Royalton
For the past two years, several towns in the White River Valley Supervisory Union have been trying to come up with school district configurations that will pass muster with local voters while also meeting strict new standards under Act 46, the 2015 school consolidation law.
Earlier efforts for a three-town merger that included Rochester were stymied, initially by Royalton voters in April and then, after Royalton voters reversed themselves to affirm the plan, by Rochester voters, who rejected the idea in June.
With Rochester now exploring a possible partnership with Stockbridge, school board members in Royalton and Bethel are seeking the two-town merger as the next best alternative, according to Geo Honigford, a member of the Royalton School Board who also sits on a newly formed study committee with representatives from the two towns.
“We’ve taken out the old plan, dusted it off, and took out all the references to Rochester,” Honigford said.
The new K-12 district would remain under the umbrella of the White River Supervisory Union; middle school students would go to Bethel, while high school students would go to Royalton.
One of the components of the three-town proposal, an experiential outdoor learning center that would have been centered in Rochester, still will be implemented, but on a smaller scale, Honigford said.
“We don’t have a location yet, but we would keep it in some form,” he said, “with two full-time staffers instead of four.”
The loss of Rochester, he said, which would have brought significant state subsidies into the agreement, also will negatively affect the curriculum, and the budget.
“My gut tells me we’re not going to be quite as robust as we would have been with Rochester,” he said.
Still, he said, the merger will improve the lots of area students.
“It’s not like we’re going to have this skeletonized school,” he said. “It’s still going to offer more, but maybe not quite as much as it would have been with three towns.”
One issue that has yet to be decided is the composition of the proposed new district’s school board. Honigford said the group is trying to decide whether each town should elect its own representatives or go with district-wide voting, and whether the board composition should be tied to population.
Officials hope to agree on a plan during Monday’s meeting, after which it can be submitted to the State Board of Education for possible approval during its meeting later this month.
In order to approve it, the state board first must allow Bethel and Rochester to back out of a “Plan B” that was triggered in the articles of agreement for the originally proposed three-town merger. The articles for that proposal were structured in such a way as to send a two-town merger between Bethel and Rochester to voters of those districts in the event that the first proposal — the three-town merger — failed. But now that the three-town merger has indeed failed, School Board members in Bethel and Rochester agree that the towns are better served going their own ways.
If the State Board of Education agrees to nix that requirement and thereby clear the way for a Bethel-Royalton merger, the next step will be to give residents in the two towns 30-day advance notice of a publicly warned vote, which likely would take place in early October.
If voters in both towns approve the merger, the new school configuration would take full effect in September 2018. If either town rejects the plan, it likely would be too late to put any other plan in place by Nov. 30, the deadline after which the State Board of Education is charged with reviewing each district and imposing a configuration that it deems best meets the goals of Act 46.
Monday’s Royalton-Bethel meeting is scheduled to take place at 6:30 p.m. in the South Royalton School.
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.