[M]ANCHESTER — With approval from the State Board of Education in hand, the Northshire Merger Study Committee is gearing up an outreach effort to promote the proposed Taconic and Green School District prior to town meeting season.
“It is going to be a lot of hard work,” committee Chairman Jon Wilson acknowledged Wednesday, a day after the state board approved the group’s merger plan for nine towns in seven school districts in the Manchester-Dorset area.
Wilson said he is confident going into the next phase — town meeting votes in March on the plan — because the 17-member study committee did an outstanding job in preparing a blueprint for the unified district, which he noted won praise from SBOE members on Tuesday in Montpelier.
“Our work will now shift from seeking out feedback and developing merger recommendations, to educating the public on the details of the proposed merger,” he said Wednesday in a release.
“As I emphasized to the board [Tuesday], there are many complexities inherent to this merger and our region, but I am more than confident that this peerless study committee will continue to tackle any obstacle in exemplary fashion.”
Wilson said a subcommittee of the study group, which includes representatives from the nine towns involved, has been discussing how too offer presentations of the proposal and familiarize voters with the details.
“Our work for January, February and March will be outreach,” he said.
The full committee is scheduled to meet Jan. 4 in Dorset, Wilson said, to discuss details of the upcoming campaign, which will include public forums to explain the merger agreement, along with the process that will lead to a single, unified school board with up to 13 members for the district. Each town would be guaranteed at least one representative.
The goal is to have at least the larger core district towns approve the new district by July 1, 2017. The regional board members would also be elected at the annual meetings this spring, but there would be a year of transition under the existing district boards until the regional board takes over the unified district in 2018.
During the outreach campaign, there will be an emphasis on explaining how candidates for the new district’s board can get their names on the ballot and how candidates will be chosen by voters.
Wilson said he and Vice Chairman Richard Grip and committee consultant Daniel French presented the Northshire merger proposal to the SBOE.
“The board also provided ‘preliminary support for a waiver regarding supervisory union board composition’ if the merger is passed by the voters,” Wilson stated in the release. “Not only was the board very complimentary of the report we put together, but they also indicated that they would work in good faith to grant us adequate representation on a future supervisory union board.”
He said the statutory default mechanism for determining supervisory board composition says that each district that operates a school receives three representatives regardless of its population. “With the knowledge that the state has final say in drawing a supervisory union’s boundaries, the Northshire committee modeled out the most likely scenarios of which other districts would likely coexist in an [supervisory union] with Taconic and Green,” Wilson said.
Commenting on that issue, Grip said: “Based on our models we developed this fall, we operated on the assumption that our proposed district would have about 60 percent of the population of the entire SU. We were very clear with the state board that this proposed merger would lose a lot of popular support in our electorates if the proposed merged district did not receive at least half of the representation on a future SU board. They listened, responded, and capped off the end of a very pleasant meeting.”
Wilson said Secretary of Education Rebecca Holcombe and the SBOE agreed to a preliminary waiver to the supervisory union representation requirement.
The board of the Bennington-Rutland Supervisory Union, to which the districts now belong, also has adopted a resolution approving of the request for a waiver of the requirement for the proposed Taconic and Green district. The current union would continuing in that role at least through a one-year implementation period for the proposed new district.
A copy of the merger committee’s consolidation agreement can be viewed here.
