Small schools, big changes, Part 1: Changing the heart of a town

Editor’s note: This is part one of a two part series by Max Breiteneicher of The Commons.

“A school or schools shall be established in each town, by the Legislature, for the convenient instruction of youth, with such salaries to the masters, paid by each town, making proper use of the school lands in each town, thereby to enable them to instruct youth at low prices.”
—Vermont Constitution, 1777

There have been many earnest state-led attempts to push consolidation and centralization of Vermont schools and school districts over the past 100 years.

All have failed.

West Halifax Elementary School shares a building with the town office and educates approximately 56 students. Photo courtesy of The Commons.

That’s mostly because of the opposition of towns loyal to the history and civic value of the small schools that have served their communities by educating small groups of students for generations.

But this year, as state government faces massive revenue shortfalls and local officials in Windham County pare budgets to the bone, small schools and the role of local control are undergoing a fundamental change as communities and state officials are looking hard at the costs and practicalities of funding public education.

According to Vermont Education Commissioner Armando Vilaseca, the state has a student-to-staff ratio of 4.55-to-1.

“We can’t maintain that,” he says. “Nationally, the ratio’s about 8 to 1. Our public school staff have increased probably about 3,000 over the same time period that we’ve lost about 15,000 students. Those are unsustainable numbers.”

It’s a problem that Jack Rizzo, superintendent of Windham Southwest Supervisory Union, predicts is “coming to a boil in the state of Vermont” within the next four to five years.

“This is a historic problem,” says Stephan Morse, a member of the state Board of Education and chair of the state’s school consolidation commission.

“Since 1997, the student enrollment has gone down 14 percent, and the full-time employees have gone up 23 percent,” Morse says.

“We simply can’t afford to have all these schools in our small state,” Morse says. “It’s impossible to maintain.”

A patchwork system

Like other institutions, most public schools in Vermont have been built out, over the years, from their original structures. Some have been renovated, razed, and rebuilt, and some have been left unaltered.

In the early 1800s, Vermont had nearly 2,500 small schools and up to eight school districts in a town. The boundaries of these districts were established according to historical settlements, and each small school was largely governed by that settlement’s values and concerns.

In 1892, the state government established school districts according, more or less, to town boundaries, decreasing the number of districts to fewer than 300.

One of the ways we keep things high quality is everyone does multiple jobs, so all of the teachers teach two grades.”
~ Stephanie Aldrich
Principal, West Halifax Elementary School

In 1896, the state allowed towns to join larger school supervisory unions, while maintaining their local schools and boards.

By most appearances, Vermont’s schools still function under the system established in 1896. Today, there are 278 school districts. A town-elected school board of three or more members oversees each school in each district. There are currently about 1,300 school board members in the state.

Each supervisory union is served by a superintendent whom all the boards hire together. Town boards are tasked with hiring the principal and setting policy for their respective schools, and with approving or amending their schools’ budgets, among other duties. The school boards and supervisory unions are collectively known as “governance.”

And yet, the actual system that decides who gets what, to quote everyone acquainted with it, is very complex.

Act 60 and Act 68, passed in 1997 and 2003, respectively, allow the state to collect taxes from every resident and property owner, and to distribute that pool of money to schools on a more-or-less per-pupil basis.

One problem for small and shrinking schools is that, below a certain enrollment level, costs don’t function on a per-pupil basis.

For example, whether five students are in a class or 15, the cost is nearly the same. That’s because students don’t cost much. The staff and the building account for nearly all the cost of the classroom.

So, small schools are often trying to do the same work with much less money.

Part of a 2010 bill by the Legislature, “Challenges for Change,” requested that all schools in Vermont cut roughly 2 percent of their budgets, for a statewide total of $23 million.

But there was such resistance from already-squeezed small and shrinking schools that the request was never made more than optional, and the cuts ending up totaling only $4 million.

This year, Gov. Peter Shumlin said that the federal government will cover the remaining $19 million.

And now comes Act 153, the Voluntary School District Merger Act. The request asks schools to consider consolidating with other schools, districts with other districts, and boards with other boards, while providing incentives for them to do so.

Schools and districts have until 2017 to take advantage of its provisions. So far, only about 10 districts have indicated interest.

For small and shrinking schools, declining enrollments and the complexities of state funding make these tentative forays into state education reform challenging, especially during the yearly budget season.

