ANDERSON — A committee for the Anderson County Board of Education will recommend that the board drop the idea of consolidating the county's five school districts and let superintendents work together to share services instead.
In a meeting almost two hours long Tuesday night, members of the county board met with the five district superintendents to discuss consolidation and the results of a study on educational equality across the districts.
In 2009, the county board commissioned a study from the Strom Thurmond Institute on Government and Public Affairs to look at ways to ensure equal educational opportunities for all of Anderson County's students regardless of where they lived.
The study made several recommendations from doing nothing, to sharing services, to consolidating the five districts into either one, two or three districts.
But the proposed consolidation raised an uproar in the community when it was presented in August 2009, prompting superintendents to submit a letter of recommendations on where they saw the districts could share services.
In January, the county board started a website that provided the public with access to the study and asked people to fill out a survey online to give opinions on the study.
Steve Garrison, chairman of the study committee, said the survey had received 341 responses. Of those, 68 percent said they were happy with the way the school districts are now.
In his mind, Garrison said, the issue was closed.
"It's my recommendation that what we need to do is go back and report to the board that consolidation issue is all but over and that we want to restructure this committee as an educational improvement committee going forward," Garrison said. "Consolidation is a dead issue because I don't think it's going to work in this community."
Betty Bagley, superintendent of Anderson School District 5, said the study did not recommend consolidation.
"The bottom line of that study was that it would not save money and it would not increase student performance," she said. "However, in the process we found that it has brought us (the superintendents) together to explore other avenues to save money in ways we have not before explored."
The committee determined that it would like to redirect its marketing focus from getting residents to fill out the survey to showing them what works in the school districts.
The recommendation will now go before the county board at its next meeting at 6 p.m. Feb. 21 in the board offices at 402 Bleckley St. in Anderson.
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