One of the themes that emerged from Wednesday’s public engagement session is that reconfiguration can mean a lot of things.

As community members in Sheffield and Youngsville rally to save their schools, a proposal has been laid on the table that would fundamentally transform how the Warren County School District operates.

The gist of the proposal is this – each attendance area (Eisenhower, Youngsville, Warren, Sheffield and, in the proposal, Tidioute) would have its own five-member local school board. Representatives from those smaller boards would then make up the county-wide WCSD board.

Kelly Sullivan said during Wednesday’s public engagement session that it’s a proposal that “a lot of us are standing behind.”

It’s laid out at 2schools1fight.org.

Sullivan said it would be a “very innovative way” of structuring the board and is something that “appeals to us.”

In comments provided in advance of the meeting and read by Superintendent Amy Stewart, Mark Lindberg called the proposal “visionary and innovative” and also something that would result in a “healing of distrust” from decades of consolidation discussions.

Lindberg said the time has arrived for a “bold and courageous” school board to take a different direction than the “work out idea of consolidation.”

The proposal reinforces that assertion – “the reconfiguration and consolidation discussions now, and over the past 40 years are not real solutions to these problems, but rather a temporary fix for an experiment that has failed.”

Organizers acknowledge that the plan is a framework and “skeletal.” But there’s more meat on the bone than a typical framework.

“We propose that local attendance area boards should be formed through an election process,” they say. “These local attendance area boards would have oversight over a broad number of decisions affecting the attendance area the members represent.”

“The local board would guide, advise, have oversight, and make many decisions on matters directly impacting education in that attendance area,” the proposal states, specifically identifying that the local boards would make decisions about closures, sports and educational specialties.

Just how the representation will work is unclear.

“The WCSD District School Board will be reconfigured with one member representing each attendance area,” the proposal states, identifying that there would be nine members on the total board.

However, there are five attendance areas proposed.

Elsewhere in the proposal it is stated that the local boards would pick “two of the local five members” to sit on the county-wide board.

That would result in a board size of 10, rather than 9.

Benefits identified include “greater local responsibility and control of education” as well as the ability to develop “educational specialities” at the local level, such as environmental studies or business.

Organizers believe the proposal would enhance student, parent and resident participation and place the “responsibility to achieve learning proficiency… more locally upon community stakeholders, especially the parents and community leaders and the local board. If the local board does not promote academic proficiency as prescribed by PDE (Pennsylvania Department of Education), the future of the school is jeopardized.”

The success or failure of such a proposal could quite likely come down to how it is funded.

“Distribution would be made through the district board to the local board on an equitable basis per student,” the plan states. “A fair ‘per student’ formula would be derived from past financial data to ensure that past distrust about favoritism would be reduced and eventually eliminated.”

The proposal acknowledges that it would be “necessary for each local board to work within the limits of its budgeted amount.

“In Spring 2023 with the WCSD Board exploring low enrollment and under-utilization of school buildings, this proposal would suggest the process is backwards and has already alienated entire attendance areas with a spirit of distrust.”

Further, all students “would remain in their current 2022 attendance area assignments for the foreseeable future” under this plan. “Any change to those assignments or those physical plants would be initiated only through decision of a local attendance area board.”

With a proposal that breaks far from current practice, it’s no surprise that there are questions. Organizers outlined several in their vision for the initiative.

Current WCSD board members have questions as well.

Joe Colosimo noted that the impact of the proposal on teachers is absent from the proposal.

Donna Zariczny explained that past mergers required court action.

She said she knows the proposal is “supported in the community” but has “no idea if it’s legal or not” or even if it is “something we can consider.”