Rebecca Healy has been a science teacher in the Morrisville-Eaton Central School District for 21 years and has watched successive rounds of spending cuts gut the two schools in this proud, tight-knit community.
“We don’t have electives anymore. We haven’t had AP courses since the early 2000s. We used to have enrichment classes and reading programs, but they all had to be cut, and now we’re just down to bare bones,” said Healy, president of the Morrisville-Eaton Faculty Association.
Declining enrollments and a shrinking tax base forced the small, rural district to cut everything that wasn’t essential, she said. Now Healy and her colleagues are instructing middle and high schoolers and worrying that their students aren’t getting an education comparable to students in surrounding communities.
“I used to teach four sections of seventh graders. Now I teach six periods a day, including a physics class. I’m not certified in physics, but there wasn’t anyone else who could do it,” Healy said.
Healy said kids are being shortchanged, and educators are running themselves ragged. “It is such a nice community, but I just feel like that’s all falling apart.”
She is hoping a proposed merger with neighboring Cazenovia Central School District could be the solution. The two districts approved a resolution in September 2024 to conduct a feasibility study on a potential merger after an invitation from Morrisville-Eaton. “I see it as a kind of ladder out of the hole,” Healy said.
The proposed merger with Cazenovia represents a win-win, she said. The state aid that comes with mergers could restore programming and help boost teacher pay, Healy said, and she has been assured by her superintendent that Morrisville-Eaton jobs would be safe. “That’s how I’ve been selling it to my members,” she said.
Once consigned to the realm of private industry, mergers and consolidations are increasingly becoming bywords in the world of education, as more school districts try to deal with the one-two punch of tapering enrollments and vanishing revenue through massive district reorganizations.
School districts can reorganize in four distinct ways: annexation, centralization, consolidation and dissolution, and the approach is determined largely by the type of districts involved: city, union free, central or common.
Recent changes to a New York statute mean increased reorganization incentive aid is available for districts that do combine, and that’s impelling more districts to weigh potential risks and benefits of reorganizations.
“It seems like every corner of the state is encouraging us to figure out what we can do to share, and I think it’s only a matter of time, especially if the state aid stagnates, before we have to start taking a really, really close look at that,” said John Cain, president of the Copenhagen Teachers Association and chair of NYSUT’s Small and Rural Locals Advisory Council.
The council took up the topic during its latest meeting in November, and presidents of small local unions discussed their experience with these shake-ups, as well as the unique pressures small districts face. Small, rural districts are often dogged by limited resources, and that, combined with geographic isolation and workforce shortages, drive many to explore mergers, Cain said.
Education is an economy of scale, and it favors larger, high-density schools because when costs are spread across more students, programming becomes cheaper, he explained.
Contrast that with a more rural school: “We have districts in our area that have one classroom per grade level and might have one high school history teacher and one high school English teacher that are responsible for all of 9 through 12,” said Cain. “That’s tough to sustain as the costs of everything continue to go up and up, like diesel fuel for our buses and heating oil. We’re going to see it with the districts that are smallest and the most rural before we see it anywhere else.”
New York school districts are also contending with declining birthrates, which is expected to increase pressure to consolidate. According to a 2024 report by Cornell University, the state’s population could shrink by as much as 13 percent, or nearly 2 million people, over the next 25 years due to low-fertility rates and aging. The number of children, ages 0-17, is expected to decline between 10 and 25 percent during that same period.
Canajoharie Central School District and Fort Plain Central School District, which are located about an hour west of Albany, are exploring a proposal to merge, or centralize, their two rural districts this year.
“I think it's important that these districts continue to survive,” said Rob Jenks, president of the Fort Plain TA. “The best way of doing that, and helping our students, is to merge.”
The proposal will be up for an informal ‘straw vote’ in June 2026, after the initiative was rejected by voters last March.
When the merger went down last spring, a special committee was convened to determine whether the districts should continue to consider the merger. The committee decided that, based on probable state and federal budget shortfalls, continued loss of programming, and ongoing difficulties recruiting qualified employees, it only made sense to reintroduce the measure for another vote in a year.
Jenks believes more education this time around will make a difference. “I just think that they didn't get enough information out to the community in order for people to want to vote yes on it,” he said.
When a school district is centralized, a new school district is created that encompasses the entire area of the merged districts. Teachers in the old school districts become employees in the newly formed district, with preference given to the most senior teaching personnel, and laid off teachers are added to a preferred eligible list for seven years, which gives them priority for rehire within their tenure area.
If the measure is successfully passed this time around, Jenks said he worries about the newer teachers, who make up about 25 percent of his membership; at the same time, 15 percent of his members are within five years of retirement.
“I think you always worry about your new teachers, the ones just starting out,” said Jenks. The districts have said that all four buildings would remain open, although they might be repurposed for different grades, he said. “That’s what they’re saying, but obviously, we have to wait and see.”
Timothy Field, co-president of the Canajoharie United School Employees TA, was also positive about the potential Canajoharie – Fort Plain centralization, citing the anticipated erosion of programming if voters insist on going it alone. “It’s not that we’re in rough financial straits; it’s that we’re not going to be able to offer as much to students if we don’t merge,” Field said.
Field is confident that Canajoharie jobs are safe. “I don’t think we’re going to lose anyone. I think we’re going to be able to keep everyone on board,” he said. Natural attrition and opportunities for team teaching will help smooth out overlapping roles in the short-term, he said, but of course, they won’t have specifics until the process is further along. “Those are the details that are difficult to figure out until you’re actually constructing the new district.”
Last spring, the Wynantskill Union Free School District and Troy City School District merged their athletic programs, because Wynantskill students wanted access to more sports and extracurriculars. “That was kind of like a first step,” said Kaelyn Madelone, a first-grade teacher and president of the Wynantskill TA. “It didn’t mean we were merging districts or anything, but it was like, ‘Let’s try this out.’”
The Wynantskill district comprises one building, Gardner-Dickinson School, which encompasses pre-K through 8. In recent years, declining enrollments and mounting costs have been putting increasing pressure on the school. “When I first started there, we had close to 500 students and now we're down to 300,” said Madelone.
Finally, this August, Wynantskill and Troy agreed to do a feasibility study, which is the first official step in a reorganization process. The study results will be shared with the community and then district residents will vote on whether to move forward with the measure.
If voters ultimately pass the measure, Wynantskill will be annexed to Troy, and its territory will be added to the Troy CSD. The Troy superintendent and school board have already announced their intention to keep the Gardner-Dickinson School open, and its employees intact, Madelone said.
“Initially, it was heartbreaking, honestly. When you work in a small district, you wear a lot of hats and you’re just putting your heart into the building, and then, to find out that it’s not really going to be ours anymore, that was heartbreaking,” Madelone said.
However, Madelone’s attitude changed when she learned how much her students would benefit.
“The kids would get so many more programs, so many more opportunities than we could ever hope to have at our little school with the budget that we have,” said Madelone.
The newly reorganized district stands to receive a total of $241 million in state funding, and any outstanding debt would be recalculated at Troy’s building aid ratio.
With advantages like that in the balance, Wynantskill TA held a vote on the annexation; 97 percent of members voted to support the move.
“My biggest piece of advice: figure out what your members want to do and make sure that you stick together, because then that's going to make your voice more powerful in the whole situation,” said Madelone.