A friend of mine worked for 30 years as a teacher in kindergarten and first grade in public schools in a suburb in Québec, Canada. The school gave her a budget for school supplies (I guess this was budgeted by the school board and then allocated to classes by the individual school). It wasn’t nearly enough, and every year she would end up buying additional supplies out of her own pocket. All public school teachers are unionised, and we’ve had teachers’ strikes every few years for as long as I can remember. Clearly this wasn’t high on the list of the union’s priorities.
It isn’t. And believe me, the trustees heard us. I’m just replying to the suggestion that the mayor, the city councilors, or anybody else could do something if we yelled at them loud enough.
I know it comes as a surprise to a lot of Ohioans, even teachers, to learn that there are no city school districts in Ohio. Even though you’ll have a school district called, say, the Lakewood City School District, and the set of students they serve is exactly the set of children of the appropriate age who live in the city of Lakewood, the school district and the city government are completely unconnected.
I suspect that, in practice, most mayors can exert some level of influence over the school districts that correspond to their cities, if only just that they know the right people, and those people will answer the phone when they call. But they don’t have any direct, official control.
Cities are able to set tax policies that affect school funding, and I’m not exactly sure how that works, though.
Around here, local governments (cities and counties) can set up what’s called Tax Increment Financing to help finance new business development by using the increased property taxes from those developments. School districts hate it because, for example, while the city gets a shiny new strip mall or condo development, the school district still only gets the equivalent of the property tax from the run-down neighborhood that was bulldozed for the new developments.
School board members or district officials (along with library, parks, and other independent districts that get their revenues from property taxes) regularly testify at the hearings for those TIF authorizations, and their objections are regularly ignored.
One year in high school – can’t remember which one – the teachers went on strike; school started three or four weeks late that year. By the time it was over, the teachers were in front of the school with their picket signs, and students were across the street picketing the teachers.
Illinois, early '70s.
For someone who attended public schools from K thru law school in Chicago/IL, the OP was - uh - surprising. Seemed like every other year from K on up it was a question of whether the teachers would go on strike or not. And, here in IL, teachers’ negotiated pensions are but one component contributing to the state’s horrific financial situation.
A pretty blatant example of how one’s perspective can be drastically affected by where/when one grew up.
I grew up going to school in Toronto, and I assumed it was normal for students to have to supply their own notebooks, pens and pencils, etc. There were a few things like the activity stuff in lower grades (i.e. construction paper, craft supplies) which I assume the school supplied, but the list of required supplies usually included (If I remember correctly) things like glue, crayons, ruler, scissors etc.) The problem as I understand is that there are some places where the families cannot afford these things.
I was under the impression that in generally every place the school board is disconnected from the municipal government. Some provinces, the municipality’s responsibility includes collecting property taxes, which include a school board set levy which the city cannot control but irate taxpayers associate with the city government.
Because the governments are in a habit of amalgamating municipalities, often the school board does not match the municipality - but then, provinces are in a habit of amalgamating school boards too, since this will (theoretically, of course) reduce administrative overhead.
I grew up going to school in Toronto too, and the school supplied everything. Pencils, pens, notebooks, art supplies, everything. So did my sister, who has kids, and was shocked to find that she was expected to foot the bill for school supplies in Calgary.
We had to supply our own notebooks etc. in high school, but not until then.
Adding to the confusion is that it’s not a given that the two will have the same boundaries. The Columbus City School District is drastically different from the city of Columbus, taking in some unincorporated areas and leaving out large outlying portions of the city.
I’m sure that’s the case in most of the US but in a number of cities, the mayor controls the schools either by appointing all or a majority of the school board members , by directly appointing the head of the school system ( CEO, chancellor, superintendent) or both. NYC and Chicago are currently the largest cities with mayoral control , although Chicago is changing to an elected school board. These places naturally have school district boundaries that align with the city in question, as there would be legal issues with the mayor of a city controlling a district that included separate municipalities whose residents had no voice in electing that mayor.
It’s pretty much a given that Columbus would be an unusual case, since within living memory the city absorbed most of its suburbs (this is how it ended up being the largest municipality in Ohio, despite not being the largest metropolitan area). Those outlying school districts probably were once coterminous with cities of the same name, before the cities got absorbed.
There are also cases in the Cleveland area (and probably plenty of other places in the state) where a municipality is too small to have its own school district, and so is merged into the same district with a neighboring city (students in Lyndale, for instance, an incorporated group of highwaymen, go to school in the Brooklyn district).
And cities and school districts being distinct may well be common elsewhere; I can only speak to Ohio.
The cities still exist. It’s just that they were stoplights with a grain silo when the school district boundaries were drawn. And then the state allowed cities to annex land without changing the school district boundaries in 1955 (a year after Brown v. Board, which I’m sure was totally coincidental), so as Columbus gobbled up rural land for suburban development, the boundaries stayed as they were.
Maybe. I just remember the list of required items every kid had to bring to school. Maybe we did get school-issued notebooks in the first few grades, but I can’t say for sure. When you’re 6 years old, these things just magically appear.
In California, cities and school districts are distinct and may or may not coincide exactly.
Fremont Unified School District covers exactly the city of Fremont.
New Haven Unified School District covers all of the city of Union City and part of the city of Hayward.
San Jose Unified School District covers only a part of the city of San Jose.
Just some local examples I’m familiar with.
The Normandy School District in Missouri includes 23 separate municipalities and an unincorporated chunk of St. Louis County. Of course, the District was organized in 1894 and a bunch of the municipalities weren’t even founded until after World War II.
The moral of the story is that with 50 states, 10 provinces, and federal, territorial, and even native reserves and two hundred or more years of history and evolution of administrative machinery, affected by assorted political machinations - anything and everything can happen with the educational systems of North America.
Every damn school district in California is named “such and such Unified School District”. Santa Clara, Folsom-Cordova, Sacramento City, etc. They obviously no longer have anything to do with their original boundaries. Seems like there must have been some phase where it was popular to merge districts (maybe to save admin costs?).
The Santa Barbara Unified School District is the City of Santa Barbara, the City of Goleta and a bunch of unincorporated Santa Barbara County land between the two cities.
California’s “unified school districts” are a combination of an elementary (K-8) school district and a high school district. If the districts haven’t been unified, there will be several elementary school districts overlapped by a single high school district.