Budget crisis forces R.I. to consider consolidation

FOSTER, R.I. — Parents send their children to the Captain Isaac Paine Elementary School because its small size means students get lots of individual attention and teachers are easily accessible for questions and concerns.

Voters in this town of 4,500 have long resisted making their elementary school part of a larger school district with neighboring Glocester to streamline operations and save money. But faced with big budget deficits, Gov. Don Carcieri is trying to break down the go-it-alone approach to schooling in Foster and elsewhere in tiny Rhode Island.

Carcieri’s cost-cutting plan includes provisions forcing local governments to buy school supplies together, enroll their teachers in a common health insurance plan, centralize their meal services and participate in a statewide busing contract.

Going a step further, Carcieri wants a commission to study whether school districts should be merged or otherwise realigned to save money.

Richard Williams, 55, who has a 10-year-old son at Isaac Paine, said he fears residents in Foster could easily be outvoted on school issues if they joined forces with larger communities.

“Glocester isn’t going to care what happens at Foster,“ said Williams, while acknowleding that some consolidation may need to take place amid a serious recesion that threatens local budgets.

Carcieri is proposing deep funding cuts to cities and towns to close a roughly $357 million budget deficit and, to compensate, suggested new measures to make local government cheaper to operate.

His plan would force schools in 39 cities and towns to join a statewide service that would provide 10 million meals annually to all of Rhode Island’s public school children.

Banding together would give each city and town more bargaining leverage and reduce administrative costs, said Carolyn Dias, chief of operations at the state Department of Elementary of Secondary Education.

Eight communities began operating a common meal service in September. If each school district joined, they could save an estimated $3.2 million.

Another of Carcieri’s proposals would ban teachers unions from negotiating health care plans with their local school districts. Instead, teachers would be required to enroll in a statewide health insurance plan. The proposal could lower costs by about $17 million, or roughly 8 percent of health care spending by school districts last year.

Teachers unions will likely oppose the idea since it would require members to pay a quarter of their health insurance costs, more than some teachers pay under the existing system.

Implementing larger changes, like merging a school district, is far trickier. Carcieri has submitted legislation creating a commission to study reconfiguring the state’s public school systems. It would have to report its findings by March 1, 2010.

Lawmakers could approve or reject the commissions’ findings but not amend them.

Carcieri believes regionalization would save taxpayers money, but he wants the commission to have broad authority to make its findings, Carcieri spokeswoman Amy Kempe said. The concept has been discussed for decades but never implemented in a large-scale fashion.

“The ultimate goal is for this commission to have some authority to bring the idea of regionalization to the General Assembly for either the yea or the nay,“ Kempe said.

If lawmakers approve the commission, one of its members would be Carcieri’s revenue director, Gary Sasse. Sasse previously participated in two school studies while working for the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council which suggested that combining school districts could save money until they reached about 6,000 students. Any larger, and problems start rising.

Voters will probably support plans that cut costs without sacrificing local control, especially during a recession, said Lorraine O’Connors, a former Glocester school board member.

She led a push in 2006 to put Foster and Glocester elementary schools into their regional school district.

She warned that politicians will face an uphill battle with proposals that parents think will dilute their control over cherished local schools.

“It’s their kids,“ O’Connors said, explaining the opposition. “It’s getting very close to home. They want to feel that they’ve got a say.“