Enrollments and governance must be priorities in Region One ‘organizational study’

As a longtime observer of local politics and Northwest Corner demographics, I was interested to see Patrick Sullivan’s June 1 story reporting that the Region One Board of Education had voted recently “to move forward with a broad organizational study that could shape the future of education in the Northwest Corner.”

“The purpose of this organizational study is to evaluate the Region’s K–8 structure to ensure long-term educational excellence, equity, and fiscal sustainability,” Region One Superintendent Melony Brady-Shanley told The Journal.

In an earlier interview with the Journal, Brady-Shanley emphasized that no decisions have been made, but confirmed that the study could include discussions about regionalization and potential school consolidation — contentious subjects for years among Region One towns.

It is a subject that I’ve been keenly interested in for some time. I covered Region One, the first regional school district in New England, for nearly four years as a reporter for this newspaper, and my wife and I had two children who happily attended the district’s schools before moving on to four-year colleges.

But if you’ve been paying attention, you know that Region One’s enrollment numbers have been on a downward trajectory for more than three decades — not because of the quality of the educational product, but as a result of regionwide demographic trends that pose significant challenges for the future of Region One and districts like it.

In the last 20 years alone, the declines have been staggering. As of October 2007, Housatonic Valley Regional High School reported having 561 students. Going back even farther, the late former Housatonic Valley Regional High School principal and beloved local historian Ed Kirby told the Republican American newspaper that in the 1970s, there were approximately 780 students attending the school.

At the end of the 2024-25 school year, there were 316 and only 300 in 2025-26. According to the New England School Development Council, enrollment is expected to drop to 284 by the 2029–30 school year. To be fair, NESDEC’s predictions aren’t always spot-on. Still, it’s safe to say that there will be fewer bodies in the classrooms of our community’s high school in four years and that, as a result, per-student costs will continue to rise accordingly.

The situation is largely the same among the K-8 schools in the district’s six towns. Twenty years ago, Region One’s two smallest schools, Lee Kellogg in Falls Village and Cornwall Consolidated, had 101 and 129 students respectively.

As recently as 1998, Cornwall had nearly 200. This year Cornwall had 85 and Kellogg 69. In June, Kellogg graduated an 8th-grade class of two students. Yes, that’s a “2” with no zeroes. NESDEC forecasts some modest gains for those schools next year, but the long-term outlook remains bleak.

And it’s not just in our corner of our state. According to a recent CT Insider analysis of state Department of Education data, public school enrollment in Connecticut is at its lowest in at least 20 years, even as the number of high-needs and special-education students has risen over the same period of time. Consequently, much of the savings that could have been achieved through lower enrollments are offset by the rising expenses of educating these higher-need students, either on-campus or at pricey out-of-district private schools.

The drop in enrollment here in the Northwest Corner has been steeper for a host of reasons. We share the typical causes for declining enrollments here in Connecticut and elsewhere in New England: lower birth rates, high housing costs and a growing interest in nontraditional schooling in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

So as we ponder what to do about this crisis — and I don’t think it’s too strong a word — what should the Region One Board of Education consider as it conducts this organizational study?

The first obvious step would be closing or consolidating the K-8 schools with the smallest enrollments. At the low end is the Kellogg School. The aging building on Main Street was built in the 1950s and was renovated in both the 70s and 90s.

It would make sense to close that school and bus its students six miles or so down Route 7 to Cornwall, which has a much more modern building and plenty of excess capacity. Or some of the Falls Village students could be bused to North Canaan, which would be a shorter bus ride for some of the Kellogg students. These towns could form a new K-8 school district or Falls Village could simply tuition its students into the other towns. The former arrangement would allow Falls Villagers at least some representation on the new school board.

Unfortunately, my experience covering the town for this newspaper from 2005 to 2008 makes me highly skeptical that Falls Villagers would ever approve of such a plan.

In letters to the editor and in public statements on social media, they have largely resisted any arrangement that would result in the closing of their beloved but tiny school, which I recall 20 years ago was the most expensive comprehensive public school in the state (as of the 2024-25 school year, Sharon Center School was the leader at $48,747 per student). Cornwall, which is nearly as expensive, would surely welcome the Falls Village students and the revenue they would bring with them.

Newcomers to the region might wonder why the Region One Board couldn’t simply close one of the schools and reassign its students, or at least put the matter to a district-wide referendum. This points to a barrier in the way the district is organized.

Most regional school districts in Connecticut are fully regionalized, meaning that all the schools within the district’s borders are governed by the same board of education. A few, including Region One and Region 7, have high schools and services such as special education that are fully regionalized, but beyond that, the individual town elementary schools are left to govern themselves.

As the Region One website acknowledges, “Each of the towns in the region (Falls Village/Canaan, Cornwall, Kent, North Canaan, Salisbury/Lakeville, and Sharon) has its own K-8 elementary school governed by an autonomous board of education.”

This arrangement is virtually unheard of in any of the other states I have lived in or worked in as a journalist. The late Jack Mahoney, a Massachusetts native who led Housatonic as principal for a dozen years, once told me of this decentralized structure, “Ours is the most expensive way to do it.”

Each of Region One’s six K-8 schools have their own paid clerks for their local boards of education. Their budgets are prepared and reviewed independent of Region One, and approved or rejected by town residents in separate votes. Some, including Salisbury Central, even have on-staff specialists who manage the K-8 schools’ finances.

In a fully regionalized regional school district, such as the newly formed Region 20 in Litchfield, budgets, board functions and financial staff for individual schools are overseen by a single board of education at the regional level, thereby reducing redundancies and streamlining operations.

For example, 30 years ago when the fully regionalized Webutuck Central School District still operated two small elementary schools in Millerton and Amenia, NY, those two schools eventually shared a single building principal who split her time between the two locations. That kind of cost-saving arrangement is all but impossible in a region split into six separate K-8 districts.

Our current hyper-localized arrangement not only equates to higher taxes for residents, but it renders Region One essentially powerless to consolidate low-enrollment schools and become more efficient.

Finally, in its organizational study, the Region One Board of Education might want to take another look at how the district is funded on the local level. For as long as anyone can remember, taxes needed to fund the regional school district have been assessed against individual towns based almost entirely on the number of students they had enrolled in the high school during the previous school year.

One Falls Village resident so objected to this method of taxation that she filed a lawsuit, insisting that it unfairly punishes less wealthy towns. In 2000, former Falls Village First Selectman Gabriel Seymour unsuccessfully sued the Region One Board of Education over its per-student method of taxing member towns.

Residents and public officials in North Canaan have long complained that their town carries the highest burden for funding Region One simply because it sends the most students, while much wealthier Salisbury has a roughly 30% higher population but sends fewer students to Housatonic and, consequently, pays a significantly smaller share of the Region One budget than North Canaan.

The Region One board certainly has a laborious task in front of it. It will be hard work that will surely include lots of public input. The only certainty is that no one will like every aspect of the final product.

Terry Cowgill is a resident of the Lakeville section of Salisbury.