To begin with, it would require a vote of Lenoir City residents to change the city charter to eliminate the school system. Whether that would ever happen is an unknown. If the voters did vote to eliminate the city school system, their system would be absorbed by the county school system. Currently, the county system has 10 schools and the city has 3.

Sure, there would be immediate cost savings by the elimination of most of the city schools central office staff. Just elimination of the city schools director position would save $170,500.00. But on the flipside, all teacher salaries would have to be equalized to be commensurate with the higher paid district salaries. In this case, the city system does pay higher salaries. Equalizing all salaries would cost several million dollars, recurring. The city school system has about $8,500,000.00 in debt. The county would have to absorb that debt. Millions in revenues would be lost in city sales tax revenues that currently go to the city school system. That sales tax revenue would revert back to city government.

The county school system would have to make up the loss of revenues to sustain the school system which would require a very large property tax increase just to maintain the needed revenue to support the new combined school system. Worst of all, if the two systems were combined tomorrow, the over crowding issues would still exist. The building program would still be needed. There are a number of other issues that would come with the combining the systems that would be financially challenging also. 

So what seems to be a simple solution to a problem isn't nearly as simple as it seems and would be very expensive to accomplish.

Someday, combining the school systems may very well happen. But just know, if/when they do, it will be very expensive.