The heart of a town

Stephanie Aldrich, West Halifax Elementary School's principal and kindergarten teacher. Photo courtesy of The Commons.

It’s recess at West Halifax Elementary, and kids are sledding down the hillside above a modest, snow-covered playground.

The school shares a building with the town office; an older woman shuffles up the steps to get a license for her dog. This building, along with a post office, comprises downtown Halifax. There’s no store or gas station, and almost half the houses in town are second homes.

Halifax educates about 56 students, from kindergarten through eighth grade.

“You really don’t wind up coming through Halifax just coincidentally. It’s really not on your way to anywhere else,” says Stephanie Aldrich, principal and kindergarten teacher. She’s eating lunch in her tidy office, her laptop open behind her.

“I’ve worked at the school for seven years and taught various grades,” says Aldrich, who has the patient grace particular to kindergarten teachers. “Our enrollment has been slowly declining since I got here. At one point, it was much bigger.”

Halifax has just put the year’s budget together, and Aldrich says it’s always a challenging time.

“We’re pretty bare bones as far as our budget goes. When we do our budget, we’re really looking at how is this going to affect the tax rate. If we raise the budget, it’s obviously going to raise the tax rate, and we know it’s not a town with a lot of money,” she says.

The school board takes the budget “very seriously, and they do everything they can to cut everything out of the budget that they possibly think we could do without,” Aldrich adds.

“So far, that’s just been recognized, and we haven’t had problems,” she notes. “But you always walk into Town Meeting on pins and needles, knowing that anything cut from the budget would be significant. I can’t imagine what else we would cut.”

With this Spartan budget, the staff is forced to be creative and to work long hours with some of the lowest salaries in the state, Aldrich says.

“One of the ways we keep things high quality is everyone does multiple jobs,” she says. “So all of the teachers teach two grades.”

Almost all of the school’s staff, including the maintenance team and the school cook, run after-school programs. “We don’t get to go on fancy field trips and, instead of buying a new science curriculum, sometimes the teachers have to spend time on the Internet pulling up updated lesson plans,” Aldrich says.

“It definitely provides challenges,” she says. “We have to figure out how can we get to the same end, and not have all the whistles and bells.”

Windham Southwest Supervisory Union Superintendent Jack Rizzo. Photo courtesy of The Commons.

Aldrich’s boss, Rizzo, has called West Halifax, with its polite and smiling students, a “blessed learning community.”

“I think we really are functioning well in one sense — our kids are performing really highly,” Aldrich says. “We had crazy-high test scores, we have 90-percent enrollment in our after-school program, and we have kids that are just happy.”

The educational success of the school, along with its greater meaning to the town, make it difficult to consider moving the students and giving up the environment of the tiny school, Aldrich says.

“The question that comes up every year at Town Meeting is, ‘Would it be cheaper to tuition the kids to another school?’ But at what point does it being cheaper make it worth it? I don’t think there’s anyone in the town who would say, well, if we can save a couple thousand bucks, it’s worth giving up our school.”

Aldrich, who describes herself as “someone that lives in the town and wants to see the town going in 20 years,” poses the question: “Would younger people move to the town if there was no school? I would hate to see the town start to dwindle even more because of that.”

This sentiment seems to be the basic idea that keeps Vermonters operating their small schools — they serve kids well, and they’re essential to a small town’s identity.

“The Department of Education said the majority of Vermonters would be behind the consolidation movement, and I’m thinking, ‘Well, the majority of Vermonters live in places that wouldn’t be affected by the consolidation movement,’” Aldrich says. “This might not be a question of the majority. It’s what do the small towns think, too.”

Smaller and smaller

Declining enrollments put small schools in a bind: The statewide funding pool has created a nexus of interconnected towns paying for and getting paid by one another.

Acts 60 and 68 created a system in which property- and income-tax payers from everywhere in the state pay into one pool of money. Some towns pay more into the fund than they get from it, and some receive more than they give.

Any one school’s budget thus becomes a statewide concern. The money that comes to a school like Halifax might come from Wilmington taxpayers, and those same funds might also be needed in St. Johnsbury.

The financial structure works in opposition to the small, locally controlled school model.

As one might expect, the situation gets complicated.

