[D]ays after a supermajority of the 14-member Addison Northeast Supervisory Union’s Act 46 study committee voted to submit its unification plan to the state for approval, three members registered their dissent by issuing a minority report.
The major issues they cited include a feeling that more analysis needed to be done and that the consultant pushed a particular merger model; a loss of local control by moving from seven school boards and one executive committee for five towns and six schools to one; and the loss of floor voting on the school budget on Town Meeting Day for two towns.
Nancy Cornell and Herb Olson, of Starksboro, and Mike Fisher, of Lincoln, wrote the minority opinion.
“We believe that all the members of the committee had good intentions and did the best they could with the information provided to them, but we think there are flaws in the conclusions they came to and flaws in the report,” said Cornell, who used to be Addison Northeast’s associate superintendent. “We are hoping the (State Board of Education) will reject the proposal and send it back, and we hope the committee will reconvene and pursue a couple of different options.”
The chair of the Act 46 study committee, Jennifer Stanley, said of the dissent: “Many of the concerns in the minority report were raised and discussed by our committee in our many meetings, and the committee determined what actions to take by our standard two-thirds majority decision rule.”
Act 46, passed in June 2015, encourages school districts to form study committees to consider voluntarily merging into larger governance units. It is the continuation of two other voluntary merger laws that date back to 2010, all of which offer tax incentives for unifying. In the past year, residents in 55 towns have voted to merge — most with overwhelming majorities — while 15 towns voted against unification proposals.
The only other time a minority report has been filed was in response to the proposed Chittenden East merger in 2014, according to Donna Russo-Savage, who works on unification proposals for the Agency of Education. That minority report didn’t stop the merger vote, which resulted in the Mount Mansfield Modified Union School District.
The Addison Northeast Supervisory Union serves five elementary schools offering kindergarten through sixth grade: Bristol Elementary, Lincoln Community School, Monkton Central School, Beeman Elementary School in New Haven and Robinson Elementary School in Starksboro. They all feed into Mount Abraham Union Middle and High School. Seven boards and an executive committee govern the current configuration. The study committee is recommending that the five school districts be streamlined into one with one school board.
The authors of the minority report say the study committee should have conducted a more detailed analysis and collected more input from the community, but they say the committee was driven by a desire to cash in on tax incentives for merging.
The volunteers on the study committee met for nine months, initially once a week and then once every other week. “After much discussion, analysis and advice from a variety of experts, the committee decided to pursue a unified supervisory district with the belief that this provides the greatest opportunities for both efficiency and educational opportunities for students,” said Stanley, the chair.
But authors of the minority report say the consultant, Andrew Pond, was focused on one path forward.
“He had a strong belief that this is the right path and advised the committee often not to vary from the preferred structure as laid out in the legislation as well as … to tailor the articles (of agreement) as little as possible away from the boilerplate language,” Fisher said of Pond.
A year ago, Pond wrote in a VTDigger commentary that many avenues are open to school districts: “Recognizing that the single-district solution may not be possible or may not be the best design in some regions, the legislation allows districts to remain the way they are (or to combine in other ways) and share supervisory union functions. The law encourages us to organize in whatever ways are locally best for students …”
There are six consultants who provide support and information about the law as independent contractors, but study groups are not obligated to use them. After Act 46 became law, members of the Vermont Superintendents Association, Vermont School Boards Association and Vermont School Boards Insurance Trust asked their organizations for help implementing it. The three groups partnered up and identified consultants for the members.
“We have no knowledge of any specific consultant’s advice,” said Nicole Mace, executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association. “We don’t monitor what was discussed at study committee meetings. It is a service to districts that no one is required to use. It is in response to a need our members identified.”
The majority of the Addison Northeast study committee said there are tradeoffs to unification and that some community members have very “real and serious concerns.” It said that as with any change, “we give up ways that we do things today with the expectation that the new way will be better.”
The plan expects streamlining governance to result in $140,000 in annual savings in addition to the tax incentives.
Authors of the minority report said they were not against centralizing any number of things such as fuel purchasing and teacher contracts, but at the same time would like to maintain local school boards.
“Schools are at their best when they are stronger and have stronger linkages and interests between the school and its community. I have a healthy dose of fear when we move decision-making about our schools further from the classroom,” said Fisher.
Armando Vilaseca, the former education secretary, served as interim superintendent of Addison Northeast and was an adviser to the study committee.
Vilaseca pointed the Mount Abraham Union High School board that serves the five towns of Addison Northeast. “You could ask members on the high school board if their voices weren’t respected and heard. You could also ask if anything has been done that didn’t benefit all the kids. People care about kids whether they are in Bristol, Lincoln, Monkton, New Haven or Starksboro. They are all their kids. It is a lack of trust of our neighbors that seems to be hurtful here.”
The new unified school board would have 13 members: five from Bristol and two each from the other four towns.
Cornell wants to know how members of the unified board will know enough about each individual school to make good decisions. “There is a lot to understand, and it is hard to imagine being able to look at a combined unified budget and be able to really understand it for both board members and community members alike,” she said.
A particular sticking point for the dissenters is how the new unified union would vote on the single school budget. Three of the five towns vote by Australian ballot, but Starksboro and Lincoln — the two towns in which all three minority report authors live — hold a floor vote at town meeting. Although Act 46 does not force them to use one or the other method of voting, this study committee decided to require all five towns to vote by Australian ballot.
The loss of a floor vote was too great for Fisher.
“Local democracy is pretty darn important, and the ability in two of the five towns for there to be floor debate and floor amendments about the budget is really important to me, and moving away from that is a step away from direct democracy,” he said.
Cornell agreed, saying that “in two of our towns that model of human-scale democracy is very valued.”
Lincoln had two representatives on the study committee, and Starksboro had three. One representative from each of these towns stayed with the majority proposal.
Caleb Elder, of Starksboro, found arguments both for Australian ballots and floor voting compelling and said he fought to preserve floor voting for both towns when determining the articles of agreement.
“The idea is we are becoming one district and basically there can’t be multiple approval processes for one budget,” Elder said. That plus the fact the majority of the districts were already using Australian ballot had to be taken into consideration, he said. “I didn’t feel I should throw out the whole report and unification on that one issue.”
If it gets approval from the State Board of Education, the Addison Northeast Act 46 study committee hopes to bring its proposal to the voters Nov. 8. The authors of the minority report didn’t say they would actively campaign against the merger, but they are prepared to answer questions from their communities.
“It is really important to me that you hear me clearly say, I know that every member of the Act 46 committee has kids’ best interest at heart and have worked hard to make the best decisions possible,” said Fisher. “We just have a difference of opinion about what is most important.”
Correction: The new unified school board would have five members from Bristol, not four as previously reported.
