April Draine moved to Northern Kentucky with her husband and kids in 2022.
It was a seller’s market, and they only had a few days to find a home in a community they liked with schools they thought would be a good fit for their children.
Draine’s family relied on their realtor’s advice on the area and the schools, since they didn’t have another point of reference.
This story is part of our latest Super Issue, which takes a look at what it costs NKY to stay separate. Click here to learn more.
With so many options, the Draines ended up in Boone County Schools because it was the best mix of home availability and affordability, school rating and property taxes for their family.
But Draine’s kids didn’t have the same experiences that their realtor and the people she knew experienced, and they considered moving – something that would not have been an option in, say, Cincinnati, with only one school district to choose from.
They ended up staying put, mostly thanks to relationships Draine developed with her kids’ principals.
“There are some great schools and teachers in NKY and after 3 1/2 years of being here, I’ve definitely learned there are more ‘systems’ in place that will require deep time and investment to get the most for your specific child and their overall experience,” Draine said.
Northern Kentucky has 13 public school districts that serve a population of about 413,000. Compare that to Cincinnati, with one public school district serving 315,000 people.
Why does Northern Kentucky have so many school districts, and is that fragmentation costing us – financially or otherwise?
How public schools work in NKY
Kentucky’s 1838 education law established the state’s first system of free education, according to the Kentucky Historical Society. The legislation established a system that included a state superintendent, state board of education, and county board of education.
But the law didn’t require local taxation for schools.
That meant wealthy communities could choose to support schools through taxation, but those that couldn’t, well …. Couldn’t.
“Through locally elected boards, those communities that did elect to support schools through taxation were granted almost total control over the administration of schools,” according to a report from the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission.
The result was a collection of small, locally funded districts that operated mostly independent of each other and the state board.
Fast forward about 100 years to 1934, when Kentucky decided to create two types of school districts: county school districts and independent school districts. Independent districts had to have at least 200 students enrolled – a requirement that is still in place today (though one district – Southgate – doesn’t meet that requirement, with just 169 students).
The decision effectively landlocked independent districts by not providing for boundary expansion, according to the report.
Today, an independent district is defined as “those school districts whose geographic boundaries are defined not by the county lines that define most districts, but by historic boundaries within counties,” according to the Legislative Research Commission report. In short, independent districts are the ones that didn’t merge with the county in 1934.
Northern Kentucky, according to the Kentucky School Board Association, has 10 independent school districts, which is the largest cluster of independent districts in the state. The state has 51 total independent schools.
These districts, according to the Legislative Research Commission report, represent the extremes of demographics and typically make up the highest and lowest in terms of poverty and achievements.
When considering NKY, this polarization can be seen in places like Newport and Fort Thomas. While the districts are within a few miles of each other, 89.8% of Newport students are considered “economically disadvantaged” per the Kentucky Department of Education, with 90.4% of Fort Thomas considered “non-economically disadvantaged.”
When looking at academic performance, this is also mirrored. In the 2021-22 school year, Newport received the lowest and second lowest score the state offers on its state report card for its elementary, middle and high schools, while all the Fort Thomas schools received the top performance rating.
A local district dissolves
In 2019, Silver Grove Independent shut down, consolidating with the Campbell County School District. At the time of its closure, the district had just 211 students, and graduating classes leading up to the closure often had fewer than 10 students, City Council member Joe Pelle said at the time.
The closure was emotional for much of the community, which felt a sense of loss and uncertainty they expressed at school board meetings at the time.
Debbie Burton, whose three children went to Silver Grove, said she was against consolidation at first.
“I moved to Silver Grove, oddly enough, for the small district,” Debbie Burton said.
But her son, Christopher, told LINK nky predecessor River City News that many students actually transitioned pretty well.
“Switching over wasn’t too difficult,” he said. “I caught onto it pretty well. It’s always kind of like the same thing for me really, just another school year.”
And while looking at it from a cost-benefit perspective, it can seem like a no-brainer to close a low-performing school with few resources and funding, pragmatic solutions can feel dismissive of the emotional elements that go into a decision such as school consolidation.
“One of the things that really is a hallmark of a smaller school district is community and strong local identity,” said Ginni Fair, a dean and professor of education at Northern Kentucky University.
When looking at school consolidation, Fair said, research is mixed and limited.
“I think that the approach to the whole discussion really depends on regional priorities and the issues, and it’s such a multifaceted concept,” Fair said. “I really like the thought around sharing services and co-oping models that allow for maybe even some mobility for different services across district lines, while still maintaining that local function and buy-in from those communities.”
What are the options?
While it might seem like an obvious solution to, say, combine all River City districts into one, independent districts cannot consolidate in the state of Kentucky.
So what are the options?
The first choice is to leave things as they are.
Because there are so many small districts in NKY and people can simply move if a district doesn’t work for their family, NKU history professor Eric Jackson said there’s little political will to do much about it.
“There’s no reason to change it,” Jackson said. “People can move. So you don’t have to change the structures – if they don’t like the structures, they just move, right?”
In short, he said, these long-standing structures work well for some groups, which makes major reforms like consolidation a hard sell.
But that leaves other groups, especially those who are economically disadvantaged, with few options.
NKU’s Fair said another downside of having so many small school districts is that some specialized services or programs aren’t provided.
“Advanced placement opportunities, sometimes mental health capacity, or nurses, occupational therapists, specialists that maybe a smaller district can’t provide, but some shared resources across districts could,” Fair said. “It’s harder sometimes to find staffing in smaller urban or rural settings, and it’s less difficult to find those same staffing connections in larger districts. So, sharing some of those resources would help meet some of the needs of the smaller districts, for sure.”
