[N]ear the end of a meeting in Franklin to discuss forming an Act 46 study committee, one resident had a bold suggestion: Consider converting the elementary school to a private institution.
“Tell the state to keep their money and we’ll keep doing what we do without any interference from them. I can’t say enough, I just have no confidence in Montpelier,” said Jay Denault at the meeting in late March.
That is a variation on a sentiment that has been popping up around the state recently, from Stowe to Warren to Craftsbury to Manchester, often in reaction to Act 46.
The Vermont Independent Schools Association’s executive director, Mill Moore, says various places are considering the pathway “within the context of their Act 46 study. It is just part of a range of options they are looking at under Act 46.”
Some residents in Stowe are finalizing a report this summer that will be delivered to the school board and community in the fall outlining what it would take to close the elementary, middle and high schools and reopen them as independent schools. The Stowe Local Schools Initiative, a group of parents, other residents and teachers, has been meeting since last fall to determine the viability of an independent school or schools in Stowe serving all children.
“The purpose of our study was to take as broad a look as we could at the overall concept of independent schools, and our report will detail our findings on both the legal aspects of doing it and the community’s input,” said Lisa Senecal, who is on the SLSI steering committee.
In 1999, after the Stowe School Board investigated taking its schools from public to private, the proposal was rejected.
“I think at times it gets overlooked that it is a community that would need to vote to close the public schools in Stowe, so if there is not community support for independent schools then independent schools don’t happen,” Senecal added.
A quick review of what it takes to build a private school, even from an established setting, shows it is anything but easy, and it doesn’t appear to get the state out of a town’s school as Denault hopes it would.
And the timeline driven by Act 46 is making any investigation of this option a race against the clock, according to Moore.
Only two years remain before the State Board of Education will start sorting school districts based on the new map created by voluntary mergers, Moore said. “If they get merged, and this would be true of any district going independent, suddenly the local voters are no longer in control because it is now an enlarged, bigger electorate who may not have sympathy” for taking the public school to independent status.
Moore used the group considering going independent in Warren as an example. It had to move fast because Warren’s vote on merging into the Harwood Unified School District came June 8. Voters ended up endorsing the merger.
Tom Martin is headmaster at the Village School of North Bennington, a formerly public school that became independent in 2013 after a two-year process and 129 public hearings. He agreed that the Act 46 timeline is not “conducive to this process.”
“This was the most vetted process ever, I think. In order for people to understand it all you have to have the time to engage with them, and it doesn’t often happen as easily or as quickly, and the timeline in Act 46 is a challenge,” Martin said.
Lessons can be drawn from North Bennington’s transition as well as the privatization of the Winhall school — which happened in 1998 when Act 60 was fresh and Winhall’s per-pupil spending was among the highest in the state.
Martin said the rules and the pathway to independence are clearly spelled out in legislation, but politics create a murkiness that North Bennington had to cut through. “It was more complicated because of the politics behind it, and what we did here was not warmly received by the education establishment,” he said. “They were reluctant and resistant to accepting what happened here, and that made the process more difficult than prescribed by statute.”
The process
The first step is for a group of people to come together to form a nonprofit and elect a board of trustees. This group is separate from the school board. The trustees develop all the plans and organizational structure needed to step in and run what had been a public school after a school district votes to close it, according to Moore.
“That was North Bennington’s great achievement,” Moore said. “When North Bennington School District voted to close its public school, the independent school organization had already in place everything needed to be approved. They had a lease agreement established with the district for the school property. They had figured out who among the existing faculty and staff would transition into the new school and how their teacher pensions and other benefits would be transitioned. It was a big job.”
A town has to hold a series of votes that abide by the existing rules on warnings and campaigns. That means, for example, a school board can’t spend public dollars on campaigning.
A majority of voters have to agree to become a choice district, where state funding generally follows the student. Then voters have to agree to close the local public school. The town then has to decide whether to lease or sell the school to an independent organization that would take over its operation. If it is a high school going from public to private, the town also has to vote on the amount of tuition.
Some cleanup needs to happen once a public school is dissolved, according to a handbook on privatization put out by Vermonters for Better Education.
The town will have to negotiate with teachers to end their contracts unless the decision was timed to come at the end of all active contracts. The handbook suggests offering “an attractive but expensive ‘career change incentive’ package for them,” adding it would likely be more cost-effective than facing lawsuits. It also mentions that while the school can hire nonunion teachers, teachers are free to unionize under the law.
Questions of control
For an independent school, all business — including setting policies and curriculum, hiring and firing teachers, purchasing textbooks and materials — is handled by a board of trustees. The school board remains but is responsible only for paying tuition bills.
