Survival strategy

The state’s current economic stress may push more small Kansas school districts to look at consolidation.

For better or worse, one of the likely outcomes of the state’s current funding crunch is that more Kansas school districts will be willing to consider consolidation efforts.

One such plan, awaiting likely approval from the Kansas State Board of Education, would combine school districts in three small towns northeast of Russell: Lucas, Luray and Sylvan Grove. The Luray building that served kindergarten through eighth grade would be closed at the end of the school year. The high school in Lucas would be converted to hold kindergarten through sixth grade and the K-12 building in Sylvan Grove would become Sylvan-Lucas Unified High School from grades seven through 12. It’s about 20 miles from Luray to Sylvan Grove, and Lucas is about halfway in between.

For these districts, consolidation simply was a matter of dollars and cents. According to a Hays Daily News report, the Lucas-Luray district spends about $1.6 million a year to keep its schools going, but the district only generates about $1 million in revenue. The district’s enrollment has dropped about 30 percent in the last decade and currently has about 110 students. It’s hard to argue with numbers like that. The Sylvan Unified School District only has about 145 students, but by merging, it can stay afloat.

To those of us who live in more urban areas of the state, it’s relatively easy to accept, even encourage, such consolidation as a simple matter of practicality. However, for a town like Luray, the loss of its last public school is a devastating event, perhaps even a death knell for the town.

That’s why state officials have traditionally hesitated to force consolidation on districts with declining enrollment, often hoping they eventually would come to that conclusion on their own. That thinking, no doubt, has been pushed along for some districts by the four recent rounds of cuts to state aid to public schools.

While school consolidation may benefit the state budget as a whole and seems particularly practical in the state’s current financial distress, it’s good to remember what a sad financial reality it is for Kansas towns that are losing their schools.