High salary costs may nip Evanston school-merger idea

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Updated: February 20, 2012 8:40AM

State legislators want to encourage consolidation among the state’s 800-plus school districts, but not necessarily the kind of high-cost merger that citizens recently have suggested for Evanston’s two school districts.

The District 65 and District 202 school boards are scheduled to discuss aspects of school consolidation Tuesday during their once-a-year joint board meeting. The boards have invited legislative lobbyist Erika Lindley, executive director of Ed-RED, to provide an update on Illinois school reform and the work of the Illinois School Consolidation and Realignment Commission. The commission was created by the Illinois General Assembly in 2011 and is scheduled to present its findings no later than January 2013.

According to an early report, the short-term costs of merging the state’s elementary and high school districts into K-12 systems, the norm in most other states, would run in the billions of dollars. The cost would be paid by state taxpayers in the form of consolidation incentives.

To encourage school consolidations, the state provides money to pay teachers on the highest pay schedule for a period of four years, a carrot pegged at $3.1 billion.

The state provides another $4,000 for each certified teacher and school administrator for one to three years, projected to run in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The state also makes up any difference in school deficits to put the districts on an even financial footing going into the marriage.

School consolidation hasn’t been a front-burner issue in Evanston since three citizen-led movements failed in the early 1990s. However, the prospect of consolidating District 65 and District 202 recently popped up on a list of 30 cost-saving possibilities offered up by the District 65 Citizens’ Ad Hoc Budget Task Force. The group asked the District 65 School Board to “consider the financial and educational feasibility of merging District 65 and District 202 to save duplicative costs while enhancing educational continuity.”

Past bids rebuffed

Three times in 1991, 1992 and 1995, groups of citizens (known in legal terms as the Committee of Ten) tried to bring school consolidation questions to the ballot to let voters decide the issue. Their efforts were struck down in large part because of the high cost of bumping elementary teachers up to the higher pay levels of high school teachers.

In nixing the third referendum attempt, then-State Superintendent Joseph Spagnola concluded that any administrative savings of combining School District 65 and 202 “would likely be more than offset by the cost of establishing a uniform salary schedule for all teachers of the new district.

“The educational programs currently available in Evanston would have to be sacrificed to an unacceptable extent” to achieve the cost savings projected by the citizens who brought forward the petition, the state schools’ chief concluded in 1996.

Consolidation advocates in the 1990s had voiced hope that more resources could be shifted to the early grades to ensure that more students were prepared for the rich curricular offerings at Evanston Township High School. But Spagnola noted that K-12 districts are often criticized for emphasizing the needs of high school students at the expense of elementary students. Prominent state legislators also predicted their colleagues would balk at sending $30 million of transition funding to Evanston schools, perceived to be among the state’s wealthiest.

Last summer, State Sen. Jeffrey Schoenberg, D-9th, of Evanston said he sees potential for elementary school consolidations in such communities as Skokie, Morton Grove and Glenview, where multiple districts serve a single community. However, he said consolidation in a such a community as Evanston, with a single elementary and single high school district, doesn’t make sense because of the cost of creating a uniform pay scale.

The average teacher salary at Evanston Township High School runs about $96,000, while the average pay in School District 65 is about $73,000.