By the early 1990s, there was a lot of fatigue over discussions of school system merger in Jackson County. The years of complicated contracts and court involvement were over between the county’s three school systems. Each school system was now independent of each other and free to pursue their own destiny without courts or contracts.
Talks of school merger had begun in the 1950s, and had waxed and waned over the years. Literally hundreds of meetings had been held on the issue; numerous studies and assessments by both citizens and professionals had been done. At least a dozen citizens’ civic groups had been formed on the issue. And once, every voter in the county got a chance to vote on school system merger, but that effort was defeated in 1982.
Final part: Annexation issue settled and merger talks evaporate
In addition, a dozen or so lawsuits had been filed over issues related to merger involving hundreds, if not thousands of motions and counter motions.
So by 1991, when the last serious effort toward merger was made, there was a lot of sentiment to just leave the issue alone. In fact, two of the main reasons for merger had been settled by then.
One reason for merging had been to consolidate school facilities and administration to save money. But by 1990, so much money had already been spent on school facilities that any savings seemed like a pipe dream. In addition, the move toward building bigger high schools was no longer in vogue as it was in the 1970s and 1980s; smaller schools were seen as a better alternative. Finally, by 1990, school systems had become bureaucratic and top-heavy from the mid-1980s state QBE rules — consolidating administrative expenses no longer seemed as attractive as it once did because few administrative jobs would have been eliminated.
The second original reason for pushing a school merger — to provide equal education opportunity for all students in the county — was also mostly resolved. Once an academically poor achieving school, Jackson County High School had by 1990 began to pull out of its years of academic neglect. It had moved to Jefferson in 1979 and had slowly climbed up to a level of modest academic success.
With those two concerns mostly resolved, why was school merger even an issue in 1991?
Because a new issue had come up. After the courts washed their hands of Jackson County’s school litigation issues in 1986, both Jefferson and Commerce had begun annexing land in a bid to grow their tax base to fund their small, independent school systems.
But that annexation came at the expense of the county school systems, effectively shrinking its tax base in the process. Every acre annexed into Jefferson or Commerce took that land away from the county school tax base.
Merger still seemed like the only solution, so the idea hung around, hitting the headlines every time one of the towns annexed more property. I was involved with 65 other people in 1991 in trying to merge the systems to resolve that issue, but our efforts failed when the state legislator who had promised to move on the idea backed out at the last minute due to the intense political pressures involved.
But in 1995, that complex annexation issue was resolved without merger. The chairman of Jefferson’s Board of Education and the superintendent of the county school system worked out a formula to share annexed property taxes once the per student tax base in the systems were equalized. Just like that, the annexation issue died, and with it the merger issue evaporated. After 1995, no serious movements toward school merger have happened. Each school system has pursued its own course independent of each other.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t lingering aspects of all those years of dispute. For example, one of the reasons the county school system made East Jackson Comprehensive High School the “Taj Mahal” of local school buildings was in part to thumb its nose at the Commerce School System. County students in East Jackson had been forced to attend Commerce High School from the 1950s to 1979 and many students and parents resented that. The building of EJCHS was designed, in part, to send a message to Commerce and say: “Look at us now!” And it was the politics held over from the 1950s-1970s that led the county system to build EJCHS rather than a new high school on the west side of Jackson County where the real population growth has taken place. Venting pent up emotions from the past 50 years was the key driving force in the EJCHS decision, not population density or logic.
But not all of the consequences of the merger debate were bad. Because of the pressure of funding an independent school system, Jefferson leaders got very aggressive in the 1980s and 1990s in annexing to I-85 and extending infrastructure. That has paid off over the years after the area became an industrial development magnet, providing jobs to many area citizens in addition to funding Jefferson’s government. Without that financial pressure on the schools, however, it’s doubtful that Jefferson leaders would have been so aggressive in that development and those industrial projects would have gone elsewhere.
And the competition between the three school systems has been good from an educational perspective. It has driven school leaders at all the systems to reach higher and to strive for greater achievement, a pressure that likely would not exist were all the schools under one system. To an extent, we have real education competition in Jackson County and that’s not all bad.
In a broader sense, the school merger issue was the most important political issue in Jackson County from 1969-1995. That one issue had a lot of other political impacts that I didn’t touch on in these articles. Directly or indirectly, the school merger debate drove every other political issue in the community during those decades.
