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School closings leave big holes in small communities
By Joanne M. Haas
Greg Minks of the Mix-Rite Feed Mill in Kennan wonders how his community and the neighboring community of Catawba will survive now that residents have lost their flagships – their local schools – to the slow fiscal strangulation of the Phillips School District.
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| The state’s system of school funding is not working, says Greg Minks of the Mix-Rite Feed Mill in Kennan. |
“Kennan is a real small community,” Minks said of this village of 164 people, which lost its only school in 2002. The school closing sent Kennan students about four miles west to the district’s school in equally small Catawba. The Catawba school, which had been a 5th through 8th grade school, was transformed into a kindergarten through 8th grade operation and enrolled 109 students this year.
However, after district voters in this far north county of 389 lakes soundly rejected a referendum in 2005 asking to bypass the revenue caps imposed by the state, a one-vote majority of the board ultimately decided to close the district’s only remaining school in the southern half of this sprawling 600-square-mile system. The school will close with the academic year.
That leaves Minks and others speculating about the fate of these two communities.
The 2004 population estimates from the U.S. Census for the village of Kennan was 164 and 138 for the village of Catawba. The 2004 estimate for the village of Phillips, also the county seat of Price County, was 1,546. The Phillips School District enrollment – now at 1,001 – has fallen an average of 2.5% per year in the last few years. State aid dropped $380,000, or 7.2%, from 2003 to 2004, Superintendent Jerry Trochinski said.
“It hurt and it is going to hurt again. Closing the school doesn’t fix their problem,” said Minks, who also served on a local Excellence in Education Committee. The way he sees it, Phillips is just another in a line of districts falling victim to a flawed school funding formula. “The system isn’t working.”
Teacher Teri Hanson of the Phillips School District said she moved her family to the Kennan-Catawba region 20 years ago for its schools. She said she wanted her children to experience the benefits of a smaller school, where classes had about 13 students and more individual attention was possible.
“This is devastating for the community and the kids,” Hanson said. “That is the community school.”
That’s also how parent Lori Hoogland describes the Catawba school, which she attended as a child. Now married, a mother of five and a farmer, Hoogland said she and her husband are discussing what to do with their children in the 2006-07 school year when the Catawba school is mothballed.
“All five are affected,” Hoogland said of her children, adding her wish is for the district to give the Catawba school to the people of the Catawba-Kennan area to run. “It is our school. We pay taxes. Give us our school and we’ll leave you alone.”
Barring that, Hoogland said her children will be pulled from the district, but she has yet to determine where they’ll be educated next year. She said some of the choices she had been hearing from other jolted parents included home-schooling, virtual school attendance, online schooling, or enrolling in the neighboring district of Ladysmith-Hawkins.
“A lot of parents might take their kids to that district, and I don’t blame them,” Minks said.
Minks added he knows many people in the southern area of the Phillips district who work in the nearby Prentice and Hawkins communities, making it logical to want their children in schools closer to their places of employment. And, he noted, putting a kindergartner on a bus for a few miles versus the 10 to 20 miles to Phillips makes for an easier decision.
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| The Catawba School is the first thing motorists see as they enter the community from the west along Highway 8. |
Meanwhile, the waiting remains tough for the seven Catawba teachers and other school staffers. Parents have through most of February to decide where to enroll their children as part of the state’s open enrollment period. The parents’ decisions will ultimately dictate what happens to the staff – the number of students determines state aid and the amount of dollars a school may collect in property taxes. But nothing will be known until numbers from the February open enrollment period are in.
“Everything remains up in the air,” teacher Hanson said. “The only real decision is to close the school.”
Former Phillips district teacher Ginny Strobl, now a Phillips School Board member who fought the November vote to close the K-8 Catawba school, fears for the future of Catawba and notes Kennan has suffered much since the district closed its school three years ago.
“Kennan, it is a place and not a village any more. It is looking really run down, and I’m sure that the businesses are struggling,” said Strobl, whose parents operated a small country bar and grill in the area during her youth.
As in other districts where school closings have been a budget-saving maneuver, community relations and emotions have spiked as teachers, parents, business operators and district officials struggle to keep the peace. These are small communities where families stretch back a generation or two and everyone seems to know each other, or at least perhaps a friend or relative once removed. Such closeness makes decisions to gut a community of its school seem personal.
Some in Catawba see the decision to close the school as another slap against a region they feel is often dismissed by the district’s headquarter community. And those in Phillips are just as quick to say the hard feelings are not based upon fact, but longstanding animosities that have been in play for years and add to the stress of severe budget problems.
“Mending fences and providing for equity are ongoing challenges when serving students from many communities,” said Trochinski, an advocate for school funding reform, who is in his third year as superintendent.
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| The Kennan School, which was closed in 2002, is now used for church services. |
There was little surprise on November 21 when the school board voted 5-4 to close the Catawba school. The closing was the first among the budget cuts aimed at saving $2 million in five years.
The board made $1.2 million in cuts to the 2006-07 budget that night. Other cuts included the elimination of a bus route, driver’s education program, and one gifted and talented position, along with cutting the athletic co-curricular program by 20% in each year and reducing administrative staff to two principals.
But the decision to close the school has brought to a boil long-simmering animosities.
“We have had bad relations for years because it was everything for Phillips and nothing for down here,” said board member Strobl, who taught 33 years for the district before retiring and joining the board three years ago.
The story of the Phillips district is familiar. High property values, absent landowners, declining enrollments and a shrinking property tax base have spelled financial disaster roughly a dozen years after revenue limits were put in place. The district cut $1.8 million during the last four years, which included the elimination of 27 positions. The district on September 13 asked voters for approval to exceed the revenue caps, and the answer was no by a 2-to-1 margin. The board then had to strategize how to cut $2 million in five years, which led to the November 21 vote.
Strobl said she wanted to amend the proposal to keep the youngest grades in Catawba and bus the oldest students to Phillips, but said she never had the chance.
Trochinski said if 50% of the Catawba student enrollment is lost after open enrollment in February, the district should save $348,000 by closing the school.
Strobl maintains the district has prioritized a community pool housed within the Phillips school and sports programs over the needs of the 109 students in Catawba and Kennan.
But Trochinski contends that critics like Strobl who believe officials truly favor one end of the sprawling district over another are wrong.
Minks, meanwhile, is careful not to criticize the elected members of the board, but shares the opinion that athletic endeavors appear to have won a better budget deal than the Catawba school.
“I don’t know if it really had to happen,” Minks said. “It has been an emotional issue.”
Frustrated with the Legislature, Minks said lawmakers seem focused on weapons and other issues instead of changing the school funding formula to help struggling districts. “I just don’t think they’re concerned about the educational welfare,” he said.
Minks, Trochinski and others stress that the budget problems facing Phillips are hitting other small northern schools and districts statewide.
“Phillips isn’t the only one, and there will be more to come,” Minks said.
OnWEAC Resource Page on School Funding
Posted February 24, 2006