By JIM BARON

PROVIDENCE — Consolidating the state’s 36 school districts into a single mega-district or a handful of large sectors, one of the most-oft suggested steps toward  alleviating the state’s fiscal crisis, may not save as much money as people think, the director of the Rhode Island Association of School Committees said Monday.

And the notion of having the state take over local education altogether, as some have espoused, would be “completely impractical,” says RIASC Director Tim Duffy.
Duffy said a 2006 report the association conducted with RIPEC (the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council) showed that “once you get past 2,000 students, there really aren’t many meaningful economies of scale to be realized” — and once a district exceeds 6,000 students, “funding inequities begin to occur within the district itself.”
While many people believe that savings can be achieved by reducing the administrative staffs that each district maintains,  Duffy asserts that Rhode Island’s per-pupil administrative costs are already lower than the national average and lower than everyone in New England except Vermont.
“So we have fewer  administrators per-pupil, than Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
“There is a belief that we can consolidate schools and save a lot of money on administrative costs in terms of salaries,” he said. “(But) it really doesn’t exist. We’re actually below the national average in the number of administrators we have.
“The larger a district you have,” Duffy contends, “the more support personnel you are going to have to administer that district. You have a larger bureaucracy and the bureaucracy feeds on itself, and the greater the likelihood that the kids will get lost in the bureaucratic maze. The numbers don’t support it.”
As an example, Duffy pointed to Fairfax County, Va., which Gov. Donald Carcieri pointed to in a State of the State speech as being a single school district that has about the same number of students as all of Rhode Island’s districts. Yes, Duffy said, it has the same number of students, but it also has 2,000 more school employees than Rhode Island and spends $250 million more each year on schools than the Ocean State does.
“I know it sounds counter-intuitive,” he said, “but every study that has been done on school consolidation came to pretty much the same conclusion.”
Duffy was responding in part to an article in The Times a week ago in which Carcieri warned that the yawning deficit in the current year’s budget will likely require serious cutbacks in state aid to cities and towns and their school districts.
Dan Beardsley, executive director of the League of Cities and Towns, said municipal leaders are looking for ways to force school departments to stay within their budgets and take away the vehicle — called Caruolo lawsuits — that allow school districts to sue the municipalities in which they are located for more money.
A Caruolo lawsuit is currently going forward in East Providence.
“The system is broken,” Beardsley said at the time. “There is more and more sentiment on behalf of city and town officials for the state to simply take over public education. They have no control over it now. Let the state create a statewide school district.”
For that to work, Duffy said, the state would also have to create a statewide property tax to replace the $1.2 billion local cities and towns put toward public education each year. The state kicks in another $700 million, so overall public schools in Rhode Island cost about $1.9 billion to operate each year.
Either that, he said, or the state would take over operations of the schools “but still stick the locals with the property tax bill” for operations they do not control.
Already, Duffy noted, Rhode Island depends more on local property taxes to run its schools than any other state except Indiana.