In many ways, the Jackson County we know today was formed in the cauldron of that hot debate. At times, it divided the county politically and socially; at other times, however, it forced us to think beyond our own provincial concerns and more about the larger role of education in the community. And in the process of all of that, the merger debate cultivated leadership in the county on all sides, people who continue even now to play a role in the county’s political arena.
Also in the process of all the debate, there were some displays of great personal conviction and courage, men (and some women) who did what they thought was right for all of Jackson County’s children, a stand that sometimes cost them friendships and for which they took much public abuse. On the other hand, there were also great displays of arrogance by officials who cared little for the overall education in Jackson County and who were only concerned about their own little kingdoms. And there were many instances of bungling and blindness, people who dithered and dawdled and who wouldn’t take a stand, or who were in the wrong position at the wrong time.
As for “blame,” there’s enough of that shared by all the parties involved. It was shameful that county school leaders neglected their responsibility and allowed JCHS in Braselton to be an academic backwater for so many decades and that they ceded responsibility for many other students within their domain. Until the mid-1970s, the county school system was little more than a weak puppet of the two city systems.
But it was also shameful that Jefferson schools were run autocratically for so many years, shutting out public input and enveloping itself in secrecy. In the 1980s, it was shameful that Jefferson leaders forced county students to attend JHS where their parents didn’t pay taxes or have any representation. As for Commerce, the lack of courage by school leaders in 1979 when the school had a chance to merge with the county system was a huge blunder. The Commerce School System has paid the price for that political cowardice ever since.
Over the last six weeks, I’ve written about the history of the three school systems in Jackson County. But even with that amount of ink, I’ve had to gloss over many details for space reasons. For one thing, I didn’t use names in the articles to keep the confusion down — the articles would have read like a Russian novel otherwise. But that is not to minimize the very real role individuals played in that debate. There were a lot of very strong personalities involved and those personal relationships — good and bad — did play a large role in the various disputes and debates.
Whatever one’s feelings about school merger, it isn’t an issue today in Jackson County and probably won’t be unless the state someday mandates unification. There is more or less educational parity today among the system’s three school systems and they are no longer entangled in the courts or with each other. It’s difficult to see any voluntary situation under which the three systems would ever agree to merge.
Each school system in Jackson County is now free to succeed or fail on its own merits. And that is what a lot of people really wanted all along, anyway.
Mike Buffington is editor of The Jackson Herald. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.
So by 1991, when the last serious effort toward merger was made, there was a lot of sentiment to just leave the issue alone. In fact, two of the main reasons for merger had been settled by then.
One reason for merging had been to consolidate school facilities and administration to save money. But by 1990, so much money had already been spent on school facilities that any savings seemed like a pipe dream. In addition, the move toward building bigger high schools was no longer in vogue as it was in the 1970s and 1980s; smaller schools were seen as a better alternative. Finally, by 1990, school systems had become bureaucratic and top-heavy from the mid-1980s state QBE rules — consolidating administrative expenses no longer seemed as attractive as it once did because few administrative jobs would have been eliminated.
The second original reason for pushing a school merger — to provide equal education opportunity for all students in the county — was also mostly resolved. Once an academically poor achieving school, Jackson County High School had by 1990 began to pull out of its years of academic neglect. It had moved to Jefferson in 1979 and had slowly climbed up to a level of modest academic success.
With those two concerns mostly resolved, why was school merger even an issue in 1991?
Because a new issue had come up. After the courts washed their hands of Jackson County’s school litigation issues in 1986, both Jefferson and Commerce had begun annexing land in a bid to grow their tax base to fund their small, independent school systems.
But that annexation came at the expense of the county school systems, effectively shrinking its tax base in the process. Every acre annexed into Jefferson or Commerce took that land away from the county school tax base.
Merger still seemed like the only solution, so the idea hung around, hitting the headlines every time one of the towns annexed more property. I was involved with 65 other people in 1991 in trying to merge the systems to resolve that issue, but our efforts failed when the state legislator who had promised to move on the idea backed out at the last minute due to the intense political pressures involved.
