In late October and early November, I wrote three different posts about school consolidation in Greene County, but the school consolidation movement in Missouri of the 1940s and 1950s was not limited to just one county or even a few counties. It was a statewide phenomenon.
For instance, the Phelps County School Board proposed a consolidation plan in August of 1951 to reorganize seventy-eight rural school districts into eight large administrative units. The only districts not affected by the proposed plan would be Rolla, Newburg, and St. James, which were the only three districts in the county that had high schools. A similar proposal had been soundly defeated by voters in 1949, but educators wanted to try again, because they felt there were numerous advantages to the consolidation.
Among the advantages cited by proponents of the plan were better buildings, more qualified teachers, better library facilities, and better instructional equipment that would be available to students by consolidating into fewer schools.
The consolidation plan was put to a vote of patrons in mid-September, and it, like the previous proposal, was voted down overwhelmingly. Countywide, the margin of defeat was approximately nine no votes to every yes vote, and in many of the smaller districts the vote was even more lopsided. In a few districts, not a single "yes" vote was cast. In the Clinton Bank district, for instance, the tally was 65 votes against the proposal and zero votes for it.
Many, if not most, of these rural school districts were eventually consolidated into larger districts, but as this vote in Phelps County in September of 1951 illustrates, the consolidation movement in Missouri usually had to overcome a lot of initial opposition from voters.
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