Orford
DeBois said that board members during their most recent meeting, on Dec. 6, agreed to discuss the formation of such a body in January.
The committee would likely look at the way that school-related funds — and costs — are allocated across the four member towns of Vershire, Fairlee, West Fairlee and Orford, and then, he said, “potentially make recommendations to the board.”
As it stands, most of the district’s costs are allocated to member towns based on their share of student enrollment, meaning that Orford, with its roughly 165 children out of the total 478, has the largest share of the pie. Much of the financial dispute has centered on how to count those students.
Under that arrangement, Orford this year is sending $3.4 million to Rivendell, compared to $2.8 million from Fairlee, $2.2 million from West Fairlee, and $1.7 from Vershire, according to figures from the district’s CFO, Dick Paulson.
The budget that voters this spring approved for the current school year estimated that Fairlee residents would pay $1.80 per $100 of property valuation in the school-related portion of their taxes, compared to $1.96 for West Fairlee and $1.83 for Vershire. New Hampshire tax rates are assessed per $1,000 of valuation, but on Vermont’s scale, Orford residents were expected to pay $2.08.
Property tax rates, however, also depend on the total value of taxable property in a given town, among other factors.
DeBois said about 40 people had attended Dec. 6’s School Board meeting, and that most of the crowd left after the conversation on the Orford residents’ concerns.
“I don’t know that they’re satisfied at this point,” he said of the New Hampshire residents, “but we’re moving forward and we’re going from there.”
The residents appeared anything but satisfied earlier this week.
Mark Burger, an accountant and Orford resident who has helped lead the group, said on Monday that he was concerned about the makeup of the potential committee and said the board had avoided having open, give-and-take conversations with him about the district’s finances.
“There’s no dialogue,” he said in an interview. “There’s no open willingness to discuss with the board.”
Over the past few months, the New Hampshire residents, who call themselves the Orford Citizen Technical Assessment Committee of RISD Annual Reports, have engaged in a back-and-forth with school administrators and state officials over how best to interpret and enforce the founding rules of the district.
The Rivendell district, which voters ratified in 1998, took responsibility for its four towns’ children two years later under its founding articles of agreement, a 52-point document that outlines how the district shall be run.
Rivendell Superintendent Mike Harris last week issued a memo to address several major points that Burger had raised this fall.
“I am convinced that the practices of the district have not violated the articles through the efforts of district personnel to interpret and implement the articles in the midst of changing circumstances,” the superintendent concluded at the end of his letter.
Burger had questioned whether Rivendell inappropriately failed to count pre-K students from Vermont in its assessment of enrollment from each town. Because the district divvies up the financial burden based on each town’s enrollment, that could have hurt Orford, he said.
The district recently began counting pre-K students in enrollment because of the advent of a Vermont law that mandated that school districts offer pre-K programming.
Harris’ Dec. 6 memo said that pre-K students had not been counted before the end of June, when that statute took effect, because they had been considered tuition students before then. They therefore weren’t attending school at the district’s expense, he said.
Burger this week said the pre-K students still had been costing the district money, since annual reports indicate that the pre-K program has been operating at a loss.
Harris’ written response addressed a concern from the Orford residents that the district’s counting of students did not match the process outlined in the articles of agreement, which call for each town’s share of costs to be based on its “average daily membership” over the first 40 days of the school year.
Harris said that Rivendell uses the state of Vermont’s system, which uses attendance from days 11 through 30.
“We might do well by correcting that,” Harris said in an interview Monday, meaning that the district should align its articles with Vermont’s student-counting methods.
In a separate interview on Monday, Burger countered that this point from Harris was an inadvertent acknowledgment that the district wasn’t following the articles of agreement.
“I don’t think it makes a significant difference,” Harris responded. “I can’t see how — or know which way a difference would go. I acknowledge that strictly speaking it probably doesn’t match.”
Aside from the dispute over how to count each town’s student enrollment, the citizens’ committee has raised questions over a host of other issues, including the method by which federal funding is distributed across the district. Harris addressed some of those issues as well.
State officials in New Hampshire and Vermont appear unwilling to involve themselves in the dispute, despite requests from both Harris and the Orford residents for help.
School Board members in early October agreed to ask state officials for assistance in interpreting the articles of agreement. After more than a month, they received answers in which state officials indicated they considered the discussion a local matter.
Diana Fenton, a staff attorney for the New Hampshire Department of Education, said in an email to the Valley News on Monday that “generally speaking … issues regarding alleged violations of the Articles of Agreement or amending the Articles of Agreement are local issues and the school administration should seek guidance from their local counsel on those types of issues.”
Officials at the Vermont Agency of Education did not respond to the Valley News’ requests for comment; however, Secretary of Education Rebecca Holcombe this month replied to direct emails from the Orford residents, saying that changes to the district’s financial allocations would require amendments to the articles, which should be handled locally.
“This decision to adopt a different allocation method is a local one and should be predicated on a thorough understanding of the effects of each option,” said Holcombe, who as principal of the Fairlee School helped get Rivendell up and running. “… The superintendent and business manager may be helpful in assembling current and historic allocation calculations.”
The RISD board’s next meeting to address this issue is scheduled for Jan. 3 at 6:30 p.m. at the Westshire Elementary School in West Fairlee.
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or at 603-727-3242.