With districts locked in, consolidation is out

The exchange of letters in the past six months between the school boards in Carlton and Wrenshall — to find common ground in consolidation talks — reached an icy end this week.

Carlton Superintendent Gwen Carman says her district is moving on.

Wrenshall Superintendent Kim Belcastro said her district is holding firm that any consolidation must include a school in Wrenshall. The district has often suggested keeping the elementary school in Carlton and retrofitting the Wrenshall school for the upper grades.

During a special meeting scheduled for Wednesday night but likely canceled due to the winter weather, the Wrenshall board was expected to approve a letter to the Carlton board reiterating its demand. A third bond referendum on making improvements at the school was also on the agenda.

“Our letter is staying put on the two-site option,” Belcastro said. “We’ve stated it already and we’re stating it again.”

Carman said news last week from the Wrenshall regular board meeting — about its continued firm stance and plans to ask for a referendum — put the writing on the wall considering consolidation talks.

She said her district simply wanted an agreement on “a process” to move forward, one that could have included a neutral facilitator to guide the negotiations.

“Our assumption is they are not interested,” Carman said. She wrote a lengthy column on Carlton’s position that can be found in today’s Pine Knot News opinion pages.

“Now that it is clearly established that the Wrenshall Board is not interested in developing a consolidation plan with Carlton,” Carman wrote, “the Carlton School Board will actively pursue in the upcoming weeks other options to best accomplish the goals of the success of students and a fiscally responsible plan for taxpayers.”

Those options include sharing programs with other districts or even a consolidation, Carman said in an interview with the Pine Knot News.

“We’ll see if there are other creative arrangements,” she said. “It’s not exclusively Wrenshall. We neighbor a lot of other school districts.”

Belcastro simply said “That’s OK,” when she heard that Carlton was moving on. She said the demand for a school in Wrenshall won’t change.

In the series of letters that began between the districts in September, the Wrenshall board said it was leery of more talks, and costs, that could go nowhere. It wanted an assurance that a school would remain in Wrenshall. The Carlton board did not explicitly agree to that demand, and unsuccessfully asked to simply see where talks would take the two boards. Carlton led a community conversation about district needs last year and residents urged more talk about consolidation.

Both districts have faced financial challenges in past decades, as two of the smallest districts in the state in terms of enrollment. Consolidation has been discussed, without much headway, since the early 1960s. In that time, scores of similarly challenged districts across the state have consolidated with neighbors either fully or through sports programs. Currently the two schools pair and share on a cross-country team.

Wrenshall residents have historically been the most opposed to consolidation and losing their school, and identity, to the county seat. Both districts have had chronic trouble getting referendums approved to make upgrades at their facilities, with each pulling themselves out of state-regulated statutory operating debt when fund balances went into the red.