Shaping school districts: How they got that way
When it came time for Jo Ellen Reikowski to send her children to school, she learned that the North Canton City Schools bus that passed her home on Whipple Avenue NW near Glenwood Avenue SW wouldn’t be stopping to pick up her kids.
In fact, no bus would be stopping.
The Reikowskis were one of the few families living in an enclave of the Jackson Local School District, which at that time had just started its kindergarten program and required parents to drive their children to the school at noon for a half-day program.
“That was inconvenient for me,” recalled Reikowski, who worked at the time as Plain Township’s finance director.
She tried to find out why the Jackson Local boundary line abruptly shifted east across Whipple Avenue and into North Canton for one-third of a mile and then retreated west into Jackson Township. Aultman North Immediate Care and Gabriel Brothers now bookend the area.
“I remember calling the state Board of Education in Columbus about the boundary line and was told when the school districts were originally formed, they asked the residents — mostly farmers — which district they wanted their children to attend and that is why they jump over boundary lines of townships, etc.,” said Reikowski, who left the neighborhood in 1986.
WANDERING LINES
None of Stark County’s 17 school districts has boundaries that exactly follow the communities where they are based. Instead, they meander in and out of the adjoining townships, villages and cities, creating puzzle-like districts and connecting neighborhoods that otherwise would have little in common. Ten of the school districts have boundaries that extend beyond Stark County’s borders, and three school districts based in another county — Tuscarawas Valley Local, Brown Local and Southeast Local — serve homes in Stark.
The irregular layout creates odd and unusual situations, such as Sandy Valley High School’s being located in Tuscarawas County. It’s why students on the eastern side of Canton City’s Ward 4 don’t attend the Canton City School District, but children in Meyers Lake do. And why two of the properties that make up the Creek Bottom Farm in Sugar Creek Township are the only properties in Stark County that belong to Wayne County-based Southeast Local.
Most school officials don’t know why the districts are drawn the way they are. But they’re all too familiar with some of the challenges the borders can pose with transportation — when residents see multiple school buses from different districts traveling down the same road — and on the districts’ ability to get services for their out-of-community families.
Alliance Superintendent Jeffery Talbert recalled when a mother sought help from the district in locating and registering her children for county-based services. Talbert said the district’s efforts to help the family were limited because the family lived in the Mahoning County portion of the district.
“That’s kind of unique to school districts that sit on the county line,” he said. “They had to go register for certain services, and had to go in their county. The majority of our students we’re dealing with are for Stark County services.”
The boundaries also can create a challenge for schools seeking to create a sense of community, especially during election time when property owners who feel connected to their schools are more likely to translate to votes for the district’s tax requests.
CREATING COMMUNITY
On the Nov. 4 ballot, six Stark County-based school districts are seeking a property-tax levy, bond issue or income tax for their operations. Four of the districts — Tuslaw, Fairless, Osnaburg and Northwest — serve voters who live outside Stark County.
For most districts, the out-of-county residents represent such a small percentage of voters that they do not affect the election’s outcome. That’s not the case for Northwest, where Summit County voters represent a quarter of the district’s total registered voters.
During the May primary, Northwest, which includes Canal Fulton, parts of Lawrence Township, Clinton, New Franklin and a small portion of Wayne County, had its income-tax renewal pass in Stark County by 55 votes, but the issue ultimately lost because it failed in Summit County by 106 votes and in Wayne County by four votes.
During previous levy attempts, campaign volunteers noted that a disconnect seemed to exist with voters in Clinton. Superintendent Michael Shreffler, who was hired at Northwest in 2012, attributes the renewal’s defeat in May more to low voter turnout. Election results show that roughly 23 percent of the district’s 10,351 registered voters went to the polls.
But Shreffler acknowledged that Northwest, like other school districts that straddle county boundaries, must make a continuous effort to remind district residents that they’re all part of the same community.
“There are issues when you cross county lines, and obviously there are some old hurts that exist in different places, but we have to have a better mindset that this is a community thing,” said Shreffler, who previously served as superintendent of Southeast, which crosses into Stark and Holmes counties.
Shreffler said one way the district promotes its identity as a unified district is through its annual community day, which brings families from all three counties together for entertainment, food and fun.
“Two years ago, you couldn’t move inside community day,” he said. “Last year, we had a snowstorm and still got hundreds of people.”
The feel-good event began in February 2010, following the district’s 10th consecutive tax issue defeat. Three months after the first community day, voters — mostly in Stark County — approved the district’s 1 percent income-tax request. The issue still failed in Summit and Wayne counties, results show.
