King remains high on regionalization

On Board Online • November 5, 2012

By Cathy Woodruff
Senior writer

Expanding the role of BOCES could help school districts cut the Gordian Knot of school finance, Commissioner of Education John B. King Jr. said in a dialogue with school board members at NYSSBA’s 93rd Annual Convention.

“We’ve got to figure out a way to leverage the BOCES as the true regional leaders they should be,” King said.

Schools face a myriad of financial issues, he said. A local property tax levy cap enacted last year and tight restrictions on the growth of state school aid will continue to financially hamstring New York’s school districts, he said. Meanwhile, districts have been struggling with lower property values and diminishing options to cut staff and program spending, he said.

“I don’t want to pretend there are new resources coming along. I think the reality is that they are not,” King told one questioner. “The cavalry with new resources is not coming.”

Therefore, King said, regionalism and cooperation hold the most promise for districts looking to preserve or improve their programs and build student achievement.

He acknowledged that mergers and consolidations are “a difficult, challenging subject,” recalling the murmurs that spread throughout the crowd at last year’s NYSSBA convention when he raised the issue. Nonetheless, he insisted, “If you were starting from scratch, you would not design a system of 700 school districts.”

King urged school leaders to more readily embrace joint options such as regional high schools, early college high schools, career and technical programming and health insurance cooperatives as they look ahead.

More regional distribution of revenue to smooth out vast inequities between the financial means of individual districts also is critical, he said.

Some obstacles are more cultural than structural, he said.

“One of our biggest challenges as a society is: How do we persuade people to invest in other people’s children?” King asked his listeners. “How do we create a state and national conversation to say we all have to invest in each other? …We can’t afford to write off these children and their prospects and just ‘take care of our own.’”

The commissioner concluded by cautioning school leaders, for the sake of their students, not to wait for a better economy to forge ahead with cooperative reforms.

He cited a line from a draft of a speech that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation: “We do not have as much time as the patient and the cautious would try to give us.”

“That is true today,” the commissioner said, as every delay denies educational opportunities for every individual child who continues to grow up while reforms stay on hold.

“We’ve got to get it right today, this moment,” King said. “That is our shared responsibility.”