Rochester, Vt.
The high school had 33 students last year, and was only slated to have 17 students — 10 of them from Rochester — attending the campus this year, according to Bruce Labs, superintendent of the White River Valley Supervisory Union.
The balance of the students had already made plans to attend other institutions, such as the Vermont Academy of Science and Technology program at Vermont Technical College.
Rochester School Board Chairman Jeff Sherwin blames the district’s woes on Act 46, the 2015 education reform law that imposes strict new standards on school districts across the state. He says the law pushed the tiny Rochester School District, which had a total of 141 students during the 2016-17 school year, to the edge.
“Act 46, it said on the first page that this Act is not to close the small schools,” Sherwin said during a phone interview on Monday. “But that’s exactly what it’s doing. … It freaked out everyone in our little town, and they’re still freaking out.”
Two weeks ago, after learning that four of five full-time teachers at the high school planned to resign, the School Board decided against trying to quickly find and hire qualified replacement staff before the school year began.
Sherwin said the decision was influenced by the fact that teachers could only expect to work at the high school for a single school year, after which all signs point to the high school being closed anyway.
The best chance of keeping some form of the high school open, said Sherwin, would have been merging with Bethel and Royalton to form a three-town district that would have complied with Act 46.
But that plan, which would have seen Rochester’s high school transformed into an outdoor experiential learning center in a year, was rejected by Rochester voters 236-144 in June.
In the aftermath of the vote, school leaders began talking instead about merging with Stockbridge, Vt., to form a two-town district that would either teach K-6, or K-8, with older students getting school choice.
Should that happen — and Sherwin said the idea has tentative support from the school boards of both towns — the merger would take effect before the 2018-19 school year, which would leave Rochester’s high school teaching staff out of a job.
“They saw the writing on the wall,” said Sherwin.
Labs said that, a month ago, the district had already been poised to react to a planned teacher resignation, and the expected pupil count, with the same type of staff reorganization that happens every year, and had lined up good candidates for two positions.
But the loss of two more teachers changed the dynamic. It left just one full-time teacher at the high school, and a handful of positions that were shared between the middle and high schools.
“I’ve been in touch with the Agency of Education,” Labs said. “They know what we’re doing. I’m not sure they’re happy about it, but we’re trying to make something work out of something that’s very difficult.”
Over the past week and a half, Labs said, Rochester High Principal Dani Stamm has met individually with each of the students to try to match them with the education program that best suits their needs.
Labs and Sherwin said students were choosing the Vermont Academy of Science and Technology, the Randolph Technical Career Center, South Royalton High School and Middlebury Union High School, among others.
Because the district can’t legally close the school, it remains obligated to provide an education to those who choose to stay, and it is also obligated to honor the contracts of remaining staff members.
Labs said that most, but not all, of the students have decided to go elsewhere.
“Some people said they’re staying on, but they need to talk to their families,” said Labs. “We need to give them time to ruminate. It’s one thing to do classes online. It’s another to not have any peers around you all year long. When they stop to really consider what that really means, they may have different thoughts.”
Mason Wade, a former School Board member who has advocated for the district to move to school choice, blames the White River Valley Supervisory Union for the breakdown of the high school’s functionality.
“This has been going on for 30 years,” he said. “It’s blowing up in Rochester’s face now.”
Wade, an organic landscape designer, said the board has failed, over the past decade, to come up with an effective plan to address the decline of students that has plagued the entire state.
In February, Wade submitted a petition to the School Board that sought a townwide vote to move to school choice.
“This would require ASAP closing the middle and high school and transferring all properties and liabilities back to Rochester Town Control,” read the petition.
The School Board discussed the petition with its attorney during a closed-door executive session, after which it announced that the language was too vague to be legally actionable.
“It was so vague the taxpayers wouldn’t have known what they were voting on,” Sherwin said. “That’s what we told them. They could have rewritten the petition but they didn’t.”
Wade called the rejection of his petition improper, and said he and other school choice advocates are hoping to involve state officials in an investigation of the subject.
He said that, when the Board dismissed the petition, he decided that he could no longer work with them.
“They’re all wonderful people but they’re in a bubble,” he said.
If the district does want to merge with Stockbridge, there’s not much time to put the plan together, said both Sherwin and Labs.
The plan would have to be drafted and submitted to the State Board of Education for approval by October 1, and then presented to voters of both towns by the end of November.
A merged district would operate within the White River Valley Supervisory Union with three other pairs of school districts: Bethel and South Royalton, Chelsea and Tunbridge, and Granville and Hancock.
School districts that fail to get approved merger plans in place by that date are subjected, under Act 46, to a review by the State Board, which is tasked with merging districts into configurations that provide the best affordable and equitable opportunities to students.
“They have to get it right and they have to do it now,” said Labs. “There’s no more time to pull this off. They’ve got one more move and its got to be the right one.”
Districts that don’t merge by the end of November also lose out on state funds that currently help subsidize Vermont’s small schools.
“All the things that were given by the state to keep the status quo, when you finally have to put them aside, it’s hard to give them up,” said Labs. “It’s hard for the taxpayers to afford this any more.”
The loss of small school support grants, artificially inflated student counts and tax incentives would result in a budgetary hole so large that, without spending cuts, it would take a 70 percent school tax hike to offset it, said Sherwin.
Sherwin said the issues surrounding the high school will be discussed during an upcoming meeting of the Rochester School Board at 6 p.m. on Wednesday in the high school library.
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.