When Bigger Can Be Better

School Administrator, Oct, 1997 by Jerry D. Weast

The superintendent in Guilford County, N.C., recites the major benefits from the merger of three school districts

When it comes to school mergers, growing bigger is an inescapable result of the process. And when faced with the prospect of a much larger school system, many individuals on the inside and outside harbor fears of administrative red tape, loss of identity and lower student achievement.

Those worries were precisely what I faced four years ago when I was hired as superintendent of the newly merged Guilford County Schools, located in one of the busiest and most populous areas of North Carolina.

While some large school systems across the United States have been discussing breaking up in recent years due to a myriad of bureaucratic and funding problems, the catalyst for merger in Guilford County primarily was rising costs and inequity in both curriculum and funding among three neighboring school districts. With the marriage of Greensboro City, High Point City and Guilford County school districts, we became one of the nation's 60 largest districts and the third biggest in our state with 59,000 students.

Like a particle accelerator, the merger created an open and charged atmosphere that allowed a greater degree of freedom for change by our administrative team. We were challenged by a newly elected school board to make this new, larger system more flexible and aggressive than any of the three previous entities.

Our board of education likened our task to building a new airplane while flying the old one. The challenge at hand was to build a plane that was bigger, faster, could fly higher and farther, handle more capacity, land on shorter runways and economize on fuel better than what we currently had. We had to come up with new standards and change the way we were thinking in order to achieve that goal.

Have we achieved what we set out to do? To a large degree, yes. Four years after the merger, we can let the statistics speak for themselves: Students have improved in the core subjects of reading, writing and math; our dropout rate has fallen to the lowest level among large districts in the state; student performance on the SAT has increased for the past three years; and local costs per child have dropped 4.5 percent over the period while teacher salaries have risen 18.5 percent and spending on classroom supplies, materials, technology and staff development set record levels.

Cost Savings

Conflicting theories abound about the merits of school district mergers. Proponents insist they save dollars while others swear they raise costs. Our experience lends some support to each theory. Local spending was held in check, and the savings enabled us to redirect dollars into proven classroom programs that work for students, teachers and parents.

Much of the savings came through staff reorganization. We cut more than 70 positions in our central staff and, while downsizing is never easy, the reorganization dissolved a lot of bureaucracy and returned more than $3 million to our classroom budgets. We saved additional dollars by privatizing some operational and maintenance functions.

The most controversial cutbacks came with the elimination of small academic or enrichment programs that did not contribute significantly to student achievement. Even though these cuts initially rechanneled $2.36 million into more effective activities, these were tough decisions to make because most programs at some time or another enjoyed support from the community, staff or a benefactor.

A new focus on team management that emphasized direct service to students increased our efficiency and provided better communication than had a former hierarchical approach. School principals and their building leadership teams became more involved with parents and community members in the decision-making process that ensured greater levels of accountability at the site level.

The merger also served as an opportunity to examine our expectations, standards and levels of student achievement. We focused our efforts on the new mission statement adopted by our 11-member school board, which emphasized continuous measurable improvement in students' academic performance. With that in mind, a team of eight people dedicated four months to compile all the student achievement data from the three former school districts for the previous five years, reorganized it into a single, new database for a detailed analysis in order to determine where the new merged district stood on achievement. The data initially filled seven three-ring notebooks before it was reduced to a single volume.

But the information it contained was not good news. It showed that only one of every five 4th-graders could write coherently. A subsequent AASA curriculum audit suggested that classroom instruction should more closely follow the state's prescribed standard course of study.

To pointedly focus attention on this data, we translated all our achievement data into compelling visuals, allowing teachers and parents to see quite clearly whether their school was above or below the achievement levels of others in the system, neighboring counties or the entire state. The visual data served as a constant reminder that each school needed to emphasize raising its achievement scores We pursued that task vigorously with a systematic plan beginning with preschool and extending beyond high school graduation.