A second option is to close the smaller districts.
Those students would then go to their county school.
In Silver Grove, Council Member Pelle said the district ranked second to last in ACT scores in the state in 2018. They also had some of the lowest test scores in the state. Pelle said he was encouraged that those students had access to one of the top 20 school districts in the state after the merger.
Another benefit was that residents’ taxes immediately went down.
Longtime Silver Grove Mayor Neal Bedel is a Silver Grove High School graduate.
“It’s been a big savings as far as the taxes paid for the school district go,” Silver Grove Mayor Neal Bedel told LINK nky in 2022. “You know, it was almost basically cut in half between Silver Grove taxes and Campbell County school taxes. It was significant.”
But there are costs the county then needs to pick up, like busing. Students who went to Silver Grove and are now going to Campbell County Schools have to be bused in, which is an additional cost to the district and a long commute for some students.
Steve McCafferty has another idea.
The longtime educator taught at local public and private schools, spending 20 years at the University of Cincinnati and developing an educational leadership program at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati.
“Most people think, get it all under one roof, and that’ll make it easier and better,” McCafferty said. “Well, you get a lot of people under one roof, and then you lose some of them. It’s not that simple. There are both successful large schools and successful small schools. So, it just depends, but the main thing is leadership.”
McCafferty’s idea is to organize Northern Kentucky schools by county while keeping some independent districts intact. Exceptions for districts that are excelling could be made, such as Fort Thomas Independent Schools.
“You would have the resources with a more centralized operation, the county operation, to get people what they need, where they need it,” McCafferty said.
The bottom line, McCafferty said, is the region needs to reconceive schools for the future, not the past, which he said is where they operate now. He said schools need to look at “Where are we going to be and how are we going to get everybody there on one train?”
With Beechwood and Fort Thomas schools ranking among the top in the state, McCafferty envisions those districts having more say. He said the county could oversee those operations, but that they would get more latitude because they are a model school.
“You can organize it in a lot of different ways,” he said. “You could have Fort Thomas take over steerage of Newport, Bellevue, Dayton, and make sure they had everything that they need, including access to the Fort Thomas schools.”
What does all of this cost?
Similarly to most questions about how things work in Northern Kentucky, the answer to what it costs to educate NKY’s kids among 13 public districts is (you guessed it) complicated.
LINK nky reviewed the Kentucky Department of Education’s expenditures for each of Northern Kentucky’s districts. The expenditures are broken into the categories: district administration expenditures, district facility expenditures, certified teacher expenditures, spending per student, and certified superintendent expenditures.
Spending per student is a good way of measuring the overall spending efficiency of a district.
School district spending per student includes operational costs like employee salaries, benefits (health insurance, pensions), and supplies. It also covers transportation, food services, utilities, facility maintenance, and capital outlays like school construction. Costs are typically calculated by dividing total expenses by the number of students.
Northern Kentucky’s largest school district, Boone County, spends the least amount of money per student at $12,351.40, for the 2023-24 academic year which was the most recent year data was available. Compared to Northern Kentucky’s smallest district, Southgate Independent which spends more than double that number at $26,777.00 per student.
Administrative expenditures are broken into three buckets: District administration (think: central office, school board, superintendent’s office, all of which serve the district), school administration (think: leadership, admin and support staff for individual schools) and business (accounting, payroll, human resources).
The total administrative expenditures for Northern Kentucky’s 13 districts for the 2023-24 school year was $95,207,423.
LINK also reviewed district facility expenditures for 2024, which includes things like custodial services, utilities and maintenance, construction and capital improvements.
Boone County Schools, which has 28 buildings, had the highest facility operations cost at $22,367,666. Southgate Independent, with one building, had the lowest cost at $321,464.
Total district facility expenditures for all 13 districts in the 2023-24 school year was $71,368,206.
Teacher salaries are also included in KDE’s district expenditures.
In the 2024-2025 school year, Fort Thomas Independent School District had the highest average pay at $75,544.28, while Southgate Independent School District had the lowest at $55,892.78.
Superintendent salaries range similarly to those of teachers, according to district expenditure reports.
The highest paid superintendent across the 13 districts is Kenton County’s, with a salary of $290,174.85, followed by Boone County’s at $265,000 and Beechwood Independent’s at $250,000. The lowest is Bellevue Independent’s at $157,590.02, which is just below Southgate Independent’s $158,000 superintendent salary.
The combined salaries for all 13 superintendents are $2,546,849.
If a county absorbed some of the smaller independent districts, Fair said, the administrative staff would need to increase. Because of that, and a lack of comprehensive data on the topic, Fair said she wouldn’t assume that consolidating schools would not necessarily mean a decrease in cost.
Looking at Cincinnati Public Schools, the district spent $132,579,196 during the 2023-24 school year on administrative expenses. Ohio doesn’t distinguish between district and school administration costs the way Kentucky does, so when combining administrative costs in the 13 counties that make up NKY, the total comes to $166,575,629.
While comparisons between Cincinnati and NKY aren’t quite fair because of the very different makeup of the communities and differences in the ways states compile information, the numbers do give some perspective to the idea that consolidation automatically means a cost savings.
NKU’s Fair said she knows that cost efficiency is one of the arguments for consolidation, but there isn’t current data, and the research she has read is mixed.
“No, it may not really be, because you have to have more staff,” Fair said. “It’s not an absorption that happens without the increase in needing staff too.”