If anything good can be said about the COVID crisis, it may be that it has forced many of us to consider alternatives to the way we were living our lives, most especially with regard to how we do our jobs and how we educate our children.
Maybe we can telecommute and work from the comfort of our own homes, instead of sitting at desks in cubicles all day long and having to play office politics. Maybe our children can likewise learn from home and get just as good, if not better, an education without being subjected to the daily perils of peer pressure and worse.
Some of our friends and neighbors had already opted for this freedom, but most of us, pre-COVID, were still stuck in our same old ruts, unable to imagine anything different.
More and more people now are thinking “outside the box” of the office building and the school building. Why do have to work and learn in boxes? And do we really need so many of them?
Rep. Rita Mayfield of Waukegan, thinking along those lines, wonders why we need so many school districts in Illinois, and why all the money wasted on buildings and administrators isn’t spent on students, teachers, and educational resources instead. Mayfield’s House Bill 7 is an attempt to re-prioritize those funds and maybe reduce our state’s property tax burden at the same time.
“In Illinois, district-level ‘general administration’ costs $581 per student, higher than all neighboring states and nearly double the national average,” says Ann Miller of the Illinois Policy Institute. “That high cost is thanks to the state’s overabundance of school districts, which serve far too few students per district when compared with other states.”
Mayfield’s bill “aims to consolidate 25 percent of Illinois’ 852 school districts, which would bring Illinois closer to the national average,” Miller reports. “Were Illinois to match the students per district of Virginia, for example, it would have only 210 districts – 642 fewer than at present.”
Let’s not waste this crisis.