ISD 2142 budget woes

As we reported back in June, the St. Louis County School District is in dire financial straits.
Without major changes in the way it currently operates, the district could be facing some existential level cuts in the near future.
As longtime readers of this newspaper know, we were skeptical that the district’s 2010 restructuring, which centered around a $79 million capital project and the closure of three schools, would resolve the district’s financial woes or provide meaningful improvements in educational quality. While the district enjoyed an initial spike in overall enrollment, that growth centered on the Cherry School and was fueled in part by an exodus of students from Hibbing for reasons mostly unrelated to the St. Louis County district’s restructuring. Meanwhile, the district saw a slow but steady exodus from its schools in the northern half of the district.
Since the COVID pandemic, many school districts in our region have seen declining enrollment and tighter budgets, although few are experiencing the flood of red ink seen in ISD 2142.
With enrollments softening, competition for students is as intense as it’s ever been in our region. School districts can give themselves the advantage by providing innovative approaches that meet the increasingly varied needs of students. In part, the declining enrollment being experienced by many traditional school districts reflects a rejection of a one-size-fits-all approach to education. During COVID, parents and students had the opportunity to explore alternative educational delivery methods, primarily online. While most students were content to return to the traditional classroom once schools opened back up again, some never made that transition and the failure of school districts to capture those students may well be accounting for a significant percentage of the lost enrollment.
School districts in our region that have offered innovative alternatives to the traditional model have actually gained students in the wake of COVID. The Vermilion Country School, in Tower, for example, has nearly doubled its enrollment since the pandemic. In addition to its traditional five-day-a-week in-school option, the school now offers two different hybrid models that are attractive to some students.
Allowing students the ability to work from home in some cases, with regular home visits by teachers, reduces transportation costs and makes staying in school possible for students whose family circumstances make regular school attendance very difficult or who need to work.
While such innovation is easier in a small school, like Vermilion Country, larger schools may need to explore ways to offer such alternatives themselves if they hope to maintain or grow their enrollment.
And, as we’ve argued for years, ISD 2142 in particular should begin to standardize its use of multi-aged student groupings within its schools. In the past, the district has used multi-aged classrooms primarily as a way to save money when a particular class was too small to justify a full-time teacher. But that has given multi-aged classrooms a bad rap with many parents in the district, who just view it as a cost-saving measure. While it’s true that multi-aged classrooms can save money by allowing districts with small numbers of students to better align class sizes with available resources, there’s no evidence that educational quality is hampered in any way by multi-aged classrooms. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that students benefit from interacting with students of different ages and maturity levels. After all, outside the classroom, in the real world, students have to get along with people of all ages and abilities.
We recognize we don’t have all the answers, by a long shot. Education is incredibly complicated, particularly in an era when families face an increasing number of challenges, as do schools. In addition to enrollment questions, education in general faces an existential crisis with the increasing use, or more accurately misuse, of artificial intelligence by students.
Addressing these challenges effectively will require input from parents and that requires two-way communication. While most area school districts seem willing to communicate with parents through newsletters and on their websites, there are few opportunities for parents or students to communicate with school officials.
Schools need to start doing more to reach out to parents whose children aren’t attending any longer, to find out why. We know the students are out there. Schools have to be open to the changing educational needs and desires of families if they’re going to stay relevant and, more importantly, if they’re going to survive.