A group of Central Vermont parents wants to change how their district votes on closing small schools.
Currently, towns in the Washington Central Unified Union School District make the final call on whether they want their school to close, even if the district board recommends closure.
In February, voters in Calais, Vt., and Worcester, Vt., voted against closing their schools after a long and contentious debate around declining enrollments, taxes and education policy.
Now, a group of families in the district has gathered enough signatures to call for a special vote to change those rules and allow voters from all five towns in the district to vote on school closures.
The other three towns in the district are Middlesex, Vt., East Montpelier and Berlin, Vt.
If that vote succeeds, it would potentially pave the way for a districtwide vote to close the Worcester and Calais schools, against those towns’ objections.
The move in Washington County highlights escalating tensions around keeping small schools open, as districts around the state brace for another push toward consolidation.
A special school district vote will be held on Aug. 11, the day of the primary election.
“This vote will give every family a voice, and a say, with the decisions that affect our kids,” said Natasha Stevens, who lives in Middlesex. “A unified district should allow parents to have a voice in that.”
After Calais and Worcester voted to keep their schools open, the then-superintendent sent out a message to parents that the district would have to move some students out of their town and into different schools to stretch limited resources and avoid a debilitating tax increase.
When Stevens learned that her daughter was going to have to change schools, moving from Middlesex to Worcester, she said she realized the broader impact of the decisions in Calais and Worcester to keep the schools open.
“I was pretty jarred over the very abrupt decision to make that change for the 5th and 6th graders,” she said. “I didn’t have any voice or any say in what directly affects where my daughter went to school.”
When school districts across Vermont merged under Act 46 about 10 years ago, each of the newly formed districts wrote its own merger agreement.
Some unified districts allow the district board to close schools without a vote. Others required a district-wide vote and still others, like Washington Central, required authorization from the specific towns that stand to lose their schools.
When Act 46 was being debated, the provision to give small towns a say on whether their school should close was often introduced to encourage smaller towns to merge in the first place.
And now some voters in the Washington Central district say this newly warned vote is going against the original agreement that formed the district in the first place.
“These communities are not going to take this,” said Calais resident Ross Andrews. “We’re going to continue to fight. We’re very engaged and very passionate and this is a long term battle.”
The long-running and often contentious debate in Washington Central is further complicated by the debt agreements that were put in place when the district formed.
When the district formed under Act 46, East Montpelier, Middlesex and Berlin had more than $10 million in combined debt from past school projects.
Ross said Calais and Worcester have been paying down those projects, and now the same people who benefited from their payments are saying they want to close their schools.
“Now what they’re saying is, ‘You still have to pay off our loans, but we’re going to take away your schools,’” Andrews said. “Those towns don’t have the local community like we do, and for them to be coming in with a majority of the people to say, ‘We’re not going to allow you to have that community anymore’ is just insulting.”
Zach Cockrum, who has two kids in Berlin Elementary School, said the Aug. 11 vote will not close any schools, but will rather allow every voter a chance to make decisions about the district’s future.
“Obviously everyone is incredibly empathetic to the towns facing consolidation,” he said. “But at the end of the day the question is pretty simple: Does that decision impact the taxpayers and students across the five towns? And it does. And so if it impacts people outside those towns then it should be a shared decision among all of us.”