South Dakota has 150+ school districts, including nine inside the Sioux Falls metro area. That’s not efficient, it’s expensive.

South Dakota has over 150 school districts. That is an extraordinary number for a state of fewer than a million people. And nowhere is this fragmentation more visible than in and around Sioux Falls.

Education Borders for a Previous Century

Seven separate districts cover territory within the city limits, while two more are well within the metro area. We are a metropolitan area of roughly 300,000 people carved into nine silos that resemble a patchwork quilt more than a coherent educational system.

The Sioux Falls School District is surrounded by growing districts

With all the attention recently on reducing property taxes, this complex education infrastructure raises an obvious question: Wouldn’t the greater Sioux Falls area be better served by a single school district, with one superintendent, one school board, and one set of administrators?

Too Many School Districts in the Sioux Falls Metro Area

The nine districts that functionally make up the Sioux Falls region are: Sioux Falls, Brandon Valley, Harrisburg, Tea, Lennox, Tri-Valley, West Central, Dell Rapids, and Baltic. Seven sit at least partially inside city limits; Dell Rapids and Baltic are just outside.

Together they educate the 35,000 to 40,000 students in our community. But they do so separately, each with its own superintendent, business office, transportation fleet, buildings and grounds team, and governance structure. School superintendents in the Sioux Falls area make salaries as high as $260,000 a year, much more than our mayor’s salary.

Harrisburg High School.

This fragmentation may feel benign, but it carries real costs.

Drifting Towards Inner City School Problems

Start with the core reality: the Sioux Falls School District is landlocked, racially diverse, and increasingly demographically different from its suburban neighbors. Its student population has plateaued at about 24,000. Surrounding districts, by contrast, are overwhelmingly white, wealthier, and growing rapidly thanks to new housing developments all around the metro area. This geographic and demographic mismatch produces predictable pressures.

A landlocked inner-city school district cannot expand its tax base or its enrollment footprint. As the population in older neighborhoods ages, student counts shrink even as needs become more complex. Meanwhile, the suburbs enjoy steady inflows of new families and new homes, which translate into stable funding streams and the political will to build new facilities. The districts in Harrisburg, Tea, and Brandon Valley have certainly been opening new schools over the past decade.

Centralized Poverty

The diversity of Sioux Falls’ older neighborhoods brings higher concentrations of English-language learners and poverty. Nine elementary schools in the Sioux Falls School District receive Title 1 funding. That federal program provides extra financial support to public schools serving large numbers of children from low-income families. 48% of students receive free or reduced-price lunches. By contrast, only 13% qualify in the Brandon school district and 9% in Harrisburg. That’s a huge difference!

Laura B. Anderson Elementary in Sioux Falls, a Title 1 School

These students require additional support, which costs more money. Yet the Sioux Falls district’s property-tax base cannot expand outward the way its suburban counterparts can. Growth flows into neighboring districts even as Sioux Falls shoulders the metro’s highest-need families. No one intentionally designed this outcome, but it’s what we have today. Our outdated education infrastructure all but guarantees it.

Teacher recruitment and retention reflect the same dynamics. Suburban districts attract staff with smaller class sizes, newer buildings, and a perception of easier classroom environments.

A Recipe for Inevitable Failure, if We Don’t Change

All of this drives a political narrative that has little to do with academic quality. An inner-city district serving the metro’s highest-need students is compared unfavorably to districts serving its most advantaged. Housing markets respond. Suburban growth accelerates. The urban core becomes further isolated. This scenario has played out time and again in other communities across the US. Why not learn from their experience?

A single Sioux Falls metro area school district would not magically erase every challenge. But it would align educational governance with the economic reality of a unified metro area. It would equalize tax bases, allow for coordinated capital planning, and reduce redundant administrative overhead. Instead of nine superintendents, nine central offices, nine transportation systems and nine curriculum shops, the region could operate with one. That savings could flow to classrooms or back to taxpayers.

More importantly, it could distribute enrollment more evenly, reduce racial and economic segregation, and allow the larger Sioux Falls community to invest strategically in new schools where they are needed most, not where historical district boundaries happen to fall.

Obvious Solution

As Sioux Falls continues to grow into a regional hub approaching 350,000 people, and tax pressure grows, we need to be more creative. For education, the answer is increasingly clear: One city. One metro area. One school system.