That may sound like a loss of control, but Senecal said Stowe wouldn’t lose local control by turning its public schools into private ones, because the community would be integral in creating the vision and documents that define the schools.
Senecal suggested Stowe could maintain control by drawing up “incredibly restrictive agreements between the school district and the school about how it was going to function and serve. Anything the town or school district wanted to put in there.” She added, “An agreement could work out as a tremendous incentive for a school operating in a building that could potentially disappear if those agreements are not upheld.”
But Nicole Mace, executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association — which has stated it is opposed to elected boards privatizing public schools — said this is a misconception. “They can start out with good intentions and write things up in such a way, but a private corporation can change their articles of agreement without a vote of the electorate,” she said.
Mace contended that going independent always results in a loss of local control. “You don’t elect the board of trustees for a private corporation, and they don’t have to follow the open meeting law,” she said. “They don’t have to disclose financial records, they don’t have to give residents a say in policy or the curriculum, and they don’t have to serve all students. All of that is gone when you hand your public project to a private entity.”
But Senecal said there is no reason members couldn’t be elected to an independent school’s board of trustees. She pointed to nonprofit organizations such as food shelves and arts organizations whose trustees serve the community well. “The idea that a board of trustees of an independent school in Vermont would be these foreigners who would come in and decide that this is an opportunity to scrap everything they told the community they were going to do and operate completely differently is ridiculous on its face,” she said.
Besides, she said, every town has to decide its school budget, and a community can vote it down if it has a problem with the way a school is operating or if it isn’t happy with the posted tuition. “There are certainly checks and balances,” Senecal said.
Mace said trustees can throw out elected members, because ultimately they can’t be bound by such provisions. And she argued that voting down the budget is no check on the independent system. “As a school district that doesn’t operate a school, the community is obligated to pay tuition for their students even if the electorate vote down the budget. Also, parents have the right to send their children wherever they want to, and the school district has to pay those bills too. So voting down a budget is not a way to hold a private entity accountable. Ultimately, the school district suffers, not the private entity.”
State approval
There is also a legal process involved in getting approval for a new private school. The applications on the Education Agency’s website detail what a group of would-be trustees has to prove to gain the right to educate children. Members are asked to provide evidence of fiscal stability and capacity and show that they have appropriate facilities, detailed curriculum for each subject, including methods of instruction, and plans to evaluate students. They need to show how they will govern the school and what the enrollment will be by grade, gender, demographic group and so on.
The handbook from Vermonters for Better Education lists more than a handful of requirements to be met by independent schools, including abiding by nondiscrimination requirements and having all employees successfully complete criminal background checks. The handbook then states: “As evidenced above, independent schools — especially those which can receive public funds — are not free of government regulation. But state oversight and intrusion into the school is lessened in some key areas.”
Those include not having to hire licensed teachers, being able to have larger class sizes, and not having to follow the Vermont standards for learning — expectations of what students should know and be able to do in each grade. There is a caveat, though: Any student attending the independent school using public tuition dollars has to take the state test aligned to those standards.
Once the school gets through the agency process, it seeks approval from the State Board of Education — the same body that approves Act 46 merger plans.
Martin said that was where North Bennington ran into major roadblocks. The agency has to recommend approval of any school that meets the requirements set out in statute. That same statute says the state board “shall approve” a private school that the agency recommends as long as it meets those requirements. North Bennington was delayed when the state board refused to act on its application, Martin said.
“To say it was not warmly received would be a vast understatement,” he said.
It took well over a year of attending multiple state board meetings where North Bennington’s vote was listed on the agenda but not dealt with, according to Martin.
He warned that North Bennington seems to have left a bad taste in the mouths of some state board members. “If you were to use the response we received as a measure, it would seem to indicate (public schools that want to become independent) will run into difficulties. The state board has made it clear they do not believe this is right,” he said.
The board has asked the Education Agency to review the rules for approval of independent schools and provide recommendations to update them.
William Mathis, a state board member who has been among those asking for the review, said new applications for independent schools are going to be closely considered.
He said the board will examine the proposed school’s abilities with regard to “financial stability, the ability to provide a top-quality program, the effects on the viability of neighboring schools, facilities, staff qualifications, impacts on Act 46 and union school agreements, special needs provisions and whether any new arrangement advances or harms the socio-economic, racial or other equity or equality compositions.”
And after all that, Martin said, going from public to independent won’t get a school district a “Get out of jail free card” when it comes to Act 46. “The public school district is still going to have to respond to the requirements of Act 46 — they will just be a non-operating district. They are still going to have to fit into a governance structure and consolidate with ‘like’ districts, and that adds another layer to the timeframe because of the need to engage the public.”
