he was trying to get us to think about sharing and doing things together. It’s difficult because everybody wants to hold onto history; they like to hold onto what they have.”
He said a lot of parents think if those schools were good enough for them when they were in school, then they should be good enough for their kids.
“That’s just not true,” he said, adding a lot has changed, including less and less state funding and more costly, unfunded state mandates.
“We need to look into the future,” Manfredi said.
The Benefits
Tudor said the proposal is a partnership between a unified new school district made up formally of all four districts and KSU.
“By where, in part, they build a new high school right next to us and we do exactly what we should do as stewards of public money,” Tudor said. “We share resources, we share physical resources, we share human resources … classrooms, labs, things like that. Because I’m out of space here at the Burton campus. I’ve gotta add onto it and I’d like to be able to do it in a shared-services way with the high school.”
He added, “There’s no mystery that these school districts are somewhat struggling. They’re just not going to be able to exist as they are. But we could create something that is fantastic for their children.”
Manfredi said a partnership with KSU will give students opportunities they would not get otherwise.
“Our budgets are all tight with the way that we try to juggle how we can spend the money that we have,” he said. “So by partnering with Kent State, we can share services with the educators. The educators are qualified to teach; a lot of them are qualified to teach high school students or college students. If you were on a common campus, we can share them amongst ourselves.”
He added, “We’re enabling our students to have more choices and to be able to be taught with a bigger group. We’re able to give more offerings and it’s not just for the college-bound kids, it’s for every kid to have more offerings than we can individually offer today.”
From the business community’s perspective, Jemison said a consolidated district would be an economic development engine. It would help bolster the county’s workforce and should attract companies seeking an educated workforce to the area.
He said it also would strengthen the county’s existing businesses and communities.
“If we could focus on the outcome, what tremendous opportunities we can provide to students from these four school districts,” said Jemison. “I would say most of them probably would come out of that high school with a two-year associates degree.”
Tudor added, “This business community wants Geauga County to win … whenever they can. They are behind higher education, they’re behind K-12 education, they want to bring workers here, they want to bring the high wage jobs here and they’re committed to doing it.”
Tudor and Jemison also mentioned the College Credit Plus program where students take classes in high school that count toward college credit.
Jemison explained students from the four districts already take classes at KSU-Geauga.
“Here, they’ll just walk down the hall or walk across the campus and be in a college institution,” he added.
When these students take classes at KSU-Geauga, the state takes away money from the school districts and pays it to Kent State.
“Kent State is saying we’ll allow those monies, when they come in, to run that high school, instead of going to the university,” Jemison said, explaining the university will use those College Credit Plus funds to help pay for the school.
“There’re all kinds of things that could be done there,” said Jemison, adding one day, there might be an “e-school” for entrepreneurs from ninth grade and up.
The consolidated school district concept meets the initiative of Gov. John Kasich to lower college costs, Jemison said.
“If you look at these students coming out with a two-year degree, they’ve already cut their college tuition in half,” Jemison said. “I think everybody just has to focus on the outcomes and then this is possible.”
Tudor broke down the benefits of getting college credit early.
“Imagine a scenario where many, maybe not most and maybe not all, students that graduate from high school, the day they graduate they graduate with an associate’s degree,” Tudor said. “They’ve got the first two years of college out of the way and all they need to do is pay for two more years of college. At Kent State Geauga, our tuition is $5,600 a year, so essentially, they would have two years left and be able to do it for $12,000. For those who want this option, this low cost, no frills education option with a major national research university, this is going to be unique.”
Negatives?
Manfredi said one big issue he has heard during prior consolidation talks is the communities’ fear of losing their respective school districts’ identities.
“A community can’t lose its identity,” he said, adding under this concept, all four districts would still have to have their individual elementary schools.
“You keep the names, you keep the mascots,” he said, adding, it’s only at the centralized school level everything would combine.
Manfredi likened this process to Mentor.
“Mentor is a big school system. Their junior highs, none of them are named Cardinals. Whatever their junior high mascots are, their mascots are. When you get to the high school, you then become a Mentor Cardinal,” he explained. “Yes, sports plays a part in it, I get it, but we better be thinking about their educations, because once sports is done, they better have had their education.”
What will happen if all the districts remain separate?
“What’s the answer then? Keep going to our voters to ask for more money? If I go to the public and ask today for money to build a school, they will ask ‘Why? Your enrollment is shrinking,’” he said. “I get the negatives, but tell me what we will be giving these kids in 10 years.”
John Karlovec and Ann Wishart contributed to this article.