School Consolidation in Sparsely Populated Rural Areas: A Separable Programming Approach

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between internal schooling economies and transportation costs with regard to consolidation of rural schools. The consolidation question was conceptualized as a programming problem where the objective was to simultaneously minimize the sum of schooling and transportation costs. Both linear and separable programming models were used. Model solutions indicated that some consolidation of schools in the study area would minimize costs but total cost savings were relatively small. Key words: internal schooling economies, transportation costs, school consolidation, linear programming, separable programming, cost minimization. The advisability of rural school consolidation turns on many different issues. Parents of students voice concern about loss of local control, long bus rides, and fewer real oppor-tunities for extracurricular activities. Public officials and their advisors often seem to con-centrate on what are viewed as the economics of the question. Since schooling is apparently a process that is characterized by internal economies of size, major cost savings should be obtainable through consolidation of rural schools which are too small. 1 What is often missing in policy deliberations is explicit recognition of the cost of transport-ing students. If large increases in transporta-tion costs are associated with consolidation, then recommendations based mainly upon presumed savings from size economies are likely to be wrong. The principal purpose of the study reported in this paper was to David W. Holland is an assistant professor of agricultura