WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — Earlier this year, the Hartford Board of School Directors requested an extension through March on submitting its Evaluation of Corrective Action Alternatives, a document indicating what the district is going to do about dangerous chemicals — PCBs — in the high school. The Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation denied the extension, instead giving the board until Dec. 4. It now has less than a month to decide how to handle the district’s PCB issue, which is tied to its other problems.
At its meeting Wednesday night, the school board found common ground among its members and with administrators on how frustrating they all find unfunded state mandates.
“There’s no money for any of this,” Assistant Superintendent Aron Tomlinson said. “How do we actually come up with a plan when there’s zero money to do any of the things that you’ve given us?”
In 2021, Vermont issued a mandate via Act 74 requiring that all public school buildings built before 1980 be tested by their districts for PCBs. The Hartford school district found measurable amounts of PCBs in the high school and has since been required by the DEC to continuously test air quality for safety. But Vermont halted funding for the testing this year, leaving Hartford on the hook for another project it can’t afford.
“We have a mandate,” Director of Facilities Jonathan Garthwaite said Wednesday night. “The resources to meet that mandate never materialized on a state level.”
Ever since PCBs were detected at the high school, Garthwaite has followed every protocol: “managing the risk appropriately,” he called it. Managing those risks, though, is an expensive task. Right now, for instance, he needs to hang a new whiteboard on a wall in a classroom. To do so, he has had to contract an environmental consulting company to determine whether hanging the whiteboard will disrupt PCBs and make air quality more dangerous in the school.
At the same time, neither the auditorium nor the gym in the high school has a working fire alarm sprinkler system, limiting their respective capacities. Only 200 people can be in the auditorium at a time. Limited attendance at sporting events and the upcoming play has a negative impact on students, of course — they see fewer supporters — but it also means fewer ticket sales that could otherwise raise money for a school caught in a budgetary crisis.
“We are incurring, continuing, and increasing operational costs every day,” Garthwaite said. “These things are just stacking up.”
And there’s not much Garthwaite can do right now. He can’t start installing a new fire safety system in the building — a multi-million-dollar project — if the district is going to move out of the building soon because of PCBs or the school merger mandate. Even if the board made a decision on a new building, or extensive renovations, the district couldn’t afford it: Hartford has yet to figure out how to cut $5 million from its budget as it is. In the meantime, the district has to spend money on things like environmental consultants and other temporary fixes to its myriad problems.
The district has used about half of a $21 million facility bond that it was granted in 2024. It doesn’t want to use the rest of it because of the uncertainty of the building. Even if it did, the $10 million or so available to Hartford wouldn’t come close to covering the cost of rebuilding or renovating the high school. Burlington, for example, spent about $206 million on demolishing and rebuilding its own high school because of similar PCB concerns.
The uncertainty is getting old. Garthwaite wants the board to make a decision on the ECAA so that he has a clear path forward. The DEC, he said, wants the same thing.
“They want the board to make a choice so that we’re moving in some direction so that the problem is quantifiable,” Garthwaite told the room Wednesday night.
Board members feel like they’ve been given an impossible task.
“Are they out of their mind?” asked Cathy Lemire. “What are we supposed to do with this when we’re looking at a 5 million dollar reduction in our budget?”
Deciding on a plan of action for the PCB problem doesn’t necessarily mean the district has to immediately put the plan in action. They won’t be able to afford action, and the state won’t fund it. The plan, then, may just sit in purgatory while the powers that be try to come up with the money to make it work. In the meantime, Hartford will continue to run on temporary fixes that it also cannot afford.
Wednesday night’s meeting also saw discussions about Hartford’s gender inclusivity policy, which was updated to the Vermont School Board Association’s version. According to parent Laura Pascoe, the district’s older policy was actually more inclusive. The board had no problem with re-expanding the language.
Kaya Dauphin, a junior at the high school, attended her first meeting as the board’s student representative. Director of Curriculum Sarah Hisman presented on the district’s use of standardized testing, a process leadership wants to re-examine, but some parents worry it will interfere with the ways their children learn best.
