Will Selectmen, FINCOM and SPS Support School Consolidation?

At Thursday night’s LWV debate, LS School Committee member Kevin Matthews made a bold proposal to regionalize the entire K-12 system with Lincoln. While his proposal is bold, unless supported by our town’s key leadership including the FINCOM, BOS, and SPS, Kevin’s push will falter quickly, and he will be voted out of office when his term expires in three years by the Lincoln voting block. My guess, is his public utterance of the word “consolidation” will cost him the LS school committee chairmanship for next year.

So why is consolidation an issue that needs to be discussed?

One of our main challenges in town is ability to fund our schools in a manner that makes them world class examples of public education. Even lowering the bar slightly, I would settle for best in the nation or even #1 in the state if we were well ahead of our rivals and the top private schools in Mass. We will never get there until both Lincoln and Sudbury rally behind a school funding model that doesn’t constantly require overrides that are increasingly difficult to pass.

These overrides are tough to pass in part because Sudbury taxpayers are smart enough to recognize inefficiency in the system. These areas of inefficiency include:

• Running two completely different administrative structures to support the two school systems – SPS and LS
• A funding model for LS that is patently unfair to Sudbury residents. A recent Supreme Court ruling supported this.
• Programs run for out of town students that incur additional cost to the town’s taxpayers (I am not including faculty children in this statement. Faculty children in our schools are a good thing)

In addition, there is a basic fairness issue where the two school districts in town operate very different wage scales for their employees. Employees can’t move easily between the systems, sharing resources is more cumbersome, and let’s face it, each snow day do we really need to get two phone calls to tell us school is closed?

The solution has been, and will be continue to be, a K-12 consolidation and restructuring of our regional agreement with Lincoln perhaps including Lincoln in a K-12 system. Lincoln would be a great partner in a K-12 regional school district given the exceptional students from Lincoln and the brain trust of the Lincoln parents. But there has been little incentive for Lincoln to do this. Their per household contribution level to LS is less dramatically lower than that of a Sudbury household even though the town enjoys the same access to this public service. This contribution difference also means that they can allocate more money to their K-8 system. The reverse is true for Sudbury.

In addition, the regional agreement with Lincoln gives them a lock on any changes with the LS school board. Their vote equals your vote when electing LS School Committee members despite their contribution of only 15% of LS funding. As a town, they vote in a very effective block for the candidate that supports the Lincoln agenda which effectively means any Sudbury candidate desiring to get on the school board has to support their status quo.

Of course there are two sides to every story. Lincoln will counter, and rightfully so, that since the regional agreement was created, they responsibly developed their town, while we embarked on a reckless home building development effort. Worse, to this day, while Lincoln has met their 40B requirement, Sudbury still has not (Lincoln TV - Skip to Minute 20:55)

Back to Kevin Matthews' proposal from Thursday night - For those supporting the status quo and the lopsided model with have Lincoln, hearing an actual LS School Committee member propose change must have been an uncomfortable moment. Kevin Matthews is the Manchurian Candidates. He wasn’t supposed to get on the board, and only arrived when the Lincoln approved candidate dropped from the race in 2010. Even then, we had a selectman, an SPS School Committee member, and other “town elders” emailing folks calling for people to write in the name of the Lincoln approved candidate who had withdrawn so the selectmen could appoint a candidate supporting the status quo. This was unbelievable and to this day, I don’t understand enough about the town political process or people’s personal political aspirations to understand this dynamic. I also don’t understand how our current selectmen especially those sitting in the chair who control the agenda, can continue to avoid this major issue.

The last time consolidation came up, guess what happened? A group was formed to study the issue and it went no where.  This probably sounds familiar to those pushing for 3-5 selectmen.

Unfortunately, it is simply easier to be a “pro-override” supporter, vote to get overrides on the ballot, throw up your hands and say “the people have spoken” when they fail, than it is to seek hard, meaningful structural change.

So what do we do now?

Two options:

1. Leave Kevin hanging, let the matter die and watch him get voted off LS in three years...OR...
2. FINCOM, SPS and the BOS move forward to understand how to get regional consolidation going.

I like answer #2 since I believe that it will also rally more support for our schools. Our status quo approach to our school model has placed us on a the path of continued slow decline in public education. FINCOM, BOS, SPS – rally to Kevin’s side, and let’s get consolidation going. Our education system depends on it.