Last December, the Oldham-Ramona-Rutland School District barely survived a dissolution vote. But residents have petitioned again to force the ORR school board to submit that failed “reorganization” plan to another vote:
The ORR School Board acknowledged at a regular Aug. 12 meeting a petition to vote on a previous plan to dissolve a district.
District voters will choose if they want to accept the same reorganization plan that was subject of a Dec. 16, 2025 election. That time, people voted 367-363 to keep the district as-is. Voting in favor of the reorganization plan would dissolve the district and divide its land and assets into neighboring districts, including Madison Central, Chester Area and others.
The district validated the petition, which had the required 20% of registered voters’ signatures. ORR will need at least six weeks to publish legal election notices and another six to seven weeks to handle early voting and absentee voting before the election, according to board discussion. The election must be held before Dec. 16, 2026, as a re-vote is required within a year of the reorganization’s plan failure on Dec. 16, 2025 [Wren Murphy, “To Be or Not to Be: Voters Will Decide Once More If Embattled ORR School District Dissolves,” Mitchell Republic, 2026.08.12].
The 2025 reorganization plan would have distributed the district’s territory and tax base to nine adjoining districts, with the largest shares of land going to Arlington, Howard, and Madison. Dissolving the ORR district would also have resulted in a net loss of at least 33 K-12 education jobs, as the adjoining districts would need few if any additional faculty or staff to absorb their small fractions of the ORR student body and thus would offer few job opportunities for ORR’s 42 employees.
This dissolution revote underscores the ongoing and thus far unresolvable division plaguing this consolidated district. I have to wonder what will happen first: will enough district supporters give up to cede this new vote to separatists, or will the lack of community cohesion on top of/linked to declining enrollment force the district to close?
They should read Wendell Berry like you Cory. Then vote.
Have students, cheerleaders, and athletes gotten a list of the students NAMES in Old/Ram and reached out to them with a welcoming message? You kids are good at that.
I have heard about this from people in the district.
I am confused as to how many of the students currently attending ORR actually live in the district and how many have been recruited from other districts under open enrollment; something said about buses are bringing them in.
Then there is the headcount from the Hutterite colony. The children are counted as being in the district but attend their own school in the colony. The district might be supplying teachers but they will never attend the new school the district wants to build in Ramona
To keep the Hutterites engaged in the ORR district, the school board gave them $25,000 in playground equipment? Opponents are saying this was a bribe to get the Hutterites to vote for a school their children will never attend. There has also been discussion of how many children who reside in the district are being home schooled or enrolled elsewhere under open enrollment.
The number of students actually enrolled at ORR seems to depend on whom you are speaking with
Google AI says the district “serves” 193 or maybe 288 students. The people I talked to said it’s actually down to 115.. Asking google AI how many seniors graduated this year and it was 17 or 18. Not sure about that number, either..
Opponents claimed the original bond measure was not accurate as to the cost of the new school in Ramona.
What I have concluded is that there’s also a lack of transparency about how many students who actually live in the district plan to attend the new school.
Subtract all the students who have entered the district under open enrollment. Subtract all the students who reside in the district but have already open-enrolled elsewhere. Subtract all the homeschoolers and Hutterites who reside in the district but will never attend ORR.
How many students are actually left?
Post script: the worry over the potential loss of 33 jobs is silly.
The purpose of public education is to educate the students. It is not to provide employment for educators.
The taxpayers don’t fund the public schools because our colleges and universities produce more graduates than the economy can absorb.
Declining birth rates mean that in the future, fewer and fewer teachers will be necessary, and the professional educators need to take note of that.