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By Dave Balcom
Publisher
10-24-2009 The K-12 Bishop Joint Unified School District took one more step towards reality Wednesday night when the Inyo County Committee on School District Organization voted unanimously in favor of unification.
It was a night of unanimity. Michelle Huntoon, a consultant with School Services of California, said the level of unanimous support for this unification is unprecedented in her 10 years of experience.
Committee vice chair Harry Petersen summed up the consensus of the board and the audience when he said, “I wouldn’t call this a ‘perfect storm’ for unification, but instead a perfect opportunity for the district, the community and the children. The timing couldn’t be better.”
Huntoon had called the timing of this process a “perfect storm” as the confluence of factors governing unification creates a new revenue stream for a combined district.
As she explained it, the state’s laws covering unification require a “leveling up” of the average wages and benefit packages of the two districts. As is usual, the Bishop Elementary certified and classified staffs have a lower average than the high school district. In accordance with the law, that will mean the state will send something slightly in excess of $900,000 a year to the combined district in perpetuity. The actual cost of “leveling up” the elementary staff to high school’s level will cost some $400,000, creating a net increase in state funding of $500,000.
If unification doesn’t occur on July 1, 2010, then the numbers creating the “leveling up” math would be based on a different two-year period, which wouldn’t create this kind of windfall, Huntoon said.
The committee had 300 agenda packets on hand at the Bishop High School Auditorium to accommodate what it hoped would be a robust turnout for the public hearing portion of the meeting.
At 7 p.m. there were 26 members of the audience. Over the next hour, four more arrived. No one spoke in opposition to unification. Trustees from both boards, teachers from both schools and representatives of unions and the citizen group Foundation for Excellence, all spoke in favor of the move.
In addition to approving the petition for unification from the two Bishop school boards, the committee also certified the unification criteria had been met, and declared the process exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act.
The committee’s vote sends the board petitions to the State School Board for a Nov. 18 meeting. Those petitions include two requests for waiver: First to make the committee’s vote this week the final decision; and second, to waive sending the matter to a general election.
The first waiver is designed “to keep this a local decision. Who knows better how Bishop education should function than the people elected to lead here in Inyo County,” said Bishop Superintendent Barry Simpson.
Waiving a general election is all about timing and expense. With no apparent opposition, an election would merely serve to delay the process past a July 1, 2010 startup, thus jeopardizing the “level-up” windfall the new district is anticipating.
In response to a question by Inyo County Superintendent of Schools Terry McAteer, Huntoon said she expected the committee’s request for the waivers to be met favorable by the state board. “It’s part of the state’s master plan for there to be fewer districts in the state, and with no opposition, I have no real concerns.”
She also said she didn’t see any issue with the state providing the new level-up funds. “The statute requires that the cost of the unification cannot be a net increase to state expense, but level-up funding is not considered a state expense.”
Simpson summed up much of the feeling in the room when he told the committee, “I came to support this process not so much for the money, but because it’s the right thing to do for our kids. A well-articulated curriculum, K-12, is superior for the children of this district.”
McAteer will deliver the committee’s recommendation and a full report to the state board on Nov. 18.
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