Trego's Mountain Ear

House Bill 567 has passed the house and awaits senate review. The bill is designed to incentivize increased cooperation between school districts at the county level.

Multi-District Agreements between districts take many forms: Curriculum cooperatives and special education cooperatives are a common means of resource sharing.

This bill increases the quality educator payment that districts receive in order for participating in a county level multi-district agreement. However, all of the districts in the county must participate for this to be the case. Quality Educator Payment is awarded based on the number of teachers, so this provides a larger fiscal incentive to larger school districts.

Essentially, the way the bill is worded, any of the little rural districts could refuse to participate and deny the rest of the schools in the county the payment increase.

Additionally, this isn’t designed to facilitate small agreements addressing single things:

The programs of the participating districts that are mutually administered must 15 include, at a minimum:
(A) administration functions, including budgeting, payroll, human resources, elections, and services provided in support of the board of trustees;
(B) custodial services;
(C) instructional services and support, including remote instruction, selection of textbooks, library and media services and curriculum development and implementation;
(D) K-12 career and vocational/technical education and work-based learning;
E) school food services;
(F) software licensing and other information technology;
(G) extracurricular activities;
(H) special education programs; and
(I) transportation for instruction and school activities.

Some of these make a great deal of sense for school districts to cooperate on. It’s often a better deal, financially, to bulk purchase software. Special education has so many requirements for various specialists that small districts essentially have to join cooperatives, and extracurricular activities might benefit from resource sharing.

But one has to ask; How exactly is sharing lunch programs and custodial services going to be beneficial, across county schools? Can we simply send our staff to the same trainings, or does it need to be more complicated?

If this does get signed into law, I’ll run the numbers for how much it would increase the general fund budget of each of the local school districts. For now, however, it’s still “wait and see”