Originally published January 11, 1969
A tangled web may be woven if political pressures are allowed to get in the way of logic when the Missouri General Assembly begins its study of the already controversial report of the Missouri School District Reorganization Commission, which would eliminate all existing public school districts and replace them with a series of regional districts.
Within each regional district would be several lesser sub-districts still considerably larger than the present autonomous districts.
If the report is adopted, it will mean formation of one regional district (Gateway) embracing all of the present schools in Barton, Jasper, Newton and McDonald counties. Sub-districts under its jurisdiction would total four, each covering approximately the area of one county.
Our own experience in school matters – beginning in the 1930s when the writer’s father was a common school district director and including eight years as a teacher, a term as a school director, several years of anxious parenthood and various stints as reporter covering school affairs – indicates this proposals likely to produce an uproar of greater magnitude than any yet seen in the always troubled Missouri educational system.
Metropolitan and other heavily populated areas will be heard from with considerable volumes. They will object because the plan would require that their people carry the bulk of the cost load for the financially less capable rural areas.
The noise from the rural areas will be just as loud but for totally different reasons. Rural people will object strenuously to the potential loss of identity and the removal of educational authority from their own hands. Incidentally, for purposed of this discussion Carthage belongs in the rural classification.
Yet there is in all justice reason to admit as well that there are some merits in the commission’s proposal and those who served to prepare it surely acted with devotion and concern. However, it would appear that much of the plan was preconceived and that the commission’s study what less than purely objective.
We hope that in all the furor which is to come, at least two things will happen: (1) the voices of all the people will be clearly heard and respected and (2) some healthy changes in the state’s educational organization will be forthcoming.
However, we would caution against haste and suggest the obvious, that any decisions made on the basis of emotion will prove destructive, as will any made purely on the basis of political expediency.
In every educational problem, one question always must remain foremost. What, over the long haul, really will be best ultimately for the children, enrolled in our schools – those enrolled now and those who will follow in the several decades to come?
We already have suggested in discussion with our own legislative representative that (1) this proposed plan probably is the answer as it stands, (2) some changes in our educational system surely are needed even though this proposal may not contain them, (3) there is a most desperate need for more thorough statutory clarification of the division of powers between Boards of Education and administrators and (4) current studies well might embrace consideration of possible reorganization and remotivation of the State Department of Education.
We suggest that one brief legislative session and the report of a single commission will not be sufficient time or data to gain the best results.
We have favored larger school districts as a means of obtaining economy and efficiency. However, it is quite as possible to create a too-large district when caught up in the excitement of change for the sake of change as to hold fast to a too-small district when involved in the nostalgic memory of yesterday.
It strikes us that the current proposal reaches beyond the reasonable to the point of diminishing or disappearing returns and the more to modernize the system could produce greater inefficiency than the archaic organization it bids to succeed.
The magnitude of the stakes in is maneuver in the training and development of several generations of Missourians – makes it not unreasonable to call for further, deeper study and the highest kind of objectivity.
However, we do no join those who call for abandonment of the entire project. Changes – constructive, wise and carefully founded changes – are needed. They should be forthcoming but they should be achieved in an atmosphere of calm and of mutual trust, based upon a widespread agreement that Missouri’s children should have only the best of education opportunity.
Note: my limited research indicates that nothing came of this and that the Missouri system of organizing school district remains little changed since the reorganization efforts of the 1950’s which created the R or C designation of school districts where previously each school building was its own district.
Chris VanGilder
Marvin VanGilder was an editor with The Carthage Press from the 1950s until the 1970s and a writer and columnist for The Press from the 1980s until his death on July 11, 2010. VanGilder was also a community leader, teacher, pastor, musician and was involved in the creation of the Maple Leaf Festival, The Battle of Carthage State Historic Site and other notable achievements. He was a prolific author almost until his death, leaving a wealth of columns, historic research, radio programs that can still be heard on radio station KDMO, and several books on Jasper County history and the histories of some of the communities in Jasper and Barton counties.
