The primary purposes of this study were to: (1) identify the reasons behind school district consolidation, the objections raised to K-12 unification, and the strategies used to gain public support for school district reorganization; (2) determine whether the educational, economic, operational, administrative, and societal benefits attributed to the expansion of a partial regional structure to a unified, K-12 regional school district are achieved through school district consolidation; and (3) examine and compare the attitudes of constituent groups (school administrators, teachers, school committee members, parents, local affairs committee members, and non-parents) who have experienced the expansion of their partial regional school district to a unified, K-12 school district to the central themes associated with school district consolidation. A single case study design was employed to investigate the reorganization. This study took place in the Quimby Regional School District in Balcorn, Massachusetts (both pseudonyms). This five town region was formed as a partial grades 7-12 region in 1965, and was expanded by town meeting votes to take jurisdiction of all children in grades K-12, effective July 1, 1985. The researcher utilized both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Qualitative research methods including in-depth, semi-structured interviews with school administrators and school committee members and document analysis were used to obtain data to construct the case study. Quantitative data gathered from an attitudinal survey on school district reorganization completed by 106 participants from the six different constituent groups from the Quimby Region were used to verify or refute conclusions reached in the case study. The researcher concluded that the single most important reason why member towns in the Quimby Region voted for a K-12 region was to secure the financial benefits from such a unification. The resistance to the K-12 reorganization centered around the perceived threats to local control of elementary education. Residents and employees of the Quimby Regional School District who participated in the study agreed that the expansion of their school district has led to an enhanced educational program, an expansion of educationally desirable support services, an increase in financial efficiency, an improvement in operational functions, a more efficient central administration, and an improvement in the societal function.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-8497 |
| Date | 01 January 1992 |
| Creators | Aherne, John Joseph |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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