What do you think about Bexar ISD? (Dallas, San Antonio: school districts, salaries)

[L210]

A state representative has introduced a bill to consolidate all of Texas' school districts at the county level. He believes it will reduce administrative costs. A commenter on the article posted below suggested that it would be better to have each school district be a certain size so that school districts in heavily populated counties won't become bloated (meaning that they would have more than one school district) and the lesser populated counties can have their schools grouped with others in another county. I don't think consolidating San Antonio's school districts is a new idea.

State Rep Wants To Consolidate School Districts « CBS Dallas / Fort Worth – News, Sports, Weather, Traffic and the Best of DFW

[gy2020]

The concept will never fly. Successful school districts won't give up their success to become average county districts. But I think most districts should look at cutting back on admin people before they cut teachers.

[HillCountryHotRodMan]

This is ridiculous. What are these idiots doing with all the time they are supposed to be thinking and working on good legislation????

Put down the bong and step away from the crack pipe.

[skeet09]

I think some of the smaller ISD's should consolidate but it would probably be too big to handle to have just a county ISD.

[Azure110]

Originally Posted by gy2020

The concept will never fly. Successful school districts won't give up their success to become average county districts. But I think most districts should look at cutting back on admin people before they cut teachers.

Or cut back on spending for sport programs before cutting out teachers. Some of these coaches make enough to sport 2 or 3 teachers and most of them don't even teach a non-PE class.

That will never happen. Here it is almost football over education.

[Bo]

I'd rather have the lege give the major cities more freedom to annex tiny suburbs than have it merge school districts.

People like to rail about huge superintendent salaries, but a county school district would likely have just as many assistant superintendents as all of the individual districts do now. And the head superintendent would have to be paid $1 million/year because of the scope of the organization and having so many assistants reporting to her/him. Some consolidation of adjacent districts with similar characteristics might makes sense, but the current proposal is one that's doomed to fail, because it's too much change too quickly.

[Azure110]

Originally Posted by Bo

I'd rather have the lege give the major cities more freedom to annex tiny suburbs than have it merge school districts.

People like to rail about huge superintendent salaries, but a county school district would likely have just as many assistant superintendents as all of the individual districts do now. And the head superintendent would have to be paid $1 million/year because of the scope of the organization and having so many assistants reporting to her/him. Some consolidation of adjacent districts with similar characteristics might makes sense, but the current proposal is one that's doomed to fail, because it's too much change too quickly.

Annexing nearby suburbs is not always good. People in these suburbs will sometimes fight it because they don't want to pay the property tax of the San Antonio school districts.

[RGJ]

People in those suburbs wouldn't change school districts because of the surrounding cities they live in. School district boundaries do not follow city limit boundaries

[mamatotex97]

People need to realize that this whole thing about property taxes....We are in 2011, the state is only paying the districts the amount from the 2006 property taxes. Part of the reason we are in this shortfall. This isn't because the districts did not know how to spend the money they did receive. While your taxes may have gone up, the payment to the schools per student did not.
We have more students in the area on medicaid and that receive special services for spec. ed. All of which is more expensive so again we have an issue of it getting more expensive to teach each individual student and not enough being provided by the state.

Like a previous poster said, if we were to say combine SAISD, NEISD, NISD you would still need alot of people to oversee something of that magnitude. I don't know about the other two but NISD has over 90,000 students alone.

[LVKim8]

Bad idea. I've lived in communities with the large, monolith districts (Clark County, NV, and Dade county, FL). It only leads to a large, almost impenetrable district where change is difficult to make when needed. Mediocrity rises, the top gets heavy (administration), and originality goes out the window. Perhaps this doesn't happen in all large districts, but I'd be surprised.

I'm happy in my small district (Boerne)!