Buried in the cuts and carnage of the governor’s supplemental budget proposal are some wonderful, long overdue, cost-saving policies. Really good ones. None of these ideas are new. Legislators have been half-heartedly jawing about them for years. But the state’s budget “crisitunity,” as Homer Simpson would say, has finally created the incentive to do a few right things.

To mention only a sample: The proposal pushes all the school districts into one large state health-care purchasing pool. Not only will this save serious money, but it will take health care off the table in 36 separate contract negotiations, reducing a major reason for teachers strikes in our seriously strike-prone state. Nice.

Similarly, all the state’s public schools will have one or two bigger, less expensive food-service contracts, instead of 36. Lovely.

And my personal favorite: a statewide transportation system will replace the 36 bus contracts that send buses crisscrossing all over the state, twice a day. Every day, dozens of buses pull up to a special-needs school near my house, with a kid on each. Two kids on a good day. I’ve been writing about the insanity of the transportation system every year since 2003.

And these are only a few of the gifts that will keep on giving.

But left on the table is the ever-thorny issue of the expensive and intractable “36ness” of Rhode Island school districts. (Not to mention 39 cities and towns.) I laughed out loud at the budget proposal’s mandate for a “School Realignment Commission” to study consolidations among the 36, since death-by-study commission is one way this state successfully manages not to get things done.

So let’s consider what might incentivize the districts to consolidate — if not whole districts joining up, then at least merging their back office functions, such as accounting, etc. What would free them from the prison of this-is-how-it’s-always-been-done? What would inspire their creativity?

My answer: Offer all parents public school choice. Allow them to send their children — on the new statewide transportation system — to any of the state’s schools that has room. Rhode Island has already created a method for randomly selecting kids for empty seats in charter schools, so an assignment process is in place. The list of superb reasons to offer parents choice is long, but here I’ll confine myself to mentioning only financial ones.

Rhode Island’s school population has declined in recent years, leaving most local schools operating under capacity. Schools are most efficient, and can best afford the art teacher and sports programs, when their seats are full. Parent choice would quickly fill some schools up, improving their efficiency. As those students move, districts will be motivated to consolidate small school populations — or God willing, to merge entire districts. In any case, the state would be paying for fewer schools, each more efficient.

To attract new families, a school might want to reinstate arts instruction, or start an engineering or Montessori program. If families want environmental studies, a school will need a great science lab, or a van to transport kids into the natural world. Such wishes would force schools to take a hard look at how they’ve been deploying their money. Rhode Island has one of the highest per-pupil expenditures in the nation, but most regular schools are spending resources according to “past practice.”

To liberate money for new, attractive programs, unions might be willing to be more reasonable about some of the contractual budget-busters that have built up over recent decades. For example, giving teachers 20 sick days in a 180-day year is odd, but not uncommon. It gets really bizarre when retiring teachers get paid lump sums for big portions of those days, as though they were accumulated vacation days in the private sector.

Legislators should change the laws to allow teachers to participate in Temporary Disability Insurance, so long-term illnesses are covered. Then sick days could revert to what they were originally intended to be, minor emergencies brought on by the flu or whatever.

In some districts, teachers get paid extra for not taking sick days. No kidding. They’re paid to go to work and then paid because they went to work. Schools, districts, administrators, unions and teachers would have incentive to rethink this sort of funny money, if it meant keeping the school open and vibrant for parents who have a choice.

Remember that the hugely popular charter schools operate on the same per-pupil expenditure as regular schools in their districts, and they have no trouble finding good teachers.

Lastly, consider the potential savings of merging back-office functions, such as human resources. If hiring is done by the folks at the school itself, where hiring should be done, human resources for a school district is a pretty straightforward bureaucratic function. Human resources confirms that prospective teachers have the appropriate credentials. When a school needs a 7th-grade math teacher, a consolidated human resource office would send it files of applicants from a nice-sized pool. HR would handle the hiring paperwork and manage the benefits. And yes, if it costs extra to manage seven different sets of benefits from seven different district contracts, human resources might suggest that those districts rationalize their packages.

It’s all in the incentives. Offering parents the option to send their kids to any school that has room would inspire a burst of creative energy. Besides fiscal incentives, school choice has been proven repeatedly, and all over the country, to promote parental involvement and satisfaction.

The 36 school districts will consolidate when they have good reason to. When they want to. Allowing parents the right to shop and choose their child’s school will give districts good reasons to deploy more resources in service of the kids and families, or go out of business. And choice-driven consolidations will occur in more useful, creative and less bloody ways than any mandate to join up ever would.

To boot, Rhode Island could start to market itself as a seriously parent-friendly state. Sweet.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@cox.net , or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.