York County’s Republican delegation will be holding an event tomorrow afternoon to discuss its request to have the state’s Independent Fiscal Office look into the potential savings for taxpayers if the county’s school districts were combined, according to a news release.
That event will be at 1:30 p.m. at the York County School of Technology.
It’s not the first time the topic of consolidation has been brought up in recent months. Consolidation was one of the ideas discussed early on when the York City School District began the financial recovery process.
The idea came before the advisory committee in several forms, from countywide consolidation to just combining York City with neighboring districts. But the advisory committee dropped the idea fairly quickly, for a few reasons.
The committee had a pretty tight timeline for turning around a recovery plan, and at least one district would have had to be interested in consolidation for the group to even consider it. There were also questions about whether consolidation would really save money – which was part of what York City needed to do. Still, there were many supporters of the idea, particularly because it was believed that consolidation might help address the city’s concentration of poverty.
The committee did send a letter to the other districts in the county asking some questions about whether they would consider consolidation. Chief Recovery Officer David Meckley only read one response during a public meeting, but said all of them were similar: districts said they couldn’t even answer the questions because they had too many questions themselves.
Here’s some background reading until tomorrow’s press conference:
York City schools: Could consolidation be the answer?
Timing forces consolidation out
York City schools: Can recovery process address poverty?
