MONTPELIER — At least five towns across Vermont will vote in the coming weeks on whether to secede from their unified school districts, a first wave of district breakups that could herald more.
For David Major, the former Westminster School Board chairman who helped organize a petition for his town to vote Jan. 5 on secession, it is fundamentally a question of local control. Westminster has already collaborated with its neighboring towns on such services as food service and special education, Major said, and has seen no added benefit to being forced to combine school boards with Athens and Grafton under Act 46.
“Left in peace, that’s where we’d like to put our energies, and not try to conform to this very contrived governance structure that was put upon us,” Major said.
If Westminster’s vote is to secede, Athens and Grafton will schedule their own. If residents there vote to dissolve the district, the matter will then go to the State Board of Education.
These votes are not unexpected. When the State Board earlier this fall reluctantly OK’d the dissolution of a two-town school district in southern Vermont, many speculated more would follow. The statute used by Halifax and Readsboro to part ways predates Act 46, and appears to generally require the State Board to greenlight such divorces once all towns included in the unified district vote to allow a withdrawal.
Since it requires all towns involved to agree, it is not likely that the law being used by the districts attempting to break up will undo large swaths of the school governance map drawn in the years following the merger law.
But it is difficult to predict the loophole’s impact, and the State Board has said it appears to conflict with the intent of Act 46, suggesting that lawmakers revisit the matter in the upcoming session. The merger law, passed in 2015, was implemented over multiple years, and eventually whittled the number of school boards in Vermont down by more than 150.
But whether lawmakers will decide to revisit bitter debates about consolidation, particularly with the pandemic expected to consume much of their attention, is an open question.
A withdrawal vote is also set for Tuesday in Newbury, Vt., which with Bradford forms the Oxbow Unified Union School District. The district oversees two elementary schools, a union high school and a technical center.
Oxbow School Board Chairwoman Danielle Corti, a Newbury resident, said she once adamantly opposed the merger. But once the two communities came together, she said, they worked out an agreement that gave each town equal representation and strong protections against school closure.
Now she actually believes there’s great potential in the consolidated district, which she thinks will be better able to think strategically about the system as a whole.
But Corti says Oxbow was dealt some bad luck. Just when it merged, pupil counts significantly dropped, which sent the taxes soaring.
That left people feeling betrayed; they’d been told a merger could stabilize the tax rate.
On top of that, the two communities have not historically gotten along — Corti jokes they are often compared to the Hatfields and McCoys. Bradford also came into the merger with debt and a history of higher spending; Newbury’s school board had a more hands-on approach to the day-to-day functioning of its schools. That animosity hasn’t gone away.
“I think people just feel like the cost is just going to continue to go up and they don’t have a voice and are concerned that you know, their school is — is not their school,” she said.
Corti worries about the instability the fragile system is enduring.
Residents have three times this year voted down the budget, and the district is going for a fourth vote in January. That’s in addition to the pandemic, and now the withdrawal vote.
“Our poor teachers and staff. It’s a lot. It is just a huge amount for them to be wading through at this point,” she said.
Meanwhile, Tunbridge residents will be voting on Jan. 9 on a petition article to withdraw from the First Branch Unified School District, which oversees public schools in Tunbridge and Chelsea.
The Tunbridge Selectboard has scheduled an informational meeting at 7 p.m. by Zoom for people to learn more about the proposal, which would re-establish a school district in Tunbridge.
Two secession votes are also scheduled for early January in the Addison Central School District towns of Ripton and Weybridge.
The seven-town school district, which serves Middlebury and surrounding communities, is contemplating closing three or four of its elementary schools in a bid to save money as enrollments decline.
The elementary schools in Ripton and Weybridge, which each served about 50 students last year, are both on the chopping block.
The secession votes are being pitched as a Hail Mary pass to save the towns’ small schools.
But some warn the move is misguided.
In a message sent to residents through the town’s listserv, Ripton Elementary principal Tracey Harrington pleaded with her community to “look forward, not backwards,” and argued students would not be well served by a small, independent school district.
“If you think by creating a small school district in order to save your small school building, you will save your ‘school’ — the teachers, staff, administrators, shared resources, programming and collaboration — you are wrong,” wrote Harrington, who also resides in Ripton. “You may save the elementary school building, but there is great potential loss to our students, pre-kindergarten through high school.”
In Weybridge, Jenny Phelps, a resident and former Weybridge Elementary School parent, helped organize the petition drive that got the withdrawal question on the ballot. Phelps says she’s concerned about what the loss of the school — the main meeting place in town — would do to the community and property values, and she also thinks consolidating schools will hurt the education kids receive.
But she also believes the structural forces at play — declining enrollments, and the state’s current funding mechanism — means the debate taking place in Addison Central is one that will soon be necessarily replicated elsewhere in Vermont.
She worries districts are in a “really risky downward spiral,” and wishes the state would take more ownership of the problem.
The Valley News contributed to this report.