Time To Talk

It won’t be on the ballot next week, as the various school districts on the South Fork seek approval for 2022-23 budgets and to fill school board seats. Nevertheless, those budgets all speak volumes about the issue.

School consolidation.

It’s time — long past time, in fact — to start the conversation in earnest. It’s a big, complicated situation that will take many years, and a great deal of dedicated effort, to resolve. That’s always been the argument against doing it, but that’s appalling. It’s a challenge, but it’s not insurmountable. Getting it done will right many wrongs, it will create a better environment for our children, and it will save taxpayers money.

There are 17 school districts in Southampton and East Hampton towns, 15 if you exclude Eastport-South Manor and Riverhead, which each educate a sliver of the western part of Southampton Town from outside its borders. Ten of those 15 “districts” have a single school; of those, only Bridgehampton provides instruction through 12th grade. For context, there are only 16 school districts in Suffolk County with a single school — and one is Shelter Island, which seemingly could easily be part of consolidation efforts on the South Fork.

It’s hard to overstate this needless fragmentation. These school districts have superintendents and other administrators beyond building principals, as any school district must. In the case of Sagaponack, that means creating a school district infrastructure for a dozen students in four grades. In Wainscott, it’s 14 students in three grades. Even Bridgehampton School, which is prekindergarten-to-12th grade, serves just 152 students.

Compare that to East Hampton (nearly 2,000 students), Hampton Bays (nearly 1,900), Southampton and Westhampton Beach (more than 1,700 each), and Sag Harbor (more than 900). None is bursting at the seams, and many take in schools from “feeder districts,” the colloquialism we use for ridiculously small fiefdoms with no high schools of their own.

“Fiefdom” might seem harsh, but it applies. The situation exists purely for financial reasons: It incentivizes smaller districts to oppose any discussion of consolidation. Why on earth would Sagaponack agree to consolidate its massive property tax base into a larger school district, when its tiny two-room schoolhouse can manage the tiny gaggle of pupils from among the rare full-time residents who don’t enroll their kids in private schools, at a pittance? Why does Wainscott recoil at any reasonable notion of building affordable housing in its borders, for fear of outgrowing its shoebox of a school? And yet, paradoxically, to keep the system in place, districts are willing to waste millions of dollars a year on needlessly overlapping levels of administration, while vetoing any talk of meaningful change.

But not all school districts. Some, like Springs and Tuckahoe — districts with no commercial district and a limited tax base — would gladly talk consolidation. It was Southampton, in fact, that spurned Tuckahoe’s earlier effort to merge. Springs, meanwhile, can see the fiscal impact clearly: Tuition costs to send students to East Hampton High School are a significant expense, as the district, which serves a largely middle class population, must consider cutting teachers and programs annually to try to keep its elementary and middle school afloat financially.

The disparities must be addressed. Taken regionally, the picture is farcical and clearly not equitable. And it has an impact on larger conversations — most notably the affordable housing crisis and its potential solutions. School tax impact is one thing that’s halted most substantive efforts to address the crisis. Meanwhile, the wasted taxpayer money flows out like a river.

It’s time to begin this conversation again — for real this time. There are economies of scale in play if, for instance, three common school districts were created: one serving all of East Hampton Town, and one each for the halves of Southampton Town neatly divided by the Shinnecock Canal. Or maybe it’s just one giant South Fork School District. In either case, the existing individual districts, most of which are single schools, need not lose their identities — only their redundancies.

South Fork taxpayers have been cowed into believing school consolidation can never happen. But it can. In the end, it might require the state to step in and demand that attention be paid and set aside objections from individual districts who hold the process hostage. But, regardless, nothing will happen until enough people in the districts take the first step: talking about it.