Should city and county schools consolidate into a single school system? That question gets raised periodically, and Will Goldsmith is chewing it over in the latest C-Ville Weekly. The city’s recent school efficiency study didn’t address the topic, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth considering. City school board member Llezelle Dugger tells the paper that it’s just not viable, but Albemarle school board member Brian Wheeler thinks it’s well worth spending some time looking at it.
The notion of combining services has been around for a long time, as has the idea that we should just combine the two entities entirely. The word “reversion” still prompts shudders in the veterans of the mid-90s township wars, when some folks were pushing to have the city demoted to a town in order to force cooperation between the entities. Some sort of large-scale collaboration may allow the revenue sharing agreement to be set aside, or at least absorbed into the largest costs of running joint services, and that might be good for everybody.
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