Lincoln residents voted Tuesday to withdraw from the unified school district that also includes Bristol, Monkton, New Haven and Starksboro.
With 525 voting in favor of withdrawal and 172 voting against, the town will progress to the next stage of withdrawing from the Mount Abraham Unified School District. For the process to continue, the other four towns in the district would also need to vote in favor of Lincoln’s departure.
Save Community Schools, a group led by Lincoln residents, advocated for the town to leave the unified district.
“Our commitment from the beginning was to stay in the district, work with the district to find a way to keep the Lincoln school open and alive and well as part of the unified school district,” said Save Community Schools member Jim Warnock, referring to the kindergarten through sixth-grade Lincoln Community School.
If the town successfully withdraws from the district, school choice for students in grades 7-12 is among the options.
A number of factors contributed to Save Community School’s push for Lincoln to leave the Mount Abe school district.
They questioned whether Lincoln’s school would remain open to K-6 students, in part, because of a proposal from Superintendent Patrick Reen. The proposal would repurpose three schools, including the Lincoln Community School, as “innovation centers,” said Paul Forlenza, another Save Community Schools member and member of Lincoln’s Selectboard.
When the school board began soliciting proposals for changes to the district, the group submitted one that would keep Lincoln’s school open. But after the district extended the timeline for considering proposals to December and hired a consultant, the group grew concerned.
The Mount Abe district and nearby Addison Northwest School District formed a committee in April to weigh the pros and cons of a merger, Warnock said. The committee aims to supply a recommendation about the merger in December to the Vermont Board of Education, Warnock said, potentially allowing the merger question to appear on the ballot on Town Meeting Day if it is approved. A story last week in the Addison County Independent reported that this timeline was not definite.
“The feeling was becoming more and more apparent to us. It appeared that the proposal process was sort of being slowed down at the same time that the merger study committee was being sped up,” Warnock said.
Currently, Warnock said, the articles of agreement for the Mount Abraham Unified School District grants member towns the ability to vote before one of their schools can be closed. The Save Community Schools members are concerned that towns could lose that right in the event of a merger, in which new articles of agreement would be drawn up.
In an interview with VTDigger this afternoon, Bristol School Board Representative Dave Sharpe said he felt that Lincoln was rushing to make decisions about withdrawing before the board had made decisions about proposals.
As of Tuesday afternoon, Sharpe said the board was still weighing the pros and cons of the proposals they received, and he hopes they will eventually come to a consensus.
“At that point, when the school board makes up its mind, [it] might be appropriate for one or more towns to say: ‘That doesn’t work for us. We’re out of here,’” he said.
Sharpe also said the proposal from the district’s superintendent, which would repurpose Lincoln’s school, was “dead on arrival” and the board had planned to move forward with something else anyway.
But for Save Community Schools, the window for leaving the district was narrowing. For the town to successfully leave the school district, the other member towns would need to vote in favor, the Vermont Board of Education would need to grant approval and Lincoln would need to draft an exit plan approved by the other Mount Abe district towns.
“We looked at that and said, ‘Wow, this is an 18- to 24-month process, and if we don’t start now, we’re going to get locked out,’” Forlenza said.
The group also worried it could be harder for Lincoln to get permission to leave from all towns in their district should a Mount Abe and Addison Northwest merger occur before they initiated the withdrawal process.
School district leadership has raised concerns about Lincoln’s ability to support its school if it left the district. During a board retreat earlier this month, Reen projected that Lincoln’s exit could mean a 30% tax increase for fiscal year 2024, over fiscal year 2021.
The school board’s estimates were based on a different set of assumptions than those that Save Community Schools used, Forlenza said. The group projected a 5% to 6% tax increase from fiscal year 2021 to 2024.
The vote in Lincoln was just six weeks after Addison residents voted on a similar question and decided to remain in their school district. However, Addison residents will have another opportunity to vote on staying or going after a petition triggered a revote.
The town of Ripton voted to leave the Addison Central School District this year.
In an interview before the votes were tallied, Sharpe also raised concerns about the financial viability of Lincoln’s plan if it left the district.
Sharpe chaired the House Education committee when Act 46, which consolidated school districts, was passed. He said there were towns that were clearly against the consolidation from the beginning, but he was shocked to see it happen in Addison County.
“I felt like Addison County was the poster child for why Act 46 made sense,” he said.
With enrollment at many schools dropping, some superintendents suggested closing schools, Sharpe said. Consolidation under Act 46 was not supposed to lead to school closures, he said. The idea was that it would make school districts more efficient, allowing them to share resources, keep just one set of books and ultimately save money.
Sharpe said they have not seen those savings.
“It seems like this newfound power that superintendents and school boards have, centralizing the power has not resulted in the reduction of cost for that central organization,” he said. “So, that concerns me greatly.”
Sharpe worries that towns leaving their districts could exacerbate equity issues, degrade public education and lead to the increased privatization of education in the state.
Warnock partially attributes a town’s desire to leave its district to a lack of genuine community among the school communities created through Act 46, he said.
“When things start getting tough via declining enrollments, spiraling health care costs, et cetera, unfortunately, what we have seen happen is that it becomes more, kind of, every town for themselves rather than, ‘let’s pull together as a unified community and see how we can problem-solve this,’” he said.
Corrections: Jim Warnock’s name was misspelled in an earlier version of this article, and a quote from Warnock about his groups’s commitment to “stay in” the district has been corrected. Additionally, an earlier version of this article misstated the timing for projected tax increases forecast by the district and Save Community Schools. The future of school choice in Lincoln has been clarified.
