As I wrote several weeks ago, there is a strong case to be made for the break-up of the St. Louis County School District, and voters in the northern half of the district should be thinking about this issue over the next few months as school board representatives, including those for seats in Tower and Cook, are up for election again.

It is important that representatives from our area support taking a serious look at the benefits of a division of the two separate parts of the district, for communities, for taxpayers, for parents, and for students. Even school district officials, during testimony at the Office of Administrative Hearings, noted that the unique structure and layout of the district poses financial and logistical problems for the district.

There really is no sensible argument for the continued existence of the district in its current form, other than that residents in the south need the property wealth of the north half in order to keep future referenda affordable for those in the south.

As we’ve reported recently, the St. Louis County Schools have, by far, the highest school levy in the region, but the effect on individual taxpayers is lessened by the tremendous property value on Lake Vermilion and other lake communities in the north half of the district.

While I can certainly understand the perspective of those in the district’s south half, such a justification for the continued existence of this strangest of all school districts reeks of unfairness. Those of us in the northern half of the St. Louis County School District should expect that the property value in our region goes to support schools in our region, not schools located 100 miles away, or more, in some cases. When you look at the allocation of resources within ISD 2142, from bond proceeds to local operating taxes, there’s a substantial inequity. While roughly 75 percent of the funding for capital improvements undertaken in the district in the past five years have come from the north half, the lion’s share of the proceeds have now been spent or allocated in the south.

This inequity is widely known in the north half of the district, and is just one more item on a long list of grievances that northern residents maintain against the school district. Those grievances aren’t going away, in part because the current structure of the school district makes it far more difficult for residents in ISD 2142 to address their concerns through the political process.

To put it bluntly, if this were any other small town or rural school district in Minnesota, Bob Larson would not be chair of the school board. In most every other school district in rural parts of the state, members of the school board are elected “at-large,” which means every resident of the district has the opportunity to elect every member of the board.

If a board member truly upsets a majority of residents in the district, as Bob Larson has certainly done, the voters in any other district could exact accountability by voting him or her out.

But that’s not how it works in this district, because voters here only get to vote on one representative on the seven-member board. As long as Bob Larson brings home the bacon for his own attendance area, he can continue to send the bill to residents of the north as long as he wants, and there’s nothing we in the north can do about it.

The lack of electoral accountability in the district is frustrating for many residents of the north, and rightly so. It’s particularly irritating to the many residents, like myself, who get dumped into virtual electoral purgatory as a result of the odd representation process in the district. Residents of Vermilion Lake Township, for example, which begins approximately one mile west of Tower, were summarily tossed into the Cook voting district two years ago. That means that if residents of the township want to vote in any special school election, they have to drive 25 miles to Cook to do so, rather than four miles, say, to Tower.

And good luck to any resident of the township who wants to run for school board. While they live within the Tower attendance area, they would have to run for office in Cook, where voters would rightfully wonder whether they would be the strongest representative for their school. Essentially, residents in Vermilion Lake are largely shut out of the process, and they aren’t alone. Other townships in the north are treated with the same disrespect by the district. Initially, the district’s attorneys were even proposing to toss Eagles Nest Township into the Cook voting district as well, but after some protest, they finally agreed to keep it attached to Tower.

All of this is avoided in other school districts, because other districts represent much smaller territories that include communities with significant commonality. That commonality is distinctly missing in ISD 2142.

Were the north and south halves simply made into independent districts, both would see significant benefits in terms of electoral accountability. School board representatives could potentially be elected at large, which would allow all residents to vote on the school board as a whole.

A division would make both halves stronger because they could operate more efficiently as smaller districts than is currently the case. While the creation of this ungainly district was supposed to lead to administrative efficiency, it’s achieved exactly the opposite.

As we’ve reported more than once, ISD 2142’s administrative overhead, per student, is significantly higher than any other school district of similar size in the state, and is even higher than most small and mid-sized districts. For example, in Littlefork, a school district with just 292 students K-12, the district spends $1,156 per student on school- and district-level administration, according to the most recently-available data from the Minnesota Department of Education. ISD 2142, by contrast, spends $1,360 per student. I could name dozens of other small school districts in northern Minnesota with lower administrative costs than ISD 2142. The district’s own business manager routinely points to the 2142’s unusual configuration in defending these high administrative costs. But if the structure of the district all but guarantees high administrative costs, why would we want to maintain such an expensive and ungainly status quo? Shouldn’t any school district seek efficiencies that will direct more dollars to the classroom?

Conventional wisdom has long held that more students and more consolidation will lead to greater administrative efficiency, but history has shown that’s mostly just bunk. In the case of ISD 2142, the district went from thinking like a small school district (where everyone wears multiple hats) to thinking like a big district, with the accompanying big and lumbering bureaucracy. The evidence is unequivocal that the ISD 2142 model does not yield administrative efficiency. If someone wants to argue that point, they can have this space next week to do so.

Two smaller, independent districts could be run more effectively, and with less overhead expense, and voters would have greater opportunity to respond at the ballot box when school officials take unpopular actions.

There’s no argument for continuing to operate the district as it stands today. It’s too costly and it’s too unaccountable. We could do better as two independent school districts— one in the south and one in the north. It’s time to acknowledge that ISD 2142 is an experiment that’s failed.