But in 1995, that complex annexation issue was resolved without merger. The chairman of Jefferson’s Board of Education and the superintendent of the county school system worked out a formula to share annexed property taxes once the per student tax base in the systems were equalized. Just like that, the annexation issue died, and with it the merger issue evaporated. After 1995, no serious movements toward school merger have happened. Each school system has pursued its own course independent of each other.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t lingering aspects of all those years of dispute. For example, one of the reasons the county school system made East Jackson Comprehensive High School the “Taj Mahal” of local school buildings was in part to thumb its nose at the Commerce School System. County students in East Jackson had been forced to attend Commerce High School from the 1950s to 1979 and many students and parents resented that. The building of EJCHS was designed, in part, to send a message to Commerce and say: “Look at us now!” And it was the politics held over from the 1950s-1970s that led the county system to build EJCHS rather than a new high school on the west side of Jackson County where the real population growth has taken place. Venting pent up emotions from the past 50 years was the key driving force in the EJCHS decision, not population density or logic.
But not all of the consequences of the merger debate were bad. Because of the pressure of funding an independent school system, Jefferson leaders got very aggressive in the 1980s and 1990s in annexing to I-85 and extending infrastructure. That has paid off over the years after the area became an industrial development magnet, providing jobs to many area citizens in addition to funding Jefferson’s government. Without that financial pressure on the schools, however, it’s doubtful that Jefferson leaders would have been so aggressive in that development and those industrial projects would have gone elsewhere.
And the competition between the three school systems has been good from an educational perspective. It has driven school leaders at all the systems to reach higher and to strive for greater achievement, a pressure that likely would not exist were all the schools under one system. To an extent, we have real education competition in Jackson County and that’s not all bad.
In a broader sense, the school merger issue was the most important political issue in Jackson County from 1969-1995. That one issue had a lot of other political impacts that I didn’t touch on in these articles. Directly or indirectly, the school merger debate drove every other political issue in the community during those decades.
In many ways, the Jackson County we know today was formed in the cauldron of that hot debate. At times, it divided the county politically and socially; at other times, however, it forced us to think beyond our own provincial concerns and more about the larger role of education in the community. And in the process of all of that, the merger debate cultivated leadership in the county on all sides, people who continue even now to play a role in the county’s political arena.
Also in the process of all the debate, there were some displays of great personal conviction and courage, men (and some women) who did what they thought was right for all of Jackson County’s children, a stand that sometimes cost them friendships and for which they took much public abuse. On the other hand, there were also great displays of arrogance by officials who cared little for the overall education in Jackson County and who were only concerned about their own little kingdoms. And there were many instances of bungling and blindness, people who dithered and dawdled and who wouldn’t take a stand, or who were in the wrong position at the wrong time.
As for “blame,” there’s enough of that shared by all the parties involved. It was shameful that county school leaders neglected their responsibility and allowed JCHS in Braselton to be an academic backwater for so many decades and that they ceded responsibility for many other students within their domain. Until the mid-1970s, the county school system was little more than a weak puppet of the two city systems.
But it was also shameful that Jefferson schools were run autocratically for so many years, shutting out public input and enveloping itself in secrecy. In the 1980s, it was shameful that Jefferson leaders forced county students to attend JHS where their parents didn’t pay taxes or have any representation. As for Commerce, the lack of courage by school leaders in 1979 when the school had a chance to merge with the county system was a huge blunder. The Commerce School System has paid the price for that political cowardice ever since.
Over the last six weeks, I’ve written about the history of the three school systems in Jackson County. But even with that amount of ink, I’ve had to gloss over many details for space reasons. For one thing, I didn’t use names in the articles to keep the confusion down — the articles would have read like a Russian novel otherwise. But that is not to minimize the very real role individuals played in that debate. There were a lot of very strong personalities involved and those personal relationships — good and bad — did play a large role in the various disputes and debates.
Whatever one’s feelings about school merger, it isn’t an issue today in Jackson County and probably won’t be unless the state someday mandates unification. There is more or less educational parity today among the system’s three school systems and they are no longer entangled in the courts or with each other. It’s difficult to see any voluntary situation under which the three systems would ever agree to merge.
Each school system in Jackson County is now free to succeed or fail on its own merits. And that is what a lot of people really wanted all along, anyway.
Mike Buffington is editor of The Jackson Herald. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.
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