Editor’s note: This commentary is by Pamela Fraser and Randall Szott of Barnard. Fraser is an artist, writer and professor at the University of Vermont and a board member of the Windsor Central Modified Unified Union School District. Szott is a writer, educator and library director. He has lectured on education around the U.S.
[R]ecenty, a middle school/high school bus slid off an icy road into a ditch while bringing a full busload of seventh- through 12-graders home. Our son was on that bus. It is the sort of incident that, as parents, put us in a panic, but not nearly as panicked as we might have been if our son was a kindergartner. And, of course, older children are themselves more emotionally prepared to handle such adversity, to say nothing of their greater physical maturity should something worse have happened.
We relay this story because the rules determining geographic isolation of school districts are being drafted by the state. The nature of these rules are vitally important because continued eligibility for small schools grants will be impacted by the decisions, and that eligibility will shape the character of Vermont’s schools and communities. It will also significantly impact the educational readiness and safety of Vermont’s children.
Some have floated a 15-minute travel time from school to school as a measure of geographic isolation, but that does not reflect actual student bus time for the majority of riders. Actual ride times in our community (Barnard) would be much longer due to the distances students live from the town school, the number of stops the bus makes, and inhospitable routes/conditions which can slow travel considerably. Our town is located at a significant elevation and involves travel on Route 12 through “the Ledges,” the most elevated section of the route, which, like many other areas in Vermont becomes very treacherous in winter.
The Barnard bus route currently has an over 60-minute travel time from the first pickup to the middle school/high school in Woodstock, and thus would be a similar duration for travel to the elementary school in the same town. The first pickup in Barnard is at 6:37 for a bus that arrives in Woodstock at 7:45. If our school is possibly rendered unsustainable by losing our small schools grant due to this rulemaking, we will be sending children as young as 4 or possibly 3 on this bus route. This will shorten their sleep and their home/family time, doing so at such an early age is detrimental to cognitive and emotional development, and will hinder school performance.
Despite the fact that the Agency of Education now dismisses the validity of their own determination, the state already deemed Barnard Academy as geographically isolated in 2011 as a result of the language found in Section 21 of Act 153 of the 2009 Session Study on Small School Grant Eligibility Due to Geographic Necessity. The considerations that determined Barnard Academy as geographically isolated in 2011 have not changed (distance, topography, technology of vehicles or road clearance), therefore it is hard to comprehend removing this designation. This determination should be the minimal starting point for a list of geographically isolated schools. That list was itself flawed for many of the reasons we cite above and thus should be expanded, not reduced.
Given the emphasis on educational equity in Vermont as reflected in court rulings, policy and legislation, it would be surprising for the state to issue rules that increase the political, educational and economic advantages of some towns at the expense of less advantaged others. It would run counter, if not to the letter of the law, certainly its spirit, to subject students in towns with less resources to unequal treatment in safety and transit times to school. In the scramble for student enrollment, we should not allow school districts with economic, political, and geographic good fortune to prey on their neighbors without such luck.
We urge the rules on geographic isolation to be based not on abstract metrics, like school to school travel times, but on real world travel times. Similarly, we urge the rules to take into account real world students like our son when determining what safe travel routes are. Lastly, we urge the rules to honor the commitment to educational equity by not exacerbating existing real world inequalities between larger towns and smaller ones, as well as between families that have the resources to drive their children to school or to move wherever is most convenient for short travel times, and those families that do not have such choices available to them.
The economic cost of maintaining small rural schools has been rising, but those schools are a vital part of what makes Vermont the amazing state that it is. There are other prices to be paid should the state continue to lack the political courage to resist the decimation of our schools and small towns. While the balance sheets of the state budget might be prettier, our small communities will lose their heart and soul — making their children less safe, more tired, and less ready to learn.