Southern Marin districts should share a superintendent

Marin County has 18 independent school districts. A hundred years ago, Marin had 52 school agencies. Most were one-room rural schoolhouses. Marin isn't an anomaly; Sonoma County has 40 K-12 districts.

The Golden Gate Bridge's 1937 opening shifted Marin from rural to suburban, making eastern Marin's bayside communities denser. Pushed by the state, the number of school governments dropped to today's 18.

There's resistance to further consolidation fueled by a fear of losing local control. If the reformers' principal goal is more efficiently utilizing tax dollars, there's a practical alternative that retains local voter control. It's called “shared services.”

The consulting firm Collegis Education defines shared services as “a common platform that is shared by two or more institutions to accomplish a particular task. … A group of institutions collaborate to pool their resources and share common back-office technologies and services. Common shared services include finance and accounting, human resources, and information technology.”

There's now an excellent opportunity to implement shared services between two Southern Marin districts: Mill Valley and Sausalito Marin City.

Both agencies have seen their superintendent depart. Now is the time for the two to collaborate and determine if it's in their constituents' best interest to share both a superintendent and backoffice functions. It's hardly revolutionary. A few years ago Sausalito Marin City and Larkspur-Corte Madera schools shared a superintendent.

The result could be what school consolidation proponents have long sought: more tax dollars directly devoted to students and teachers. The scheme eliminates a major objection to consolidation: local voters retain their current individual elected school boards with control over budgets and classroom instruction.

In 2011, the Marin County Office of Education's efficiency and effectiveness task force issued a report focusing on shared services.

It concluded the practice had seven benefits. It saves money; gains economies of scale; standardizes procedures; attracts more highly qualified staff; retains local control and achieves scale; flattens out peaks and troughs for the need for certain functions and, crucially, decreases political opposition since “sharing services is a much more popular cost-cutting option than political consolidation.”

Sausalito Marin City and Mill Valley schools both require a top of the line superintendent with talents to address the needs of diverse constituencies. Sharing a superintendent in distinctly different districts demonstrates the wisdom of increasing shared services among all school agencies.

Mill Valley and Sausalito Marin City schools facilitated by the county Office of Education should give a hard look at sharing one superintendent and ultimately back-office functions. As that 2011 task force concluded, that will drive “more money into the classroom.”

***

I was blessed with great history teachers in high school and college. It fostered my lifelong interest in American history. Now, many public schools are being badgered by parents and far right politicians claiming that educators now teach too much in history classes.

They're concerned that students are learning both the past's good and bad. That's what history is about. To emphasize the bad isn't any better than whitewashing the past to teach only the good. Every society and culture have both.

Since our country's 1976 bicentennial, we've celebrated February as Black History Month. It opens our eyes to aspects of the past unknown to many.

Why wasn't my generation taught about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre? That's when a White mob incited by a rumor that a Black man touched a White woman led to the destruction of 35 blocks of Tulsa's African American Greenwood neighborhood. Three hundred died, 8,000 became homeless and 1,470 blackowned homes and businesses burned or were looted. No one was ever arrested for this outrage.

The massacre was intentionally hidden by contemporary Oklahomans afraid the world would learn the truth. Now we know.