700
Opinion of Souter, J.
ter 748. See Brief for Petitioner in No. 93-517, p. 20; Brief for Respondents 11. The significance of this fact to the state legislature is indicated by the further fact that carving out the village school district ran counter to customary districting practices in the State. Indeed, the trend in New York is not toward dividing school districts but toward consolidating them. The thousands of small common school districts laid out in the early 19th century have been combined and recombined, first into union free school districts and then into larger central school districts, until only a tenth as many remain today. Univ. of State of N. Y. and State Education Dept., School District Reorganization, Law Pamphlet 14, pp. 8-12 (1962) (hereinafter Law Pamphlet); Woodward, N. Y. State Education Dept., Legal and Organizational History of School District Reorganization in New York State 10-11 (Aug. 1986). Most of these cover several towns, many of them cross county boundaries, and only one remains precisely coterminous with an incorporated village. Law Pamphlet, at 24. The object of the State's practice of consolidation is the creation of districts large enough to provide a comprehensive education at affordable cost, which is thought to require at least 500 pupils for a combined junior-senior high school. Univ. of State of N. Y. and State Education Dept., Master Plan for School District Reorganization in New York State 10-11 (rev. ed. 1958).3 The Kiryas Joel Village School District, in contrast, has only 13 local, full-time students in all (even including out-of-area and part-time students leaves the number under 200), and in offering only special education and remedial programs it makes no pretense to be a full-service district.
The origin of the district in a special Act of the legislature, rather than the State's general laws governing school district
3 The Commissioner of Education updates this Master Plan as school districts consolidate, see N. Y. Educ. Law § 314 (McKinney 1988), but has not published a superseding version.
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