WOODSTOCK — Recent changes to an annual school funding bill would prevent the construction of a new middle and high school that voters in the Mountain Views School District approved in March.
The legislative changes, made as the session is winding down toward adjournment, have provoked a furious response from officials in the seven-town school district, urging residents to lobby their legislators.
“Until yesterday, we were pretty confident they were going to deal with it,” Mountain Views School Board Chairwoman Keri Bristow said in a phone interview Thursday. “It does feel as though somehow we’re being punished for getting a bond.”
The $112 million bond issue that Mountain Views voters approved in March is contingent on two factors: The school district must raise through state, federal and private funds at least 25% of the total cost, and the Legislature must exempt capital costs from the excess spending penalty in the state’s school funding formula.
The excess spending threshold would force Mountain Views to pay double the cost of the new school, Bristow said. Legislative changes proposed by House members of a conference committee negotiating the bill would exempt only those capital costs approved before Jan. 1, 2025, and the Senate conferees proposed exempting bonds approved before July 1, 2024. Both proposals exclude the Mountain Views bond issue.
“In either case, the existing, failing state of our middle and high school facility should not simply be ignored by our State representatives and senators — but under current proposals, they are,” Mountain Views Superintendent Sherry Sousa wrote in a Wednesday evening letter to the school community.
“If we don’t get that debt decoupled, there’s no way we can go forward with a bond,” Bristow said.
And if that bond can’t go forward, the district’s taxpayers would still be required to pay double for two other bond issues approved by voters in March, which total more than $500,000 to fix sewer lines and replace the school’s antiquated boiler, Bristow said.
Woodstock Union Middle and High School was built in the 1950s and has outlived its functional life, school officials said during the debate over the bond issue. The school currently educates around 415 of the district’s 1,000 students. Mountain Views educates students from the towns of Barnard, Bridgewater, Killington, Plymouth, Pomfret, Reading and Woodstock.
The new school is designed for an enrollment of 600, but could be expanded to 750 to 1,000 if the school becomes a hub under the state’s plans to further consolidate public schools, which also are under negotiation in the Statehouse.
Absent the new school proposal, the district would be forced to set up temporary classrooms, under an existing plan in case of catastrophic failure of the aging school complex, Bristow said.
Securing and setting up temporary classrooms on the school’s football field would cost $5.2 million up front and $250,000 a year in rent, district officials said in a news release Thursday morning.
State Rep. Charlie Kimbell, D-Woodstock, said in a Thursday afternoon email that “We are still working on the Committee of Conference and don’t have anything to report yet.” He said he expected the bill would be resolved by Friday, “at the latest.”
