[T]he State Board of Education approved a proposal Tuesday for a new unified school district in Brookfield, Braintree and Randolph that would replace five school boards with one and potentially save $66,000.
Voters in the three communities will make the final decision on whether it becomes reality on Town Meeting Day. If even one town votes it down — as happened with a previous merger plan — the unification will not happen.
Students aren’t likely to notice a change. The study committee is proposing a system offering pre-kindergarten through 12th grade that maintains the three K-6 elementary schools — Brookfield, Braintree and Randolph — that feed into one middle and high school. The district would continue to operate the Randolph Technical Career Center as well.
Currently Orange Southwest Supervisory Union has five separate boards: one for each of the town elementary schools, one for Randolph Union High School and another for the supervisory union. The Orange Southwest Unified District as proposed would replace those five boards, and their separate budgets, with one eight-member board and one systemwide budget.
Also, under a unified district, the employees would be covered by a systemwide contract that would allow them to carry over their seniority across schools.
According to the study committee, the merger should give the district a better chance of attracting and keeping skilled teaching staff; enable equalizing of class sizes; ensure the same curriculum is taught across schools and grades; and streamline financing.
No major cost savings are expected, because special education and transportation costs are already centralized, and as a union high school district, services and operations have already been consolidated. But the study committee did identify about $65,930 in additional cost reductions by completely centralizing the human resources system; increasing student-to-staff ratios; and reducing expenditures for treasurers, audits and board member stipends.
Brooke Dingledine, chair of the Randolph Union High School Board, who presented the proposal to the State Board of Education, spoke about the long history these communities have shared working together to educate their children by sharing staff and improving buildings.
“We look at ourselves as a community,” she said. “We are very committed to one another to ensure that every child in our district is provided the same opportunity, the same curriculum and the same chance so that when they come together in seventh grade in middle school they are all on the same page.”
The merger plan qualifies in all but one respect for the “preferred model” presented in Act 46 for accelerated mergers that can garner a 10-cent reduction in the property tax rate. It falls just short of the 900-student average daily membership requirement in the law. So, Orange Southwest Unified District is moving forward as a regional education district, as outlined in previous education law, which qualifies for an 8-cent tax break.
“We would have preferred to do this under an accelerated merger,” said Brent Kay, superintendent of Orange Southwest Supervisory Union. He said the average daily membership is around 850.
Average daily membership is the number of students who live in a district for whom the district is responsible to provide education. It is different from enrollment, which is a head count of the students attending a school on Oct. 1 regardless of where they live. Orange Southwest has a lower membership than enrollment largely because of the technical center and two special education centers, which bring it to around 1,100 enrolled students, according to Kay.
“This is one of our pet peeves around using ADM, which is a tax number. We are significantly understated in our ADM. The reality is … between choice and tuition we have a lot more kids in our system than our ADM suggests we have on paper for taxes,” Kay said. He said he didn’t think lawmakers meant the 900 number to be firm and he would like them to change this part of Act 46.
Jeff Francis, executive director of the Vermont Superintendents Association, said that requests for changes to the law are inevitable. He thinks it would be better to look at Act 46 later, after it has been in action for a couple of years. “Orange Southwest can articulate its position on ADM versus enrollment, and there are other aspects of this law that ought to be looked at over time. But the law in its general construct seems to be working pretty well” for communities that make use of it.
This isn’t Orange Southwest’s first attempt at a merger. It proposed a merger in 2012 that failed by a “teeny-weenie” margin, according to Dingledine. Brookfield rejected it, which was attributed to fears on the part of some residents that their elementary school would be closed without them having an adequate say in the matter.
Under the current proposal, a school could be closed in the first four years of the unified district’s operation only if voters in the affected town went along. After June 30, 2021, a three-quarters vote by the unified district board would be enough to close a school, after a process of hearings and an advisory vote by residents.
In the years since the 2012 merger attempt, the towns have developed cross-community goals, according to Dingledine.
In fact, Kay said if voters back this unification, administrators would still like to find even more teammates in the region. “We are too small. We only have one person in any of our key positions,” he said. Officials will continue to have discussions with other districts and will keep looking for more partners in the region including Chelsea, Rochester, Northfield and Williamstown, according to Kay.
“At this point, it seems that when local citizens examine the benefits of coming together to achieve the goals of Act 46 they realize that the opportunities are there,” Francis said.
