[W]OODBURY — Ten state legislators and the secretary of the Vermont Agency of Education spent Tuesday evening helping residents in one rural community understand how the new education reform law will impact local schools.
About 75 people packed the school gym at Woodbury Graded School, a 1914 red wooden building just off Vermont 14, around the corner from the town’s general store and signs warning of moose crossings. School board members from towns in the Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union represented about a third of the audience.
The supervisory union hosted the meeting to help teachers, school board members and parents learn about state incentives and mandates for district-wide mergers under Act 46.
The Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union has six individual school boards representing school districts in Craftsbury, Greensboro, Hardwick, Stannard, Wolcott and Woodbury. Under the new law, those school districts could become one unified school district with one school board or merge with other districts in the region.
Act 46 calls for the 277 school districts across Vermont to voluntarily find ways to merge districts into larger Pre-K-12 education systems with a target number of 900 students. The bill seeks to improve educational opportunities for students while achieving economies of scale through the formation of larger school governance systems.
Like many areas of Vermont, the region served by the supervisory union is seeing a decline in student enrollment. In less than 20 years, Vermont has lost more than 24,000 students, but staffing has not gone down in proportion, and education spending continues to increase.
Many residents who spoke at the meeting in Woodbury expressed support for small schools and small class sizes, saying their schools had served them, and their children, well.
Steve Moffatt, chair of the Craftsbury School Board, was critical of how the law might impact the town’s school. He said in the past five years, “spending has not increased past the rate of inflation.”
“We’ve taken your message seriously, expanded our student population, expanded our opportunities both inside the classroom and out,” Moffatt said. “We have a high graduation rate, and a higher percentage of students going to college. Why would I want to risk losing local control?”
“It’s a tough sell for my community,” Moffatt said before he sat down to applause.
Sen. Ann Cummings, D-Washington, said Craftsbury may not need to merge its school board with other districts. If the town, she said, is “delivering a quality education at an affordable per student price, then you’re probably going to be OK.”
Several lawmakers, including Sen. Anthony Pollina, P/D-Washington, Rep. Sam Young, D-Glover, and Rep. Vicki Strong, R-Irasburg, said they voted against the legislation because they worried the law would compromise local control.
Suzy Graves of Woodbury said she believes the state needs to find a different funding model for education in Vermont.
“If education is very important to the State of Vermont, my opinion would be that you look at it from a different point of view, and that you come up with another funding source than what we’re doing now, and always pushing it back on the school boards to deal with it. Come up with some other funding sources. That would be helpful.”
Financial resources, however, are dwindling as property taxpayers are tapped out in many communities, and the state faces ongoing budget deficits.
Rebecca Holcombe, the secretary of the Agency of Education, said many districts have no choice but to consider mergers. She pointed to a school with an enrollment of 170 students facing $6 million in needed capital improvements.
“That’s a pretty grim future,” Holcombe said. “That’s a pretty hard lift, especially in a system that has declining enrollment.”
She suggested starting with what the communities want for their children.
“Think about quality,” said Holcombe. “I would start with your quality and your equity, and then I would think about your sustainability. My hope is that you can see the tools that are outlined in Act 46 as an opportunity, given the challenges that we face.”
Cummings, chair of the Senate Education Committee, said the increase in education spending at a time when student enrollments are declining is difficult for taxpayers to support.
“I don’t need to tell you that taxpayers have been concerned about the cost of education, about the rate that their school bills and their tax bills are going up,” Cummings said. “There is a significant amount of pressure on us to do something.”
A high percentage of students in Vermont graduate from high school, but the state rates second to last nationally in post-graduate education and training, Cummings said.
“We also know if you don’t get past high school, you’re pretty much condemning yourself to a minimum wage job, and it’s pretty likely the state is going to be supporting you in some way,” Cummings said.
Rep. David Sharpe, D-Bristol, chair of the House Education Committee, said the new law pushes communities to right-size school districts.
“We’re asking you to face the problems that our state is seeing both in terms of educating students and the cost to taxpayers,” he said.
Joanne LeBlanc, the interim superintendent of OSSU, said in an interview that the six district boards in the supervisory union will revisit the work of a voluntary merger study from two years ago.
The new law offers tax breaks for districts that move early into mergers.
Act 46 dials back the hold harmless formula, which has insulated districts that have lost students from feeling the full financial blow of shrinking enrollments.
Districts that do not move into larger systems and that the agency believes need to make changes after statewide Education Quality Reviews are conducted, can be reassigned by the State Board of Education under the law, starting in late 2018.