Caledonia residents seeking secession aren’t alone

BY PAUL SLOTH
Journal Times

Sunday, June 22, 2008 8:51 PM CDT

Caledonia residents seeking secession aren’t alone.

Other communities in Wisconsin seek to break away from larger school districts too, said Miles Turner, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators.

In Wisconsin, the Shawano-Gresham, Middleton-Cross Plains and Monona Grove school districts have recently considered splitting. The Gresham Community School seceded on July 1 last year, but the other two districts did not split.

There are many reasons why a community considers separating from a district and creating a new one.

Some communities want their own identity. Some are disillusioned with the current school system, Turner said.

“Is it white flight? Some might want to create their own homogeneous population. You can’t ignore that that might be one of the possibilities,” Turner said.

People enter the discussion about creating new school districts with some built-in assumptions: it will be more cost effective; the schools will be better.

“That does not mean that Racine does not have good programs or good teachers,” Turner said. “It may be an unfair assumption that they’re going to get a better school by separating.”

Urban schools face the threat of their suburban communities pulling out and trying to create their own school systems. Some of it may be evolutionary. Growth is a factor, especially the growth of suburban areas, Turner said.

“This is a tremendously difficult issue for school boards and community members to tackle,” Turner said. “There is an issue that people need to recognize, we can’t, as a society, start to isolate and segregate students from each other.”

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