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It is time to look at saving money.

Fort Plain Central School District Superintendent Douglas Burton and Board of Education President David Fredericks knew the district would have to find new ways to save money.

It started with shared services. Fort Plain already shares transportation with the neighboring St. Johnsville Central School District and sports teams with the Canajoharie Central School District. After the December 2008 school board meeting, Fredericks sent letters to see if there was any interest in expanding shared services after Gov. David Patterson's 2009-10 budget called for massive educational cuts.

"It certainly came into the discussion, but the initial thing that triggered our board was initial attempts at developing a budget for next school year," Burton said. "They began to realize that this was becoming more and more difficult within the physical constraints that we were forced to work in."

The following month, Fredericks had received only one response, from St. Johnsville. After a meeting between executives from both districts, the two school boards met Wednesday with Hamilton-Fulton-Montgomery Board of Cooperative Education Superintendent Geoff Davis. He briefed board members about how much state aid would become available if the two districts became one.

The short answer was, a lot of it and for quite some time.

Davis told the school boards consolidation would result in state aid that would have been given to the two districts being added together and the combined district getting a 40 percent bonus, which would continue for five years, on top of it. After five years, the bonus would decrease by 4 percent until it phases out after 14 years.

"Certainly the additional incentive aid for reorganization is tremendous," Burton said. "But there's a process that you have to go through and the public is very much involved in that."

St. Johnsville already has involved the public, at least on a very basic level.

St. Johnsville Superintendent Christine Battisti said both districts are facing decreasing enrollment. Along with Tuesday's budget vote, her district conducted an exit poll in an attempt to gauge what the voting public thinks about the district participating in a merger study with neighboring districts.

A large majority, 239 of 282 people polled, said they were in favor, while 32 said they weren't and 11 said maybe.

"We got a bailout with the stimulus money and we feel we're going to have to make tough choices," Battisti said.

St. Johnsville, however, hasn't just been seeking a merger with Fort Plain. In April, at a joint meeting between the St. Johnsville and Oppenheim-Ephratah's school boards, the districts agreed to merge most sports programs. Oppenheim-Ephratah also could be a possible consolidation partner with St. Johnsville.

"Our kids hang out together," Battisti said. "The Fort Plain and St. Johnsville communities are very similar and the same is true with Oppenheim-Ephratah. I don't think it would be a major change."

There are two options open to the districts, centralization or annexation.

Centralization would involve the dissolution of both school districts and the creation of a new one. The new district would encompass the entire area of both former districts. The new district would have a new Board of Education, new superintendent and new employees.

Under annexation, one district would take over the other, resulting in the dissolution of the annexed district. In this case, the administration and employees of the annexing district would remain, unless new positions were created for the additional students. Staff members from the annexed district would be considered for vacancies.

"I think probably the only concerns were the same concerns that are always voiced when looking at reorganization," Burton said. "What will the new entity look like? Those things always remain to be seen, but that's part of what a feasibility study will produce."

Davis said there only have been two centralizations and two annexations in the past 10 years. Information from the state Department of Education explains this low number with a list of typical factors such as fear of losing local identity, higher costs and higher property taxes, more time required for transportation, job security for employees in existing school districts and a natural tendency to resist change.

The first part of the process to merge school districts is a feasibility study that would include current and projected enrollments, current and projected professional staffing plans, current and projected housing plans, plans for educational programs, plans for transportation and fiscal implications of the reorganization.

The study would need to be funded locally. Davis estimated a cost of about $6,000 to $15,000 for it.

"We're always concerned with the cost of mergers studies," Battisti said. "We are concerned that if we go ahead with merger studies and if they very clearly show that we can provide better services for kids and be more responsible, then we'll look at it, but it still goes back to a public vote."

Public sentiment could change very quickly if the feasibility study doesn't show St. Johnsville taxpayers what they want to see.

At a school board meeting in February, Fredericks said he got a letter from Canajoharie, which showed interest in discussion of shared services.

"Other options are limited by our own creativity and our own will," Davis said.

School districts can share faculty, non-teaching staff members, administrators and back office staff members. Districts even can share superintendents. The only thing that can't be shared is a school board.

"The only way you can end up with one Board of Education would be to consolidate districts," Davis said.

Sharing services is nothing new in the area as Fort Plain shares wrestling and cross-country programs with Canajoharie, while St. Johnsville recently voted to merge most of its sports programs with Oppenheim-Ephratah.

St. Johnsville and Fort Plain have been sharing some transportation services for about two years.

The state master plan for reorganization was adopted in 1947 and revised in 1958. According to figures from the New York State Department of Education, there were 1,293 districts in 1960 with the number cut down to 760 by 1970. However, by 2007, Davis said there were 698 school districts in New York.

"It's greatly slowed down and the lions' share of consolidation took place in the 1960s," he said.

There is a plan on Paterson's desk from the Commission on Real Property Tax Relief that recommended mandating that all school districts with fewer than 1,000 pupils be forced to consolidate. However, the New York State School Board Association and the state Association for Superintendents oppose the recommendation.

"In order for that to happen, politicians would have to tackle those two very powerful groups," Davis said. "We'd have to have a governor who wasn't worried about being re-elected. We'd also have to have a strong, financial driving force. We can look at our current situation and those conditions could exist."

However, it's still out there and Battisti said she didn't want to see her district hit with a forced consolidation.

"We want to do it on our terms and not some arbitrary reorganization," she said. "We need to make the decision locally and not have it come down from above. There have been other merger studies in the past, but I think we're in a different situation now."

Mike Zummo covers Montgomery County news. He can be reached by e-mail at montco@leaderherald.com.