Sisters will be part of a statewide ESD ‘reform’ experiment

In the Oregon Legislature, ESDs are like Mark Twain’s weather: Everybody talks about them but nobody does anything about them.

It happened again last year. The 2005 Legislature was all geared up to adopt substantial “reform” of the state’s Education Service Districts. Meaty bills were ready to go in both houses. Then, almost literally at the last minute, those bills were dumped in favor of a four-year pilot project that changes the way board members are chosen in three of the state’s 20 districts.

For reasons not entirely clear, the High Desert ESD, which covers Crook and Deschutes counties, was chosen as one of the three. The local ESD serves the four school districts in its boundaries — Bend, Redmond, Sisters, and Crook County (Prineville).

Education Service Districts provide specialized services to regular school districts within their boundaries. Those districts pool resources to obtain services and equipment many of them could not afford on their own, such as special education instruction and help with technology.

“I’ve got seven board members now.” ESD Superintendent Dennis Dempsey explained last week, “five from zones and two at large. Four of the members are from Bend, two are from Prineville and one, Scott Pillar, the chairman, is from Sisters.”

Dempsey is a former Sisters High School principal who still lives near the town. His ESD is headquartered in Redmond.

Under the experiment ordained by the Legislature, the High Desert board will soon have nine members, chosen in two phases. Five will be chosen from zones; the current board designed the zones last month. A zone centered on Bend will have two members while one each will come from zones covering Sisters, Redmond and Crook County.

But the key to the plan, according to its designers, is that the members will no longer be selected in elections. Instead they will be appointed by the boards of the regular school districts in each of the zones. Moreover, once the first five are in place, they will appoint four additional members representing not geographic areas but designated interest groups, one each from higher education, social services, business and one at large.

The first five will be chosen in July with the other four following soon afterward.

Dempsey says this change in governance resulted from the fact that around the state “some of the bigger districts felt they didn’t have enough input into what goes on with their ESD.” He doesn’t think that’s the case here.

“They can’t complain about that here because, for one thing, all of my superintendents (in the four constituent districts) are on my budget committee.” So they have a direct vote on choosing programs and services the High Desert ESD should add or drop.

Sisters School Superintendent Ted Thonstad tends to agree that the High Desert ESD is not an example of the kind of problem the change was meant to address, which makes it an odd choice as one of three districts to be included in the pilot program. “High Desert is not the problem. It’s closer to a model than a problem,” Thonstad told The Nugget.

Thonstad says that the superintendents on the ESD budget committee have indeed “changed the ESD’s direction significantly a couple of times.” And he notes that “Dennis does a good job of communicating with the superintendents and having them involved in decisions…He’s somewhat more attuned to that than some of the ESDs in the valley…where the school districts complain about” a lack of responsiveness.

As might be expected, some of the smaller districts are now afraid that the governance experiment will put them at a serious disadvantage. Both Dempsey and Thonstad said it’s going to be difficult in an ESD that covers 20 districts, such as the Northwest Regional ESD in the northwest corner of the state — one of the three in the pilot program — to come up with fair patterns of representation on a board with only five members chosen geographically.

Both Dempsey and Thonstad feel it’s possible, maybe even likely, that the Legislature will revisit this issue in 2007 even though the pilot program is supposed to continue to 2010. But both also concede that the basic forces that have blocked major change in the past will still exist.

One of those forces is the desire of smaller districts to get as much help as possible from an ESD office that is as close as possible. Their interests conflict with those of reformers who look at the map of 20 ESDs and propose reducing them by perhaps a third.

Thonstad is sympathetic with the districts that have opposed much consolidation. “Nobody wants to lose their ESD,” he says. “And my experience is that the farther away you are from it the less service you get.”

At the same time, he acknowledges that larger districts really don’t need ESDs. “Bend doesn’t need an ESD,” he said. “They could provide these services themselves.”

The 2005 Legislature did make one other concession to the larger districts, one that Thonstad doesn’t appreciate. It cut the share of state school funding reserved for ESDs from 5 percent of the total to 4.75 percent, giving the quarter-percent piece directly to school districts, which can use it for ESD services or for other purposes of their own.

“That only means $15,000 for us,” Thonstad said. “But it’s probably $200,000 for Bend. And I don’t think they’re going to give it back.”