Northern Minnesota School Districts Create Opportunity from Crisis

School districts in the rural Itasca County area already know how to cope with difficult times. Schools here have faced declining enrollment, and thus declining revenues from the state, for more than a decade.

While watching student enrollment numbers edge downward each fall has presented its challenges, it also offered opportunity to work together in ways that 20 years ago would have seemed unfathomable.

Rural school districts in this area, including Grand Rapids, Greenway, Nashwauk-Keewatin, Deer River, Remer, Floodwood and Hill City, began working together collectively in 1987 as the Quad County Telecommunications Project. Then the focus was simple: making interactive television studios a reality for rural education.

In 2005, the school districts, joined by Itasca Community College, reorganized as the Itasca Area Schools Collaborative (IASC). The group re-launched with a greatly expanded mission dealing with: declining enrollments, strained budgets, high poverty, stagnant or declining state aid funding, the need to maximize resources, the declining ability to provide recovery, remedial or elective classes, and the need for data-driven decisions. In short, IASC’s redefined focus dealt with many of the same issues that face rural communities as a whole.

Grand Rapids School District Superintendent Joe Silko, a 2004 alumnus of the Blandin Educational Leadership Program, said one of the main benefits of membership is that districts can choose whether to participate in any given initiative. “It’s a menu-driven approach,” he said.

The umbrella IASC is a pick-and-choose model for member educational institutions, but there is plenty on the menu. Some of the collaborations include: Project Lead the Way, a pre-engineering curriculum offered at the high school level, a shared fiber network, cost savings through combined staff development and textbook purchasing and combining resources to greatly expand community education offerings.  IASC also fed into northeastern Minnesota’s Applied Learning Institute, a workforce development collaboration of 16 school districts and five community colleges.

Rochelle Van Den Heuvel, a 2008 BCLP alum and former Greenway superintendent, said the greatest benefit of the collaboration has been to students. “I believe the value to Greenway is significant both in financial savings as well as being able to provide increased opportunities for students in the district,” she said. “As a district moving to get out of statutory operating debt, we were reducing core and elective courses as well as staff development options. Through IASC partnerships and programs, we were able to continue, or bring back, some of those opportunities.”

“The relationships that have been established through IASC have enabled changes to happen more quickly,” added Mike Johnson, a 2004 BCLP alumnus, ICC Provost and Blandin Foundation trustee. “The social capital that has developed has allowed a crisis to create opportunities. Reality is upon us and we have the trust and willingness to make bold moves to enhance educational opportunities for students.”

The collaborative approach has not only been successful but it also is beginning to expand. An IASC online learning collaborative, VITAL, merged with a Brainerd-based online learning group last year to become Infinity Online Learning. The new online learning group is comprised of 35 member school districts.

Through Infinity, about 900 students from IASC member districts were able to take courses from about 50 offerings during the 2008-2009 school year. There was a much wider spectrum of offerings available through Infinity than ever would have been possible for any small school district operating on its own.

“Through Infinity, we can offer everything from intermediate to advanced coursework in a number of areas,” said Joe.

“We have a responsibility to improve the quality of education for all students in the region, not just the pupils in our individual districts,” said Joe.