Interstate status complicates Rivendell’s plans to reshape its schools

ORFORD — The Rivendell Interstate School Board still has no proposal for residents on reconfiguring the district’s schools. Officials had planned to put options to a vote in September; now a community forum on them is set for Oct. 27.

“I would say that we’re a month behind,” board Chair Charles Newton of Orford said at Tuesday’s meeting. Board member Nate Thames of Vershire interjected that it was more than a month.

Superintendent Randy Gawel and board members said several legal questions remain unanswered. Those include whether the board or the district’s voters would make the final decision, and whether New Hampshire’s school tax cap question on the Nov. 3 ballot would apply to the four-town district, which includes schools in both Vermont and New Hampshire.

The district serves Fairlee, West Fairlee and Vershire in Vermont and Orford in New Hampshire. A steering committee of board members, administrators and teachers is studying three options:

• Combining the district’s two elementary schools.
• Closing Samuel Morey Elementary in Fairlee and moving its students into the Rivendell Academy building in Orford (currently serving grades 6 through 12).
• Closing the high school grades at Rivendell Academy and paying tuition to send those students to other high schools.

Only two members of the public attended Tuesday night’s meeting. The October forum will be at 5:30 p.m. at the district office. Gawel said postcards announcing it were going to the printer Wednesday.

Gawel said mail delays pushed the forum to late October. The finance committee has suggested a vote in December, with at least two more public forums laying out operating costs and capital needs.

In his written report to the board, Gawel included advice from the district’s unnamed legal counsel. The lawyer wrote that the board can likely vote on its own to combine the elementary schools or move Samuel Morey students to the academy campus. Selling a school building, though, would need voter approval under Vermont law.

Tuitioning out high school students is a different matter. The lawyer wrote that he wasn’t sure it was possible. He said the district would likely have to remake itself as an interstate elementary district through eighth grade. For grades nine through 12, the old Vermont and New Hampshire districts would return, and each would decide on tuitioning under its own state law.

Vermont’s director of elections told the district that changing its articles of agreement takes a two-thirds majority, according to Gawel’s written report. Under the interstate school compact, both states’ boards of education must also approve any change to the district’s structure, he wrote.

At the meeting, Gawel said a districtwide vote on the options would happen in person, not by Australian ballot, and would have no minimum turnout. But it’s unclear whether the board would have to follow the result or could treat it as advisory.

He pointed to Danville, Vermont, where voters weighed in on a similar school decision last year. “When Danville did this in the fall, they had two legal opinions; two different groups of attorneys weighed in,” Gawel said. “One said it’s binding. The other one said it’s suggested.”

Under Vermont law, the state education secretary, with advice from the attorney general, can rule on whether a board action is proper. Thames asked why the district couldn’t seek that ruling now.

“Because we don’t know what we’re going to do,” Gawel said.

The district has also asked the state whether it would claw back construction aid if it closed a building it helped pay for. Gawel said that question has gone unanswered for about a month.

“There’s a sense of urgency that seems to be dying in the bureaucracy, and I think there’s some way we need to cut through that,” Thames said.

Gawel offered to have an attorney write to both states’ boards of education. He said that if the board went that route, he would suggest holding off on forums until the boards responded.

There was also disagreement over what the board has already decided. The finance committee has recommended formally rescinding “the vote several years ago to close SME.” Thames, who sits on the steering committee, said he recalled the board only voted to investigate that option further.

The Valley News reported in 2024 that the school board had approved a three-year plan ending in the closure of Samuel Morey Elementary. The newspaper later reported that the board walked back that plan a year afterward, amid leadership turnover. No action on rescinding the vote was taken Tuesday.

Board member Terry Martin of Orford, who sits on the finance committee, said a 2025 engineering update put the district’s long-term capital needs at about $20 million. He said the district won’t spend all of that, but the budget hasn’t accounted for repairs due in the next two to three years. Those include about $750,000 at Westshire Elementary in West Fairlee.

Martin said the finance committee’s rough estimate for moving Samuel Morey students into the academy building is $6 million to $7 million. Part of that cost comes from asbestos in the building’s east wing.

He said the goal isn’t cutting the budget below its current $16.6 million, but slowing how fast it grows.

“The harder I look and the more I educate myself about what we do here, the more I find myself treading water,” Martin said.

He also pointed to the limits of the district’s tax base. “There’s not another half-million dollars of property value on each one of the grand lists to be added,” he said.

Thames said his own enrollment study found the high school losing students faster than it used to. He projects about 86 high school students attending the district in five years, compared with the finance committee’s projection of 98.

“Every year fewer kids stay in the district for high school, and that’s been accelerating,” he said.

In his report, Gawel wrote that research shows savings from consolidation often don’t materialize. He described the district’s interstate status as making it “a bit of a unicorn.”

“The decision to close or merge smaller rural schools is never purely financial,” he wrote.

Martin also raised the school tax cap question on the New Hampshire ballot. Orford’s sample ballot asks whether the town should “limit property tax growth for Rivendell School District (SAU #78),” and the cap needs a three-fifths majority to pass. Martin said he is “worried about the answer.”

Gawel said the district is still waiting for the state to say how the cap would apply to Rivendell. Only Orford voters will see the question, and Gawel noted it would change funding for about 30% of the district’s students but not the other 70%.

The New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration, which oversees the tax cap rules, did not respond to a message seeking comment Wednesday.

Thames said the district’s high school enrollment numbers are already set for the coming years, and costs won’t drop as fast as student numbers.

“It’s not like as our high school shrinks from 120 to 90 to 80 kids, we’re going to be able to shrink the size of the staff by that much,” he said. “You still need teachers for every subject in every grade.”

“If you think our cost per student is high now, just wait,” he said. “The die is already cast, right? Like, this will happen. We’re not going to suddenly find 30 students just springing out of, you know, a creek somewhere.”