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Show School Consolidation Answers Are Offered for Summit County of rural boards of education to use their influence to affect legislation now being considered consider-ed by the legislature. The Beaver County Board of Education at its regular January Jan-uary meeting, discussed the need for a cooperative concerted concert-ed effort on the part of the rural school board members to make their feelings known to the State Legislature. The Board recently sent letters to the board members of rural school districts calling attention to the fact that the voting power of rural Utah in the State Legislature is now so limited that it is going to take the united effort of all rural Utah school districts to make their needs known to those who influence the votes in the Legislature. Leg-islature. It expressed the opinion of the Beaver County Board of Education that local school board members influence legislation leg-islation more than organized groups because they reflect the general feeling of the people on educational matters and are primarily responsible for the operation of the public schools. The letter said that the Beaver County Board of Education Ed-ucation considers the following four issues as being very important im-portant to rural Utah at this time: 1. The move to consolidate school districts. There is a very serious attempt to consolidate the rural school districts through legislative action. This means that the Legislature, in which the rural district is poorly poor-ly represented, isgoingtomake decisions to force consolidation upon rural school districts without their having any voice in the decision. The letter asked the questions: Imagine what your county's representation would be if your district board was consolidated with several other districts. Would your schools be close to the patrons? Would your community have any say about how the schools operate? op-erate? 2. Some school districts have developed special education programs and have these programs pro-grams integrated into their financial fin-ancial structures. Other school districts desire to add special education programs, where they are so badly needed, but find that all special education units authorized by the Legislature in the past are being used. It is important that the Legislature Legis-lature authorize more units for special education programs so that those who need these programs pro-grams can have them and those districts that already have the special education units can continue con-tinue to use them. 3. Many of our rural schools are able to offer good educational educa-tional programs because special school units are awarded award-ed to them by the State Board of Education. If these special school units are cut by the Legislature, many school districts dis-tricts will suffer financially, and their fine educational programs pro-grams will suffer. It is up to the rural boards to see that these special school units are maintained. main-tained. 4. The Teacher Leadership Program has enabled the local boards to reward financially and give leadership and status to those teachers who render excellent ex-cellent service to children. It gives the rural board a way to allow a real fine teacher to remain re-main in the small rural schools. We should lobby to expand this Teacher Leadership Program. The letter urged the members |