Editor’s note: This commentary is by Alison Lane Anand, who is a member of the Mount Mansfield Union School Board member and a career educator, business owner and environmental planner. She lives in Richmond.
Schools can’t strive for excellence if they close, and that is what the Chittenden East Supervisory Union merger is really about. The public and the various local school boards, officials and prominent citizens have been subjected to nothing less than a hard sell about a proposition to consolidate schools (Modified Unified Union School District, formerly called the RED). I have watched several people who were opposed to the idea when it was proposed in 2011 change sides under the pressure of “working together as a group.” However, the proposed structure is divisive, the opposite of community building. Here is why.
1. The merger eliminates the local school boards under the guise of “efficiency.” One school board member recently said, “The unified school board will find it easier to make the difficult decision to close a school.” It is impossible to think that a board of 15 people overseeing nine schools can give the care and attention that the present school boards give. We need more, not less community participation in our schools. The present school boards are local volunteers who give considerable amounts of time to their communities and feel they have a vested interest in important decision making. They cannot be replaced by a centralized smaller more remote board which will discourage volunteerism at the local level by taking power away from the public. If a majority but not all towns vote for the merger, the merger defaults to the modified union. School board representation becomes confused and unbalanced. People who favor a complete merger but not a modified merger have no clear voting choice.
2. A hidden form of bankruptcy is the transferring of public assets. If you vote for this merger proposal, your school and school building will be sold to the merger for one dollar.
Contained in Articles 7 and 8 of the Voluntary Merger Committee Modified Unified Union Report/Plan is the description of the process of transferring these public assets to the union district. They could choose to close your school. They claim that if that happens, the building would be offered back to the town in which it is located, but the town would have to reimburse the merger for any improvements and keep the building in a public function for five years. If a town cannot or chooses not to comply with this requirement, they do not recover their building.
Who is most vulnerable here? Two schools in particular. Underhill ID would go to the Rawson Library. (Incidentally, Underhill ID owns the land on which the Rawson Library is now located. There is a 99 year lease.) Bolton has the most assets per child of any of our district schools. The temptation might be enormous to capitalize on the acquisition of assets with the fewest number of children to farm out to other schools. Smilie School could possibly end up eventually as a private charter school, at the bottom of Bolton Mountain, while the children of Bolton ride the bus past what used to be their school, on their way to school in a different town.
It is also interesting that Richmond has more liabilities than all the other towns combined. The merger would help Richmond pay off its debt. Where is the list of assets and liabilities that the voters are asked to assume? It is not on the voting ballot or even in the 44-page CESU Volunteer Merger Committee Report/Plan. It is listed on the Chittenden East website, but only after the request of some concerned citizens.
3. Rising costs and lower enrollments are bankrupting the taxpayers! Yes, but this merger proposition only guarantees temporary tax savings to towns who vote yes. These are not “pennies from heaven”; they are your tax dollars rearranged to give preference to people who vote for a specific agenda. Using public funds in this manner has been proven illegal in other similar circumstances. There are some who regard this as bribery.
Public education is a civic duty of a free society. Our country cannot afford to put it at such risk, and we in Vermont can lead the way to protect it.
The real culprits of rising costs are unfunded mandates and government regulations which increase the responsibilities of the schools. As a career educator, I have noticed over the past 30 years that the schools have had to assume gradually more responsibilities which used to be considered parenting.
The No Child Left Behind law, supposedly intended to improve schools, has actually done enormous damage to the public school system around the country by sapping resources from needed school programs. It has forced the closing of many schools and firing of many capable teachers and principals, just because a school could not meet an unreasonable standard. The efforts to meet this standard have also created a test cheating scandal in an effort to survive. More information and proof of this is presented in a book by education historian Diane Ravitch in her 2013 book “Reign of Error — The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools.” Recently Timothy Meegan of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote an article titled “America’s Schools are Being Starved into Failure in Order to Justify Mass Privatization.” He explains that after mass privatization, the next plan on the part of some of the wealthy is to eliminate free public education through charter schools. One vehicle for this disassembling of public education is redistricting (school consolidation).
4. There is no going back. For example, the 2013 Legislature in the state of Maine tried unsuccessfully to reverse school consolidation. A major obstacle was that the towns no longer owned their school buildings. In Philadelphia, the charter schools have taken so much funding away from public schools that the public schools have deficient resources. The students who do not qualify for admission to the charter schools are relegated to the public schools. Similar situations exist in North Carolina, Maryland, Wisconsin, California and Georgia. In New York City, after years of consolidation, there is a new “Small Schools Movement.” They are now developing small neighborhood elementary schools with no more than 200 students in each school. It has been established that students in the elementary age group do best in a small nurturing environment. Vermont already has this environment.
5. There is concern about the achievement gap. The achievement gap is the opportunity gap. The inequality between the rich and poor deteriorates the goal of a peaceful society. Thomas Pickety in the book “Capital in the 21st Century” considers it to be the potential downfall of our society. Statistics show that there is a correlation between students qualifying for free and reduced lunch and lower achievement. The root of the achievement gap is poverty, economic struggle of the need for two income-earning parents, and cultural prejudice (yes, even in Vermont). However, in Vermont we are doing better than most of the nation in our efforts to close the gap. In fact, in our school board meetings, there are repetitious presentations about how Vermont, and particularly our district, rate high in test scores, even in world comparisons. Why should we change this highly performing structure? How is a structure that gives less public input and less personal attention to individual needs going to help the opportunity gap? An old Vermont saying is “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it”.
An arguing point by the proponents of the merger has been the expectation that it will be forced on us by the Legislature. This has not happened. We do not need to rush into the existing very imperfect system of consolidation. The present legal structure (Acts 153,156) is a vestige of the kind of thinking that produced the No Child Left Behind law. It has been tried and regretted in many parts of the country because contrary to expectation, it has actually worsened the gap between rich and poor. Instead, it amounts to disassembling public education and taking control of millions of dollars of public property and assets for a pittance and a small tax bribe. The promise of making things more fair through the proposed merger is a myth.
Public education is a civic duty of a free society. Our country cannot afford to put it at such risk, and we in Vermont can lead the way to protect it.
I hope that people will have the courage to vote no to this merger. We deserve better.
