WINDSOR — Three Vermont school districts in the Upper Valley say they are willing to become one.
The Mountain Views Supervisory Union, Hartford School District and Windsor Southeast Supervisory Union presented a letter to a state task force on Sept. 29 indicating they are open to being combined into one educational unit.
Merging “will be a practical and effective path to meeting the state’s goals
while protecting our communities and ensuring the long-term sustainability of our schools,” a letter to to the state School Redistricting Task Force signed by members of all three boards reads.
The School Redistricting Task Force formed in July following the passage of Act 73, an education reform bill. The 11-member group includes state Rep. Rebecca Holcombe, D-Norwich, and Jay Badams, a recently-retired SAU 70 superintendent who lives in Strafford.
The group is charged with redrawing Vermont’s school districts so each has between 4,000 and 8,000 students.
Together, the three districts would have about 3,700 students, which is close to the minimum target size of 4,000, said Keri Bristow, chair of the Mountain Views school board.
Members of the three school boards held a special meeting Sept. 18 to discuss the possibility of partnering in the face of the impending changes.
State Rep. Elizabeth Burrows, D-West Windsor, who also serves on the Windsor Southeast Supervisory Union School Board, reached out to the other boards to invite them to the meeting. Windsor Southeast includes students from Windsor, West Windsor, Hartland and Weathersfield.
Burrows called the situation an “informal meeting with an informal outcome” in a Friday email. She said the meeting “simply asked whether it was a good idea in principle to talk about working together.”
While the task force works on creating three options for school district maps by Dec. 1, the local boards wanted to get involved in the conversation.
“I personally don’t believe that any of the three parties agree with Act 73, but if we are left with no choice after the maps are drawn, we wanted to show our willingness to work together,” Hartford School Board member Jeremy Warren said in an email.
Warren helped to draft the letter along with Davis McGraw of Windsor Southeast and Bristow and Carin Park of Mountain Views.
Personally, Warren said he is not a fan of Act 73 and “won’t be shy” about saying it. His preference would be to not have “other people’s voices in the town of Hartford,” but said it seems inevitable.
Bristow, of Mountain Views, attended a meeting of the state task force last Monday and read the Upper Valley boards’ letter to the group.
The three districts would make good partners because they “have similar educational goals, share a Career and Technical Center (the Hartford Area Career and Technical Center), and are geographically aligned,” according to the letter.
The districts have common curriculum priorities, especially in math and literacy, Bristow added in a Thursday interview. A key goal in all three districts is to have students graduate “career and college ready.”
The Mountain Views Supervisory Union includes Woodstock, Barnard, Bridgewater and Pomfret in the Upper Valley, as well as three other Vermont towns.
“We just feel that we are natural partners, even though we are rivals on our sports teams,” Bristow said.
The districts already pull from some of the same student populations, Bristow noted.
For example, some students in Hartland and Weathersfield, which are part of Windsor Southeast and offer choice for high school, choose to attend Woodstock or Hartford high schools.
Bristow said in a future district she would like Woodstock to host a “regional hub school,” which is one of the benefits of this possible partnership.
She said it seems like a reasonable choice for the supervisory unions and district to come together and center around Woodstock because Mountain Views Supervisory Union has already invested millions of dollars in planning, permitting and design for a new middle-high school and it would take minimal changes to accommodate a larger student population.
Voters in Woodstock rejected a controversial $99 million bond to construct the new middle and high school building in 2024. The supervisory union will likely try to put together a new bond for next March, Bristow said.
The proposed union of the three districts aligns closely with a proposal presented at a Monday meeting of the school redistricting task force.
At the meeting, the group discussed a map that would create 14 school districts based around Vermont’s Career and Technical Centers. It was the first time the committee reviewed a proposed map.
The proposed map creates a cluster around the Hartford Area Career and Technical Center, which includes the three school districts and Norwich, which is part of the Dresden Interstate School District.
Hartford’s Warren said the tech center map was “maybe a glimmer of hope personally for me because I think that was at least one map that made a little more sense” than other options that have been thrown around.
Still, some of the many questions that remain in the redistricting process include what will happen to programs that cross borders or to Vermont’s interstate school districts such as Rivendell Interstate School District, which is comprised of the towns of Orford, Fairlee, West Fairlee and Vershire, or Dresden School District, which oversees schools in Hanover and Norwich.
“We have other questions: what do we do with our neighboring towns across the river that also utilize our career and technical center?” Warren asked. “We definitely want to serve those people as well because they’re part of our neighborhood.”
The redistricting task force will meet again Friday at Oxbow High School, 36 Oxbow Drive in Bradford, Vt. Following the regular public meeting that is scheduled from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., residents can participate in a public hearing. The hearing will be from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. and the meeting will also be streamed via Microsoft Teams for remote participation at https://tinyurl.com/3u6n76e8.