Almost all school districts in the Chittenden East Supervisory Union will merge next summer, voters decided Tuesday. In Bolton, Jericho, Richmond and Underhill, poll results showed overwhelming support for a voluntary unification. All schools in the district except Brewster Pierce Elementary School in Huntington will be controlled by one school board.
Huntington was the lone holdout in the five-town ballot measure, voting it down 521 to 285. Residents there will retain a school board for the town’s single-school district at Brewster Pierce.
The “modified” union approved by other towns will include five elementary schools, plus two middle schools and one high school that already are unified as Mount Mansfield Union School District to serve grades 5 through 12 in the five towns.
The newly reformed supervisory union’s single, overarching budget will contain smaller, school-level budgets, said Chuck Lacy, a community member representing the town of Jericho on a 15-member merger committee.
Lacy said that, in addition to administrative nimbleness, unification will allow the district to achieve cost efficiencies through streamlining. That may include staff reductions, especially among maintenance or support personnel at some point, he said. But the payoff, he added, will be in a more consistent curriculum that better prepares students.
He said at Mount Mansfield Union School District, planning and curricula at the middle school levels feed into high school curricula, and this integration makes the transition more productive for kids. He expects the same benefit will come from bringing elementary schools into the fold.
Opposition explained
Megs Keir, who represented the Huntington School Board on the merger committee, penned the group’s minority report in July. She recommended against the merger, saying it was well intentioned but deserved closer scrutiny, especially in terms of projected cost savings, student opportunities and governance.
“The loss of local control is much more than an outdated emotional concern,” Keir wrote, “as it involves relinquishing ownership of real estate and assets, as well as transferring decision-making to a smaller number of people, most of whom are not the neighbors we meet and greet in our daily comings and goings.”
She said a proper analysis should more specifically outline deficiencies in the current operating model and how unification would solve those problems. The merger discussion should include alternative models that also address concerns about the “modified” union district model, she said.
Keir was the only dissenting committee member, and the majority responded to her minority report by alleging several factual errors.
“Paradoxically, the minority report expresses hunger for CESU wide deliberations on important education issues when the proposed governance structure will finally provide a school board charged and capable of doing just that,” the majority response reads.
School board membership from each town will reflect each town’s population: four members each from Richmond and Jericho, two each from Underhill, Underhill ID and Huntington, and one member from Bolton. Huntington’s membership on the supervisory union will be maintained because the town’s middle and high school students will continue to matriculate to the union middle and high schools as they do now.
Lacy said that a unified school board will be able to respond better to community needs.
“We have eight different districts with eight different sets of voters and eight different sets of taxpayers,” Lacy said. “Trying to move ahead as a district is really difficult. We move at glacial speed because it takes eight different boards to sign off on (the) language — even on things we agree on.”
He said the new school board may, at some point down the road, reconfigure enrollment boundaries to allow more school choice, and may even move to close one or more small schools. But the status quo made school closure even more likely, he said, because operations had become unsustainable.
Lacy said he wished Huntington voters had seen the value of unification, but that he was relieved its decision was conclusive. A skin-of-the-teeth “yes” vote ultimately would have proven harder to work with than a decisive “no” will be to work around, he said.
Test case
Steve Dale, executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association, said he was pleased with the vote to unify. The VBSA has been working with Vermont’s Agency of Education to inform school boards across the state about projected enrollments and school costs in coming years, and possible partnership models that may help sustain local public education.
“We’ll all get a chance to see how it works,” Dale said.
The “modified” union was made possible by a recent change in state law, and CESU is the first to implement a structure that allows Huntington, for example, to keep one foot out.
“If it works really really well, it may be a model that other people will follow. If it’s not really successful, I’m sure the law may change,” Dale said.
Either way, he expects it will be at least a couple years before the new union’s performance can be measured. Unification is set to commence July 1, 2015, with all prior district work to be wrapped up no later than June 30, 2016.
In the meantime, Dale said he’s interested to see a modified union tried for the first time in Vermont.