Twin Valley High School in Wilmington is a sprawling building that looks like an 1800s inn from the front and that, around back, has the heavy brick and steel construction of any postwar high school.

This building has been through numerous transformations and renovations over the years, and could well be in for more. There are roughly 170 students in grades 9-12, down from a peak of about 240.

Principal Frank Spencer sits at his desk in the school’s upper office. He started working here right out of college, and he will retire at the end of this year. His resume reveals a series of school consolidations and changes.

“I’ve been in this same building for 40 years, but I’ve had at least five different jobs,” says Spencer, who “started as a teacher, then became half-time teacher/half-time assistant principal and athletic director, became the principal of the Wilmington Junior Senior High in ’87, became the principal of the Wilmington Middle/High School in ’91, and then became the principal of Twin Valley High in 2004.”

Spencer has been through a consolidation before and, because of low enrollment, his school might be on the verge of another.

“Seven years ago, the decision was made to consolidate the middle and high school for Wilmington and Whitingham,” Spencer says. “Now, the Twin Valley Middle School is located in Whitingham, Twin Valley High is located here, and now we’re talking about consolidation of K-12.”

Putting both schools in one building would require renovations, and it’s difficult to justify the spending to the town, says Spencer.

Wilmington pays more into the education pool than it receives — primarily because of its high property values, many second homes, and a relatively small school.

Spencer says that Act 60 created a “huge challenge and problem” for Wilmington, Dover, and other towns with similar financial pictures.

“In the original Act 60, for every dollar we spent on our education, we had to ship a dollar to Montpelier to be sent around to other towns,” he says.

Wilmington voters, he adds, defeated a bond vote to renovate the Middle/High School “in large part because, at the informational meeting, someone stood up who had a sign that said $8 million, which was the cost of doing it, equals $16 million.”

That 1:1 ratio of dollars spent to dollars contributed to the state education fund was modified over the years, but the reality remains that Wilmington pays for other towns’ schools and doesn’t have a say in how the money is spent.

“If they need that money to maintain essential education, I can understand that, but there’s a school up north that renovated their gymnasium three years ago, and I talked to the administrator there, and he said when they did the presentation for the bond vote they essentially said, ‘Wilmington’s going to pay for it,’” Spencer says.

“Renovating our gym is something we’d love to be able to do,” he adds.

School budgeting was also easier to explain to the town before Acts 60 and 68, Spencer says. The actual property tax rate residents pay is now decided after the budget is approved, in part by the state’s appraisal of property values.

“You can still talk about the budget and how you’re spending the money, but people get frustrated because there’s no way to tell them definitively,” he says.

“It’s as though you went to Shaw’s and said, ‘I’d like to buy this,’” and they said, ‘OK, we’ll send you the bill.’ ‘Well, how much is it going to cost?’ ‘Well, we can’t tell you how much it’s going to cost. If you want it, take it.’”

Ongoing confusion from the days when a town funded its own school remains as well, Spencer says. The fact that households making less than $90,000 are probably paying education taxes based on their incomes, and not on their property values, isn’t clear to a lot of people.

Spencer says that he hears people at town meeting who argue against education spending because of property-tax increases that won’t affect them. “It’s so difficult to explain to people what the impact will be, that there are still people who will treat it like the old days.”

Maintaining educational opportunities in this economic environment is a delicate balance, Spencer says, but it’s essential to sustain some costly programs.

“An example is funding extracurricular activities. Students who are engaged in athletics, drama, things like that, are the ones who will normally excel in academics,” he says. “So, if you can provide students with a reasonable variety of extracurricular activities, you’re likely to have greater performance in the classrooms.”

The other factor for Twin Valley, Spencer says, is that roughly 25 percent of students are tuition students.

“Our snowboarding team is relatively expensive, but we have tuition students who come here so they can be on the snowboarding team,” he explains. “If we don’t have it, there’s a good chance they might go somewhere else. If you cut $10,000 on the snowboarding, then you’ve lost $20,000 because two of the tuition students left. You can go downhill very quickly if you start making those cuts.”

Spencer says that even in his 40th year at the school, he has no idea what the future holds financially and educationally.

“But to me, the immediate solution a lot of schools or districts should look at is a fair and reasonable consolidation,” he says. “It seems highly unlikely Vermont is going to mandate it, but somewhere along the way, if they really want to make these cuts, closing down schools is about the only way.”