Editor's note: This story was originally published in the Belleville News-Democrat.
Madison School District 12 and Venice School District 3 began discussing a proposal to consolidate during special meetings each board of education held Wednesday evening.
At the meetings, local education officials gave a presentation on the benefits of a potential merger to the two Madison County school boards and community members.
Madison District 12 is a pre-K through 12th grade district with an elementary school and combined junior high and high school. Its enrollment was about 675 at the end of the 2023-24 school year.
Venice District 3 is a pre-K through eighth grade district consisting of an elementary school that enrolled about 67 students at the end of the 2023-24 school year. It is currently building a new school to serve up to 160 students with a $26 million emergency construction grant from the state after the former school was condemned in 2020 due to structural issues.
Venice High School closed in 2004 with an enrollment of 58 after a voter referendum, according to past BND reporting.
Now, when Venice Elementary students graduate from eighth grade, they go on to either Madison Senior High School, East St. Louis Senior High School or Lovejoy Technology Academy, the high school in Brooklyn District 188. Venice 3 pays the tuition for those students to attend the high schools.
Ed Hightower, who was superintendent at Edwardsville District 7 for 19 years, is serving as an owner’s representative and project manager for Venice 3 as it builds its new school, which is part of a larger economic revitalization plan that includes a grocery store, health care clinic, a career and technical education center, 40 affordable homes and a funeral home. He is serving in a similar role for Cahokia District 187, which is constructing a new high school.
“We are here to help you develop a long-term plan that will benefit the students, the communities of Madison and Venice. That’s our goal,” Hightower said at the Madison 12 board meeting Wednesday.
According to Hightower, the benefits of consolidation for Madison 12 and Venice 3 include:
- Pooling resources and enhancing academic, athletic and performing arts programs
- Increasing financial stability for the districts by reducing administrative costs, streamlining operations, increasing state funding and expanding the tax base to provide greater borrowing capacity
- Enhancing funding for ongoing health and life safety repairs and other upgrades to school facilities (Madison 12 has nearly $2.2 million in health/life safety repairs in its two school buildings currently, according to the district. That total does not include facility costs for improving course offerings or other opportunities for students.)
- Better allocating the area’s student population and ensuring the new Venice Elementary is serving as many students as intended
- Creating a “vertical approach” to keep students in the local area
Hightower said he would be a consultant for both school boards for free, working closely with Madison County Regional Superintendent Robert Werden and legal counsel throughout the two-year consolidation process if it moves forward.
Following the Wednesday meetings, the seven-member school boards will decide whether they want to move forward with the proposal. Four of the seven members on each board must be interested for discussions to continue.
At the meetings, attorney Barney Mundorf, who represents both Madison 12 and Venice 3, and Werden outlined the legal requirements for a consolidation and what the timeline for the two districts would be if they decide to pursue it.
“This isn’t the first time school districts have considered and moved forward with consolidation. We’re not recreating the wheel,” Mundorf said.
If both of the school boards decide to continue, then each would need to approve resolutions at their August meetings to file petitions to consolidate to Werden.
Werden would then schedule public hearings to allow for public testimony on the petitions and publish notice of the hearings at least once a week for three successive weeks.
Within 14 days of the hearings, Werden would then either approve or deny the petitions. If he approves, then the petitions and all evidence would be sent to State Superintendent of Education Tony Sanders, who would have to approve or deny them within 21 days.
Generally, when two school boards approve a consolidation, “it’s almost a given” that the regional superintendent and state superintendent would also approve it, Mundorf said.
If Sanders approves the petitions, then the consolidation proposal would go on the April 2025 election ballot. For the referendum to pass, a majority of voters in each of the school districts would need to vote in favor of the consolidation.
Is the referendum passes, the Madison and Venice school districts would continue to operate independently in the 2025-26 school year and then officially merge for the 2026-27 school year.
A handful of community members attended the Madison 12 board meeting and about 20 to 30 people attended the Venice 3 meeting.
Questions from members of both boards and the public included whether facility improvements in Madison 12 are contingent upon consolidation, why the districts’ boundaries couldn’t be changed to allow students living in a northern area of Venice to be within Venice 3 again (the boundaries had been changed in the past for those students to attend Madison 12 schools), and whether there would be teacher layoffs.
According to Illinois law, certified teachers would be guaranteed a job in the consolidated district, Mundorf said.
In response to the question about changing the school districts’ boundaries, state law now makes it much more difficult to change school district boundaries than it was in the past, Werden said.
At both meetings, Werden said he’s avoided “the C word” — consolidation — until recently.
“But something has changed,” Werden said at the Madison 12 board meeting.
“People are setting aside past differences. They’re looking out for what’s best for the kids and what’s best for the future of this community. And that I applaud you for because … this is vision. This is what you’re having, a vision for the future.”
Past school district consolidations
Consolidations are one type of school district reorganization, which are governed by the Illinois School Code.
There have been five school district reorganizations in the metro-east between the 1983-84 and 2023-24 school years, according to a list from the state. Four of them were annexations.
The most recent metro-east school district reorganization was in 2015, when Hoyleton District 29 dissolved and was annexed to Nashville District 49 in Washington County.
The number of school districts in Illinois decreased by 15.5% – from 1,008 to 852 – from fiscal year 1984 to 2023, according to the state.
Kelly Smits is a reporter with the Belleville News-Democrat, a news partner of St. Louis Public Radio.
