One reason is that it is the latest educational fad. The state education department is notorious for wasting money chasing after the latest hot but untested trend.

This website is rapidly filling out with robust, hard evidence showing that a school merger is a bad idea. There is a strong likelihood that student opportunities and achievements, as well as community vitality, will be damaged by a merger. So why, then, are the schools so intent on forcing through a merger? One reason: it is the latest cool fad.

New York State public schools have experienced many of these fads over the last few decades. From the “New Compact on Learning” through the “Common Core,” and including many smaller initiatives like the endlessly swinging pendulum lurching between phonics and whole language reading; the educational establishment is always falling for the nonexistent quick-and-easy fix. School mergers are simply New York’s latest go at magical thinking.

Author Rick Hess, in an October 2019 Education Week article “Five Signs Your Reform has become Another Education Fad,” could be describing the current merger mania in pointing to an onslaught of expensive consultants, ubiquity in media, and a bevy of eager early adopters. Here’s the evidence.

As soon as our schools started pursuing a merger, educational consultants started earning tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money for doing “studies” whose only purpose is to convince voters that a school merger isn’t the disaster for students and communities that the research predicts. The 2025 Merger Feasibility Study cost more than $70,000; and both districts are now paying thousands more for a “financial study”; again, for the purpose of fooling voters into thinking that a school merger will save them in future tax dollars. The actual research on school mergers says different.

We also have the predicted media frenzy. Do a Google search, and you will find dozens of articles, breathlessly informing us that schools (including ours) are in crisis and need to merge, all without a shred of actual evidence. At the same time, our local education “leaders” are obsessed with being heroic early adopters, while ignoring all of the negative evidence urging caution before merging schools.

A current local example perfectly illustrates this phenomenon. A few years ago, our brilliant local educational leaders jumped on a bandwagon that, amazingly, held that what young children need is more screen time. All children from Kindergarten on receive Chromebooks, and teachers are required to have kids use them. What!? Never mind the extensive research on the damage that screen time does to young children. It became the hot fad, so our leaders said: “we got to get ourselves some of them there Chromebook things.”

Following the fad is never a good thing for students. See this article from the Fraser Institute on turning students into guinea pigs. Don’t turn our students, or our communities, into guinea pigs. Don’t believe the school officials, or their expensive consultants, when they say: “we got to get ourselves some of that merger stuff!”