Your editorial ("The assignment: Save the schools," Nov. 9) is a heartfelt plea for lowering overhead costs in public education, which is laudable, but shows a lack of understanding of the costs and benefits of physically merging various school districts.
Hospital beds and school seats are apples and oranges; they have completely different sets of parameters, the foremost being transportation. Hospital patients can be transported an extra 30 or 60 minutes to another hospital for their multiple-day stay; students must be transported to and from school twice each and every day.
The transportation costs incurred from merging two rural school districts can be astronomical. The typical school bus gets 10 miles to the gallon, needs maintenance and a skilled driver. Merging districts requires buying even more buses to get everyone to the same district at the same time from many areas. And students sit passively on a bus for longer and longer periods of the day to get to distant buildings.
A far more cost-efficient and forward-looking way to cut costs in public schools is to think outside the bricks-and-mortar box and begin offering some of each school's courses online to be shared among many schools. A good example of this is a Massachusetts public consortium called Virtual High School (thevhscollaborative.org) that offers co-synchronous online courses in which students from around the world cooperatively discuss, debate, analyze and create with classmates through group projects and assignments. Teachers must successfully complete professional development courses in online teaching pedagogy and methods before joining the faculty and are in class every day Monday through Friday.
English-speaking students at any public, private or home-school setting in the world can take Advanced Placement high school courses that are not available at their home school for lowered costs. Cash-strapped schools can offer more of the needed courses for learners without hiring more teachers, building more classrooms, or buying and fueling more buses.
JAN-MARIE SPANARD
Newcomb