WOODSTOCK — Officials in the Mountain Views School District are pressing Vermont’s education secretary to provide state funding to build the district’s new middle and high school.
Act 170, the education reform bill approved last month, includes provisions to resume state aid for school construction, which was suspended from 2007 to 2022.
But the Agency of Education’s rulemaking process means the Woodstock project might not get state funding until March 2029.
Voters in the seven-town district approved a bond to finance a new $112 million middle and high school to replace the existing 70-year-old school, which is rapidly deteriorating. The approval hinged on getting at least 25% of the cost from state and federal funds and private donations.
While the district has raised nearly $6 million in pledges, it needs an assurance for state funding before the project can break ground. The district is counting on getting 20% of the total cost from the state.
“We have a shovel-ready project,” Mountain Views Superintendent Sherry Sousa said in an interview Thursday. “We need a commitment from them that they would fund their portion,” she said of state education officials.
Mountain Views board members said they have a meeting scheduled July 29 to plead their case to Education Secretary Zoe Saunders and Deputy Secretary Jill Briggs Campbell.
An email to an Agency of Education spokesperson and a voicemail to the agency were not returned by deadline.
Time is of the essence for Mountain Views. District officials hope to start construction of the new school, on the existing football field, next spring. Major systems at the old school are in danger of failure, Joe Rigoli, the district’s buildings and grounds director, said in an interview.
In addition to the construction bond, voters approved in March spending $500,000 to replace failed sewer pipes and the school’s 1958 boiler, work that’s taking place now.
“Every system in that building is at the end of its lifespan,” Rigoli said. What keeps him up at night, he said, is the question of “What is going to collapse next?”
If the school has a “catastrophic failure” of a key system, there is no other place for students to go, Sousa said. Construction of a new $200 million high school and technical center in Burlington went ahead while classes moved to a former Macy’s store in the state’s largest city. “There is no Macy’s down the road,” Sousa said.
It could cost $14 million to $15 million to keep the old building open for five more years, Rigoli said.
Every year the project is delayed, the cost of construction also goes up. Rigoli estimated that, “if we wait another two years, we’re probably looking at another $12 million to $14 million.”
Because of their considerable property wealth, Woodstock and neighboring towns have paid more money into the state Education Fund than they get back under the education funding formula in place since 1998, Sousa said.
“There’s a real belief in our community that we’ve paid in,” she said; the implication is that the community believes it’s time for the state to pay up.
