Gov. Peter Shumlin made it clear Thursday that passage of a bill reducing the number of school boards in the state is one of his major goals for the waning legislative session.
The governor told reporters that the administration would fight for H.883 down to the final gavel. “We have to take the burden off property taxpayers that are seeing increases that their wallets can’t sustain,” he said at a Statehouse news conference.
The bill would eliminate 270-plus school districts and create 45 to 55 supervisory districts that would have unified management of personnel, coordinated best practices for teachers and district-wide curriculum. H.883 stalled in the House Appropriations Committee this week.
The legislation is on the House notice calendar for Tuesday. House Speaker Shap Smith has set May 9 as the target for adjournment, leaving little time for the bill to be considered by the Senate.
The goal of the legislation is to reduce costs and improve educational opportunities, supporters say. Opponents say it takes away local control over school spending decisions.
The governor acknowledges that the debate over creating fewer school districts is difficult and divisive, and he need look no further than his adopted hometown of East Montpelier for proof of how the law might play out on the ground.
Residents of the separate U-32 and Montpelier school districts met with legislators Wednesday night in an attempt to share the lessons of 40 years of off-and-on discussions about consolidating or merging the two neighboring districts.
About 50 people attended the Statehouse gathering organized by Rep. Tony Klein, D-East Montpelier, Rep. Mary Hooper, D-Montpelier, and other lawmakers.
Speakers told of the obstacles they faced in earlier attempts to combine the districts, whose two supervisory central offices are about four miles apart. Past reasons for the failure included a lack of significant savings, uneven board representation, loss of control over staffing and plain, old community rivalry.
“In the past, there has been no appetite for it in Washington Central (the U-32 district),” said Montpelier Mayor John Hollar, a former school board chairman.
Though local residents remain skeptical, the difference this time, Klein said, is that no one at the hearing definitively said “it’ll never happen.”
Many of the people who spoke acknowledged that cost savings could be achieved by eliminating administrative overhead and sharing educational opportunities, while others worried about the loss of local decision-making and state intervention.
Some said it was unclear whether school consolidation actually saves money and improves outcomes.
“The jury is out on rural school consolidation,” said Montpelier resident Theresa Murray-Clasen, who also said she would welcome having state participation in consolidation discussions. “It would be great to have a team of professionals to work with school districts when they run into walls.”
Dexter Lefavour of Middlesex suggested making a list of all the academic and athletic opportunities available at the two schools and let juniors and seniors pick from the list to gauge which programs had the most demand.
A new opportunity
The Montpelier-U-32 debate extends back to the creation of U-32, which opened in 1971 amid the district high school building boom. Before U-32, most students in the feeder towns of Berlin, Calais, East Montpelier, Middlesex and Worcester attended Montpelier High School. When the new district was formed, Montpelier elected not to join.
Since then, as Montpelier’s school population has declined, efforts to unite re-emerged and study committees came and went. Negative feelings lingered and many in the Washington Central Supervisory Union towns believed Montpelier had its chance, residents of both districts have said.
Now that the state has made school consolidation a priority, the issue is back in front of the central Vermont communities.
Some people at Wednesday’s meeting expressed a desire for a “bottom-up” approach, where individual districts decide to join on their own rather than under a state mandate.
Montpelier resident Charlie Phillips, who is on the school board and has also served at U-32, said it just might take a push from the state to make consolidation happen.
“There has to be some coercion from the top down to get people to consolidate,” Phillips said. “(State involvement) is a different way of approaching things. (Having one K-12 board) avoids some of the really thorny issues involved in consolidation.”
Shumlin on Thursday rejected the notion of more study on consolidation and said action was needed this session.
“Having a K through 12 education enterprise makes a lot of sense for Vermont,” Shumlin said. “Whatever the Legislature does should empower local communities to decide their future and their destiny.
“There’s a difference between right-sizing administrative bureaucracy and closing schools,” he said. “I don’t think Montpelier should ever be deciding what schools should be open and what schools should close … that would be a disaster. What Montpelier can and must do is come up with a better structure for administering schools that improves education outcomes and quality and in the long run saves administrative costs.”
Action may already have begun in central Vermont as Phillips said he planned to ask the Montpelier School Board to consider holding a joint meeting with the U-32 board to discuss ways to reduce administrative costs.
“Everybody was feeling positive (after Wednesday’s hearing),” Phillips said, adding that it might be the right time to explore the opportunity again.
