SOUTH ROYALTON — Vermont lawmakers should try to ease residents’ financial burdens by addressing health care costs and reforming the state’s tax system, rather than trying to close rural schools.
That was the message delivered to the state Senate Education Committee during a listening session Wednesday afternoon at White River Valley High School in South Royalton.
“Forced mergers would not work,” Sarah Root, a Strafford native and longtime school board member, told committee members. “The governor and legislative leadership say that it will work, but they are wrong.”
The Education Committee visited the public high school, which comprises students from Bethel and Royalton and surrounding towns that have school choice, as the last of five stops at schools around the state. Around 75 people gathered in the school’s gym to defend their rural schools and the 10-town White River Valley Supervisory Union that contains them.
WRVSU, which was created by a forced merger in 2015, stretches from Strafford west to the Addison County towns of Granville and Hancock.
State records show the supervisory union comprises a little over 1,100 students. It contains six school districts, ranging from the Granville Hancock Unified District, which operates no schools and pays tuition in surrounding communities, to White River Unified District, the SU’s only preK-12 establishment.
Sharon operates a preK-6 district, while Strafford is preK-8. Tunbridge and Chelsea formed the preK-8 First Branch Unified District, and the preK-6 schools in Rochester and Stockbridge are governed by their own unified district.
Act 73, passed by the Legislature this year under the urging of Gov. Phil Scott, calls for creating school districts of between 4,000 and 8,000 students. The express purpose of the larger districts, Scott has said, is to achieve economies of scale and expand course offerings by closing smaller schools.
Most of Vermont’s schools are small and rural. If Wednesday’s public comments are any indication, a sweeping consolidation such as what Scott has proposed is likely to be deeply unpopular.
Stockbridge resident and school board member Joshua Budukiewicz said he moved to Vermont from Boston a year ago in search of a small school for his young son, who’d been bullied as a 5-year-old. At Stockbridge Central School, “Children across grade levels bond, look out for one another and accept each other exactly as they are,” he said.
“People are coming here by choice, young families,” he said. The state should “look at the tax system as a whole, including property values,” to tame the property tax burden, he added.
Several speakers touted the findings of the Vermont School Redistricting Task Force, which was supposed to deliver three possible school district maps to the Legislature but instead called for cooperative service districts through which schools could share special education, transportation and other resources, and incentives to merge high schools.
“I just feel like, if communities come together to pool their resources, but not dismantle their schools,” the state would see better results, Carrie Caouette-DeLallo, a Chelsea resident and former special educator at Spaulding High School in Barre, Vt., said. “Consider what you’re taking away when you dismantle small schools,” she added.
At least one of the proposals discussed by the Redistricting Task Force would have rearranged education in the White River Valley around high schools in Hartford and Randolph, which many in the Bethel and Royalton district saw as an effort to close their high school, which currently has around 215 students. Many speakers touted the virtues of smaller schools.
Growing up and going to school in Northfield, Vt., “I could see there were things I did not have,” South Royalton resident Betsy Donahue said. But, “in a small school, I had people who were invested in me.” She went on to earn a master’s degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She and her spouse decided to come back to Vermont. “We knew we wanted a rural school,” she said. Her three children are enrolled in the White River Valley School.
What the speakers value about a small school would be lost at a larger one, several people said. For example, Superintendent Jamie Kinnarney is responsive to parents’ concerns, said Francey Slater, of Royalton, who’s the White River district’s farm-to-school coordinator.
“As a parent and a staff member, (she feels) Superintendent Kinnarney is incredibly present and available,” she said. “Those things don’t scale.”
“The bill as planned has a lot more Phil Scott than Jamie Kinnarney, and I don’t think that’s a plan I can get behind,” Tyler LaGrange, a parent from Royalton, told the committee.
“In our SU, I’ve seen how close relationships and local knowledge result in better outcomes for students,” Strafford School Board member Dustin Ray said. A wider consolidation could damage what already works, he added, but the effect could be far wider than the school. “This could change the fabric of our state, not just in the education realm,” Ray said.
Hancock resident Stacey Peters noted that closing small schools doesn’t help communities. Granville closed its small elementary school and merged with Hancock. Then the combined school closed in 2009 amid declining enrollment. “Our towns have more or less become employment deserts,” Peters said.
Even absent a state consolidation plan, small schools are closing in Vermont, including in the southern Vermont towns of Danby and Sunderland. Two more, in Worcester and Calais, north of Montpelier, are up for debate in the Washington Central School District.
After the public comments, which followed a full day of meetings with students, teachers and principals, and lunch with students in the cafeteria, Sen. Seth Bongartz, a Democrat from Manchester, said that he heard a common thread in the testimony.
“I think the overall message was the connection between community and education,” he said in an interview.
How this will inform the debate in Montpelier is unclear, he acknowledged. Lawmakers need to find a path forward “to fix what I think is a broken funding formula,” to improve education and “to recognize the vast differences among districts in Vermont,” he said.