Regionalization: School Buzzword or a Means of Change?

By BILL BELLEN
MILFORD

Otsego County is by no means an urban metropolis. The rural nature of our area has resulted in a consistently declining student population throughout the last decade, with our region falling below 8,000 students for the first time ever, according to Milford Central School District Superintendent Kristen Shearer.

With this metric in mind, it is easy to see the conundrum posed by the ever increasing expenses of education, combined with our ever decreasing enrollment rates. As teachers, school districts, regions, and even the state at large are presented with this issue, one word continues to come to mind for many: regionalization.

Regionalization has been a hot topic among numerous schools in Otsego County in recent years. Regionalization is the process of neighboring or nearby school districts sharing various services to lighten the financial load on each individual school, as well as provide new opportunities to their respective students. This is not to be confused with reorganization via school mergers, where all functions of multiple schools are combined into a single district.

Regionalization has been touted as a way to mitigate the effects of declining enrollment rates seen in rural regions across New York State by balancing budgets and coordinating to ensure the most efficient programs and schedules for both staff and students.

“It’s Laurens, it’s Edmeston, and it’s Morris,” Shearer said when asked what schools Milford was looking to partner with. “We’ve created opportunities for teachers to do professional development. We are sharing transportation and special education, as well as our merged sports [with Laurens]. So, we just took four similar schools and started working together.”

Regionalization initiatives are not new to our area. For years, the BOCES system has been a prime example of what these efforts can accomplish.

“In this region, we’ve been talking about regional sharing for a very, very long time,” said Dr. Catherine Huber, district superintendent of Otsego Northern Catskill BOCES.

“BOCES is a great example of regional sharing. We already do that. We share programs for … career and technical education and for students with disabilities. We also share management services; some of our districts participate in a central business office … We have shared professional learning, we have shared labor relations, we have shared safety risk. I could go on and on,” Huber explained.

Rural schools, like the majority of those found in Otsego County, do not possess the resources to offer all of the opportunities they would like to be able to provide for their student bodies. Though BOCES career and technical schools may offer some extra avenues individual districts cannot supply, only so much can be done through one avenue of collective programming.

This is where initiatives of regionalization come into play. The Milford, Laurens, Edmeston, and Morris school districts have all been in talks about synchronizing their programming and services in order to provide a better learning environment for their students, and more economically efficient means of program expansion. Though the exact parameters of these arrangements are in the preliminary stages of planning at this time, opportunities for major forms of collaboration between the districts are already being explored, especially in the realm of class sharing.

When asked what was next on the horizon for regionalization at Milford Central School, Shearer responded, “Larger conversations about what it could look like and the opportunities that potentially we’re missing out on by not having more partners in our education right now. I think that the next steps are really broader conversations about the reality of rural … The cost to educate a student is going up, [and] enrollment is going down. So the reality is, how do we survive through that? We survive by engaging in conversations that help to create opportunities for students. And if we don’t do that, we’re going to be left behind.”

District superintendents like Huber are tasked with being the officials to oversee these processes, convening bimonthly meetings to discuss regionalization data and how plans and programs are panning out in their respective regions. This year, the New York State Education Department kicked off a regionalization initiative in recognition of the problems plaguing schools across the state; an initiative that all 19 component schools of ONC BOCES have participated in to some extent. Though some plans are certainly further along than others, regionalization is a reality that is quickly becoming recognized across our region.

“What’s most exciting about this initiative and this work is that there are no predetermined outcomes. So this is work that is purely creative. So, might that look like specialization in some school districts? It could. Might that look like school districts coming together to offer certain programs? It could. Might it look like [an] expansion of some BOCES programs? It could. It all depends on what our region designs and then chooses to implement,” Huber said.

The ball is in our court now. It is up for the communities of Otsego County to shape how the collective educational experience will look for its next generation of students. Though this is a push on a statewide level, according to Shearer and Huber, regional autonomy and discretion is key in creating programs that will work for each individual area. The groundwork has been laid—school administrators are setting themselves up to be proud examples of the successes and benefits that regionalization can bring for Otsego County students.

For more information on the New York State Education Department’s regionalization initiative, visit https://www.nysed.gov/regionalization.