Jun 3, 2016 3 min read

You know what Ben Franklin – well, Daniel Defoe probably preceded him – said about death and taxes.

Let’s concentrate on the latter unpleasant subject and the inevitability of school taxes rising each year throughout Pennsylvania.

Culprits abound, depending on your point of view, with the folks in Harrisburg bearing the brunt of many discourses on the subject.

Actually, our state lawmakers attempted long ago to remedy a major financial issue regarding public education: They passed laws in the early 1960s to consolidate school districts, with the hope of increasing quality while realizing economies of scale.

A major point of contention at that point, though, was a provision of Act 561 of 1961 that attempted to set the minimum size of a school district at 4,000 students. By 1963, revised legislation had turned that threshold into a recommendation instead of a mandate.

The result was that the number of districts dropped throughout the decade from 2,277 to 669, and it stands at an even 500 today.

The time has come to reduce that figure even more.

Today’s districts face financial pressures that no one dreamed about 50 years ago, or as was the case with the Pennsylvania State Employees’ Retirement System contretemps, even a decade and a half ago.

For every district that manages to sort of weather the budget storm each year, several others scramble to stay afloat, especially when basic education funding is delayed because of interparty squabbles at the state level.

Keeping the wolf from the door while trying to provide a decent education is particularly difficult where enrollment is low, of which there are plenty of cases among Allegheny County’s 46 – count ’em – school districts. Allegheny Valley, Clairton City, Cornell, Duquesne City, Riverview and Wilkinsburg all serve fewer than 1,100 students each, which certainly represents a far cry from that early ’60s benchmark.

Districts of that size should not exist, but attempts so far to make more sense of their situations have failed.

Let’s see if the efforts of state Rep. Mike Vereb, R-Montgomery County, can meet with more success.

The suburban Philadelphia legislator last month introduced HR 910, which would direct the Joint State Government Commission – it’s a bipartisan effort – to conduct a statewide study on, yes, reducing the number of school districts.

Vereb’s home county, by the way, has exactly half the districts of Allegheny. Whatever the case, he makes a whole lot of sense:

“This considerable number of school districts operating independently may unintentionally result in significant financial inefficiencies and duplication of services, which in turn increase the strain on local property taxpayers.”

Whether his proposal gets anywhere is sketchy. His fellow lawmakers from Cameron, Forest, Juniata, Mifflin, Snyder and Sullivan counties – they each have two or fewer school districts – are certain to pay more attention to other matters.

But anyone who represents any part of the 46-district county may want to have a long talk with Mike Vereb and see what he or she can do to help his efforts.