Budgets are constrained, population demographics are changing and competition is increasing. In turn, property taxes are rising, neighborhood schools are closing and families are choosing alternative educational pathways. Local school districts are feeling this squeeze as they scramble to balance the books, maintain their student population and keep taxpayers happy. Do the pressures of today make local school districts more difficult to manage? If so, should we be concerned about large districts?
Local Education Agencies (LEAs) that manage school districts play an important administrative role in connecting federal and state law, policy and curriculum standards to our neighborhood schools and allocating money across programs. These school districts consist of administrative staff who manage day-to-day operations and accountability, while a board of elected officials oversees executive staff, policy and budgets, serving as the people’s voice. Studies show that school district effectiveness has a direct and indirect influence on student outcomes.
School districts in Utah vary by the total number of students. The average number of students per district across Utah is around 15,000 while three — Davis, Granite and Jordan — have over 50,000 students each, placing them within the top 100 largest districts across the nation (of which there are over 13,000); Alpine was the largest in Utah before the vote to split. Alpine was the largest in Utah before the vote to split.
To place these numbers in perspective, the size of the aforementioned LEAs is relative to the population of Millcreek and Murray. Imagine the strategy, leadership, infrastructure and communication that it takes to carefully and effectively maintain and grow a city.
A review of literature would identify both pros and cons to larger and smaller school districts. Larger school districts can potentially save on administrative costs per student at the district level, leading to more specialized staff and extracurricular activities. On the other hand, large school districts can also experience additional bureaucratic complexity, diminished communication between district administrators and educators, and less elected representation.
Small school districts could accrue more administrative costs per student but provide more opportunities for student engagement, increased safety, stronger community engagement and greater local control.
Despite the debate over larger versus smaller school districts, there is an intersection of agreement across models — that is, districts that are too large or too small are ineffective and don’t save on cost. For example, one analysis found that 6,000 to 7,000 students were an optimal size because these districts benefited from scale economies whereas schools greater than 7,000 experienced diminished returns of their cost savings and suffered from scale (dis)economies. In other words, increasing the size of a school district too large can increase cost and undermine organizational effectiveness.
Based on this evidence, it makes sense to question the size of some of the school districts in Utah. That is, would reducing the size of a school district improve decision making and tax-dollar efficiency?
Granite School District is one example. A group of concerned families in the district are feeling the constraints of its size and, in turn, are advocating to study the viability of equitably splitting the district into smaller areas. While opponents of a feasibility study could suggest that Granite is benefiting from scale economies, there are signs that the district is reaching its limits and suffering from the same issues as smaller districts. This includes but is not limited to increased property taxes over the next 5-10 years, declining student enrollment and school closures.
With an increasingly complicated public education landscape — which demands innovative and layered decision making, increased attention, and dynamic leadership — some of Utah’s largest school districts could potentially better serve students and taxpayers by downsizing. The question is not if we should compare the pros and cons of a school district’s size, but when. In other words, at what point do local school districts cross the threshold where the drawbacks of their size outweigh the benefits?
Our LEAs’ main goal should be to make decisions that best position Utah students in their communities to succeed while optimizing taxpayer dollars. If that is agreed, then it is worth studying the size of school districts. And it is worth asking: What are we sacrificing if we don’t?