The Northeast Kingdom community voted on Tuesday to shutter the Guildhall Elementary School.
The K-6 school, established in 1957, will be close down at the conclusion of this academic year and students will be tuitioned out to other schools for grades K-12.
Michael Clark, the superintendent of the Essex Caledonia Supervisory Union, said the school no longer had enough students to keep going.
“As sad and heartbreaking as this story is about the Guildhall School closing the real challenge is the economy in the Northeast Kingdom,” Clark said. “We aren’t attracting families with school age children to the Guildhall area and that is sad.”
In the last 10 years, four nearby mills closed, according to Guildhall Elementary School Principal Cheryl McVetty. “There are no jobs,” she said.
None of this came as a surprise to local residents. The October vote was set at Town Meeting Day in March. Enrollment is expected to plummet from a total of 20 students this year to only 10 students over the next two years. Six of the students would have been at the elementary school and the other four older students would have been tuitioned out for middle and high school.
If the school had stayed open, taxes would have gone up to $1.97 for every $100 of assessed property value, according to Clark, who said that estimate was “optimistic.”
“With their hearts, the community absolutely loves the Guildhall School and they do a good job, however at the end of the day they couldn’t afford the increasing costs because of the decrease in the student population,” Clark said.
McVetty, whose father-in-law and nieces went to Guildhall, said they are devastated. “We understand that it comes down to not having enough kids. We are emotional but we aren’t delusional,” she said.
Clark, who has only been superintendent of Essex Caledonia Supervisory Union for four months, said he was impressed with the way the community of Guildhall handled the decision. Residents were thoughtful, deliberative, civil and very respectful throughout the process.
While there had been fears that the new school district consolidation law, Act 46, and the elimination of the small schools grant and hold harmless protection against declining enrollments would cause small schools to close, that wasn’t what put Guildhall over the edge, Clark says.
“Act 46 would have helped Guildhall stay open longer,” he said.
In fact, under almost all the merger options in the new education law, small schools that participate get to maintain both the small schools grant and hold harmless protections.
Rep. David Sharpe, chair of the House Committee on Education told the Vermont School Boards Association at their annual conference in Fairlee on Friday that Act 46 is meant to “protect our small schools to survive and thrive rather than being under the pressures of our current system.”
Still, those protections didn’t help tiny Guildhall Elementary and McVetty lamented what she called the end of an era.
“The education in small schools like this is really special because we are so small that we know these kids so well,” McVetty said. “Unfortunately, small schools are being phased out and with them a nice community of learners.”
