Points from the April 17th "Informational Meeting"

Ten of us from the CAC, having attended many meetings and reviewed much data, met last night with the BoE scattered among forty-odd community members, Superintendent Diana Bowers presiding...and near the end, someone in the audience commented that there seemed to be two of us in favor of the merger proposal, two undecided, and six against. I think that's about right, at the moment; and at the moment, I'm among the reasonably-solidly-against. There was a camera going; the video ought to appear on the Hamilton CSD site somewhere sometime soon. My very-fragmentary thoughts:

What Next? The perennial question, Where Do We Go From Here? was answered by Dr. Bowers, as indeed I laid it out in my CAC Done; Do You Feel Lucky? post: next comes (1) a BoE vote, and they can choose to stop everything, or to proceed. If they choose to proceed, then there's (2) a community straw vote, which can stop everything, or proceed. If we choose to proceed, then things go to the DoE and (3) back to the BoE, which can stop everything, or proceed to (4) a final community vote for district merger. Meanwhile Morrisville has the same sequence. If all the votes are favorable, then there's a merger, and then we (the combined district) elect a new combined BoE, and they decide what happens next -- who to hire, what to do with the existing buildings, whether to build a giant swimming pool instead (as Dave Hollis put it), and and at that point we ...well, it goes on. And on. And on, until Somebody gets tired of our performance and rings down the final curtain. (I don't think Diana actually got that far.)

Please Read: As Susan Marafino said, anybody who is going to vote on this should dive into the data, probably starting at the end with the 15-year Financial outline if we merge, based on the Possible Program/Staffing (where we save by economies of scale) and the Transportation Plan (where we pay to get kids together to achieve those economies of scale, and incidentally give them an hour per day extra transportation time for all HCS middle schoolers and M-ECS high schoolers.) Also please read my own collection of District Comparisons on this blog and at the accompanying site, based on the earlier documents and on reports I saw in the past year or so. (Some of these were out of date; as Susan commented at the meeting, M-ECS has in the past few years drastically cut its programs, and some of the district comparison material I linked is out of date in that respect.)

Summary: As Diana indicated at one point, the communities fit together in that our true-value tax rates are very very close (I believe neighboring communities have higher rates). As I said, I think that this equality actually indicates an additional difference: Morrisville made a choice between cutting programs and raising taxes which I do not believe we would have made. There are all kinds of reasons behind this; I'm not saying that they made the wrong choice, for them. I am saying that if a merged district were somehow to run short on money in future, I expect that most Hamilton homeowners would be voting differently than most Morrisville homeowners, and somebody would lose and be very unhappy about having merged. Of course if the merged district were never to run short of money, that's not a problem. If fuel costs stop rising (why would they stop rising? Well, they might, I suppose)...if the state doesn't run out of money (won't it run out of money? Well, maybe not...but I haven't read any economists or investors who think the current situation is sustainable. Some promises will be broken.) My feeling is that this merger is a very big gamble, which is why I wrote the CAC Done; Do You Feel Lucky? post which goes over both of those issues, with links.

And If We Don't Do This Merger Now? Well, we may do a different merger later (such as the merger I proposed in that post), or no merger at all. A couple of people were commenting on the value of merger in terms of having enough students for advanced classes, (again, I wrote about that in the aforementioned post.) One item I wanted to repeat in the meeting, but didn't get to: the economic issues of advanced K-12 (or introductory college) courses are changing rapidly. A recently completed study is reported as Online Education Trumps the Cost Disease

In a large, randomized experiment Bowen et al. found that students enrolled in an online/hybrid statistics course learned just as much as those taking a traditional class.... Perhaps even more importantly, Bowen et al. found that the online model was significantly less costly than the traditional model, some 36% to 57% less costly to produce than a course using a traditional lecture format. In other words, since outcomes were the same, online education increased productivity by 56% to 133%! ... ... Online education even in its earliest stages appears to be generating large improvements in educational productivity.

Actually outcomes were not the same; students learned the same material faster in this "hybrid" (online + one class/week) model than in the classroom-only model.

Then again, there's the Khan Academy which I've discussed many times, as a not-yet-complete K-12 curriculum (with some college courses) of thousands of explanatory videos with software to go with them; they're not intended to make teachers obsolete, but they are intended to make "class size" obsolete as a concept. I've also discussed Khan's One World Schoolhouse book a few times, in which he explains how that can work. Will it work? Which model will win? I don't think anybody knows, but the background to the economics of education is changing faster than ever before, and the most clearly currently-effective change is happening at just the right level to make merger unnecessary. Predicting is hard, especially the future -- but there's no need for panic. There's a very good chance that we will end up replacing the traditional model of school with something that's somewhat cheaper and a whole lot better. (Or with something that's a whole lot cheaper and somewhat worse -- I admit that's possible too.)

Tell me what I'm missing...

Update: Radio Free Hamilton (i.e. Dave Hollis) reports: 'What If' Scenarios Paint Post-Merger Picture

Members of the committee of HCS district residents studying the possible merger with Morrisville-Eaton Central School discussed the study in a forum Tuesday night in the school cafeteria attended by about 70 people.

70? Well, I guess there were more people after I counted. And yes, the picture is me. (And Susan remarks that there was one CAC member who stayed in the audience; 11, not 10.)