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For editorial information,
contact Karon Schaack at karon.schaack@state.sd.us.

It is the policy of the Department of Education and Cultural Affairs to provide services to all persons, without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, disability, ancestry, or national origin, in accordance with federal and state laws.

Doing More with Less

As we look ahead to our educational future in South Dakota, it is clear that we will need to find ways to provide more educational services for less dollars.  Developing plans to do “more with less” will be a continuous challenge in our state for many years to come.

South Dakota has 171 K – 12 school districts.  Approximately 25% of those districts have 200 or less students.  That information alone makes it obvious that sharing of resources will be a necessary strategy if we want to continue to provide quality educational services for our students.  Clearly, the greatest challenge will be to meet the needs of our high school students.  With the academic bar being raised across the country, it is no time to be offering fewer services to our high school students in South Dakota.  What are some steps that can be taken to ensure that our students get the best we have to offer?  Here are a few suggestions that are already being implemented by some districts in our state.

• Coordinating high school schedules and calendars.
  • The key is to provide area schools with the opportunity to share staff.  This provides districts with an opportunity to have highly qualified teachers in all classrooms. 
• Joint Services.
  • Precious financial resources can be saved by combining services such as media resources, business services and technology support.  Our educational cooperatives have begun to encourage this type of sharing and more needs to happen across our state.
• Professional development
  • Concepts such as regional in-services and other joint professional development opportunities need to continue.  We can afford more when several districts work together for a common purpose.  Once again, this requires schools to communicate with one another about district goals/objectives.

The SD Department of Education is currently discussing the possibility of forming Educational Service Agencies (ESA) to attempt to meet some basic needs of all districts in our state.  Priorities seem to reside in the areas of curriculum coordination and professional development.  Discussions will continue as this concept is studied in more depth.  Most importantly, it is imperative that our schools and educational agencies need to be thinking about cooperation for the benefit of our students.