HOW THEY GOT THEIR SHAPE
School-district boundaries in Ohio have been a mess since the 1900s, according to Charles C. McCracken, an Ohio State University professor of school administration, who documented each Ohio county’s boundaries in a book published in 1929.
He blamed state lawmakers for not abolishing the state’s several hundred small districts when it created county boards of education as part of a new school code that took effect in 1914. The state had charged the county boards to centralize and consolidate small school districts with the hope of bringing better consistency to the educational system, but many county superintendents — including those in Stark County — faced protests every time they suggested the reorganization of a district.
According to the Stark County Educational Service Center, Stark County boasted 189 separate school districts guided by township clerks, the county auditor, and a few district superintendents.
By the time McCracken did his survey in 1925, he identified 33 rural and village school districts, not including the city and exempted village districts that were not under the control of the county boards of education. His list included long-forgotten districts of Hostetter, McFarren and West Brookfield.
Besides the excessive number of school districts, McCracken blamed the lawmakers for the districts’ arbitrary boundaries, which, he said, made it too easy for residents to transfer from one district to another.
“This is often done merely to escape taxation; in other cases it is done in order to obtain better school advantages,” McCracken wrote.
He recommended that state legislators eliminate the “exceedingly chaotic condition” by creating one school district per county. The recommendation was never approved by the Legislature.
1950s MERGER BOOM
In the early 1950s, the state began to pressure small school districts to merge with other districts. It banned districts from building high schools that would house fewer than 240 students and created financial incentives for districts to keep their high-school students from leaving for another district with a broader curriculum.
Many of the Stark County school districts still in existence today were created during this era:
• Northwest formed in July 1953 with the merger of the Canal Fulton and West Franklin school districts, which had little educational interaction prior to the merger despite their close proximity.
• Fairless followed in April 1956 through the merger of Justus, Navarre, Brewster and Beach City (which included Wilmot) districts.
• Marlington formed in May 1956 with the consolidation of school districts in Lexington, Marlboro and Washington townships.
• Tuslaw followed in July 1956 with the joining of the Lawrence and Tuscarawas school districts.
• Lake Local formed in 1957 with the consolidation of the Uniontown and Hartville districts. The Greentown district in Lake Township went to the North Canton school district.
During this time, the state also halted many of the property transfers between school districts that had annoyed McCracken. Legislators in 1955 revised Ohio’s annexation laws so that school- district boundaries no longer changed when a village or city annexed a piece of land. The amended law also required the state Board of Education’s approval before an area could be separated from its original school district, according to a legal opinion written in 1980 to settle a school boundary dispute in Alliance.
Hills and Dales residents learned in 2005 just how difficult getting the state’s approval to change a district’s boundary line can be. In March 2004, 121 village residents petitioned the state board to transfer the village from Plain Local to Jackson Local. The state denied the request in September 2005, citing a state hearing officer’s conclusion that it was in the best interest of the affected students to remain in Plain Local. An appeals court later upheld the state’s decision.
FUTURE CHANGES?
Stark County Superintendent Larry Morgan, who plans to retire next year after a 20-year career as county superintendent, doesn’t expect much change in district boundaries anytime soon.
“Because philosophically and operationally, this (Stark County Educational Service Center governing) board’s policy is that we will not support any changes in school boundaries,” he said.
But at least one county school board member believes change — through consolidation of the smaller districts — eventually will become unavoidable.
“It will come up because we’re being pressured by Columbus to think about to how to share services,” said board member Mary Olson. “As we find more and more of our (property tax) levies are not being passed, we’re going to have to start looking at alternative ways of keeping solvent.”
Reach Kelli at 330-580-8339 or kelli.young@cantonrep.com.
On Twitter: @kyoungREP
While school boundaries in Ohio have been essentially frozen for more than 50 years, they never have been officially approved.
A decade-long effort to formalize the boundaries, begun in 2001 by the Stark County Educational Service and the Stark County Auditor’s Office, remains unfinished.
“The goal was to have each (school) board adopt their official boundaries,” said Tamara Hurst, treasurer at the county educational center. “Nobody was debating anything. We just could never find anywhere that said it was officially adopted.”
Shanda-lyn Yaeger, who served as the county auditor’s GIS director from 2004 to 2012, said the effort was able to correct some longstanding errors where properties had been placed in the wrong taxation district. But she said the project stalled in 2011 because neighboring counties didn’t have the technology to verify those school boundaries that extended beyond Stark County’s borders.
“We could verify that everyone was in the right tax district in Stark County, but we couldn’t go to the school districts and ask for a resolution to be passed because the boundaries outside Stark County weren’t verified,” said Yaeger, now a GIS instructor at Stark State College.