Corbett suggests district mergers

PITTSBURGH - Gov. Corbett, defending his proposed cuts in education aid during a tour of a Clairton factory Thursday, said some of Pennsylvania's school districts should consider merging.

"We're going to work with school districts and see what they can do," he told reporters, "but frankly I think school districts around the state are going to have to start looking at can they continue to exist - that there should be a consolidation or a merger somewhere."

Corbett said tough decisions were needed to stanch the red ink in Pennsylvania's budget. "Nobody, including myself, wants to just go in there and cut. It's not pleasant. But my job is to make the hard decisions," he said.

His comments about district mergers echoed those of his education secretary-designee in a recent interview. Ronald J. Tomalis said in March that the Republican governor "wants to encourage school districts" to consider consolidation.

Tomalis stressed that the state should not compel districts to do so - as Corbett's Democratic predecessor proposed in 2009. Ed Rendell's call for merging the state's 501 school districts into no more than 100 to save money gained little traction in Harrisburg.

In the Philadelphia area, where some districts were already struggling with deficits of their own before Corbett proposed the cuts, mergers of small districts have been proposed before without success.

In Delaware County, the Chester Upland district, which has about 4,300 students in regular schools and 3,000 or so in charter schools, faces a loss of $19 million in state funding - about 17 percent of this year's budget. The district has also struggled academically: It is one of the lowest-performing in the state.

In an interview last week, Jay Himes, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials, said districts like Chester Upland might end up in such dire straits that they would have to "go extinct."

Chester Upland borders several richer districts, including Wallingford-Swarthmore. But even if those districts would consider a merger, many Chester Upland residents are fiercely opposed, saying they fear students and residents would lose their identity.

In Bucks County, the Morrisville School District, with fewer than 900 students, was already facing a gap between revenue and expenditures of at least $2.3 million - more than 11 percent of its budget - before Corbett proposed several hundred thousand dollars in cuts. The district has only $250,000 in reserves and is proposing to spend all of that in an effort to keep from raising taxes.

Morrisville officials have had talks about a merger several times in recent years with the neighboring Pennsbury district, but they have gone nowhere, reportedly because of fears by Pennsbury board members that consolidation would place a larger tax burden on their district.

Damon Miller, a candidate for the Morrisville school board this year and a critic of the current board, said a merger would leave Morrisville residents with less representation in a consolidated district and cost them the small-town atmosphere, where teachers, administrators, and residents know one another well.

In a small district, Miller said, "you are able have a connection and know what people to go to. There is no bureaucracy." On the other hand, he said, some parents would like children to have the greater educational offerings available in Pennsbury.

Miller said he did not foresee a voluntary merger; it would have to be forced by the state, he said. Still, given the district's financial crisis, he said, that may be inevitable, "but it would be sad."

In Clairton, Corbett called Wednesday's talk with employees at the Kurt J. Lesker Co. "a lesson." The governor, a onetime schoolteacher, used a series of analogies to hammer home the state's yawning $4.2 billion gap between costs and revenue.

"We didn't control our spending" during Rendell's years, he said. "If all of you at home took a 20 percent or a 10 percent reduction in salary, you'd have to say, 'Where am I going to spend my money? Am I going to go out on that extra dinner date?' "

Corbett would not address his administration's reported push to cut pay of some unionized state workers by 4 percent, saying, "I'm not going to get into the negotiations."

He defended his proposed $1 billion cut in basic education aid, saying schools had been relying too heavily on the temporary infusion of federal stimulus money.

"The federal money's been cut off," Corbett said, gesturing to a large education spending chart his aides had brought to the high-tech vacuum plant. School districts "should have known - and they were told - that that wouldn't be there."

He repeated his no-tax pledge regarding natural gas extracted from the Marcellus Shale but also that he was open to imposing some type of impact fee for municipalities. Corbett said some of those fees might even help schools in areas closest to the drilling.

"I want to see the communities protected, and the impact is not just roads. . . . [If] schools are suddenly growing in an area, the impact can be to the social services network. Let's take a look at it," he said.

Corbett, who was attending the Pittsburgh Pirates' first home game Thursday as a guest of team owners, also responded to polls indicating that his popularity was dropping. "They're reacting to a very difficult budget proposal," he said. "We'll worry about that reaction, if it continues, way down the road."