SOUTH ROYALTON — The state Senate’s Education Committee will make the last of five visits to Vermont public schools when it spends the day at White River Valley High School in South Royalton on Wednesday.
The agenda, posted on the committee’s website, includes panel discussions with high school students from across the 10-town White River Valley Supervisory Union, teachers and administrators, a student-led tour, lunch in the cafeteria and two hours in the afternoon to hear public testimony.
The tour is an attempt to give the committee’s six members some exposure to the variety of public high schools in Vermont, Sen. Seth Bongartz, the committee’s chairman, said in a phone interview.
The committee members wanted to see “what schools are actually doing to provide excellent educational opportunities for every child,” Bongartz, a Manchester Democrat, said.
The committee’s tour has taken it to the tiny high school in Canaan, Vt., in the far northeastern corner of the Northeast Kingdom, to Woodstock Union High School, and to Rutland and Champlain Valley Union high schools, two of the state’s largest.
The common thread, Bongartz said, has been “the Herculean effort that schools, teachers and staff are making to provide real opportunities for kids.”
While the tour has been an opportunity for the committee to take a step back from the debate over education reform, the public comment period, from 2:30 to 4:30, is an opportunity for the public to weigh in on virtually any topic on education that they’d like to bring to the Legislature’s attention. Members of the public can speak up in person or submit written comments to lindsey.schreier@vtleg.gov by Dec. 16.
At White River Valley High School, which comprises the towns of Bethel and Royalton and also serves students from surrounding towns with school choice, the committee expects to hear about how a school provides opportunities to students in a rural setting, said Bongartz, who served as chairman of the independent Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester, Vt., before stepping down in 2020.
Jamie Kinnarney, superintendent of WRVSU, said he had urged legislators to visit the supervisory union’s schools during the legislative session. Bongartz reached out to him late last summer to arrange the visit.
Act 73, the state’s sweeping education reform law, calls for reorganizing the state’s schools into districts of between 4,000 and 8,000 students, with an even larger district in Chittenden County, the state’s most populous area. This poses a mortal threat to districts like the ones in his supervisory union, Kinnarney said.
“It’s a personal thing for me now … to ensure that our elected officials understand what the ramifications will be for the state 20 years out,” Kinnarney said.
Towns that lose schools would wither and disappear and the state’s population would be clustered around the interstate highways, he said.
After a task force assigned to draw new districts recommended a different route to cost savings and better outcomes, Gov. Phil Scott told the media the task force had “failed.” Kinnarney pointed out that Scott also said that education reform had to start with larger districts that could close schools and reduce staff-to-student ratios.
“We’ve got a lot of data points that show … you can be rural, you can be small … and provide high quality education,” Kinnarney said.
The White River Valley Supervisory Union once contained four K-12 schools. But amid declining enrollment and under Act 46, the state’s 2015 school consolidation law, the high schools in Chelsea and Rochester closed, and Bethel and Royalton merged to create the K-12 White River Unified District.
White River Valley High School, the only public high school in the supervisory union, reached a high-water mark for enrollment last year, with 215 students.
Canaan Schools, a preK-12 district, was the only smaller school on the committee’s tour, with an enrollment of 168 students, Principal Ryan Csizmesia said in a phone interview.
“I think that we got the opportunity to show the Education Committee all the great things that can happen in a small, rural school,” said Csizmesia, who’s in his first year leading the small school in Vermont’s far northeast corner.
The state’s reform proposals are “forcing schools into a tough spot, and schools are the heart of a small community like Canaan,” he added.
During its visit to Woodstock last month, committee members met with both elementary and secondary teachers, and talked with students, School Board Chairwoman Keri Bristow said in an interview.
Some of the school redistricting proposals discussed publicly this fall would have split up the eight-town supervisory union, and Woodstock Union Middle and High School is in desperate need of replacement.
Around 300 people crammed into the school’s auditorium for the public comment period, Bristow said, and the committee heard from a wide range of people, including a second-homeowner who said he should be paying the same tax rate as his resident neighbors. Committee members expressed support for the school, Bristow said.
“Everything’s at stake here for our district,” she said.
White River Valley High School is at 223 S. Windsor St., in South Royalton. The meetings with the Senate Education Committee will take place in the larger of the school’s two gyms.
