WOODSTOCK — Officials at the Vermont Agency of Education are declining to meet with representatives of the Mountain Views Supervisory District to discuss state funding for a replacement of the district’s crumbling middle and high school building.
Voters in the seven-town district approved in March a $112 million plan to build a new school. That support was contingent upon the project receiving at least 25% of its funding through state, federal and private dollars.
District officials are concerned that the state will not act quickly enough for the construction plan to come in at cost, or to forestall the failure of one of the 70-year-old building’s major systems.
Mountain Views officials thought they had set up a meeting with the AOE on July 29, but a spokesperson for the agency said this week that “There is not a meeting scheduled” for that date.
“Because the Agency of Education is at the beginning of a public process for rulemaking for State Aid for School Construction Program, it is premature for the Agency to meet individually with stakeholders to discuss or influence potential rulemaking that must be responsive to all districts in the State,” Toren Ballard, the agency’s director of policy and communications, said in a written statement Monday afternoon. “The Agency is looking forward to receiving district feedback through a public engagement process that is open to all.”
Absent those rules, and specific authorization from the Legislature, the agency doesn’t have authority to grant construction funding to individual districts, Ballard wrote. Once the state aid program goes into effect and the Legislature has funded it, districts will have to apply for funding.
The AOE’s communications are “debatable and, overall, disheartening,” Keri Bristow, chairwoman of the Mountain Views district’s board, said in a written statement Tuesday. “Nevertheless, we remain undeterred in our resolve to provide a new, safe, and healthy school building for our students in the near future, and we will pursue every opportunity available to us under existing laws.”
Those opportunities include working with legislators and Gov. Phil Scott and to increase support for the project from local citizens, as well as “others across Vermont who are weary of new legislation that has so far failed to deliver tangible relief to serious infrastructure challenges for the past 10 years,” Bristow said.
The state did provide $16 million toward construction of Burlington’s new $200 million high school, but that was “a one-time appropriation made by the General Assembly specifically connected to the presence of PCB contamination and the removal of contaminated materials,” Ballard wrote.
A version of the Mountain Views project received state approval in February 2024, and district officials argue that that approval should be sufficient for the state to grant construction aid.
But in a letter Monday to Mountain Views, Deputy Education Secretary Jill Briggs Campbell said the state’s approval “was issued under a prior, now-defunct school construction process. It was not an approval under the State Aid for School Construction Program established by Acts 73 and 170 and does not confer eligibility, priority, or funding under the new statutory framework.”
Act 73 is a state education reform bill the Legislature passed in 2025; it was designed to consolidate school districts and cut costs while improving options for students. Act 170, passed this year, built on the reform effort, but also scaled it back to encourage school district mergers, particularly in the form of larger, comprehensive high schools, and the sharing of specialized services across district lines.
Of particular concern to Mountain Views officials is a provision of a new state law that says that if a district starts a project without state approval, it will be denied state funding. The district has raised close to $6 million in private pledges and had hoped to break ground next spring.
