Editor’s note: This commentary is by David F. Kelley, an attorney and a co-founder of Project Harmony (now PH International) who is a member of the Hazen Union School Board.
[T]he levels of poverty in many small, rural communities are 50 percent higher than in more densely populated communities.(1) That equates to an increase in alcoholism, drug addiction, teen pregnancies, food insecurity and lack of transportation. A classroom in Lowell, where 80 percent of the students are on free and reduced lunch, is not the same as a classroom in Montpelier. Especially in small, rural schools, we not only teach our students, we have also become the default caretakers for many of them. Those schools make a difference. The Small Schools Study commissioned with Act 60 concluded: “Small schools in Vermont cost more to operate than larger schools but they are worth the investment because of the value they add to student learning and community cohesion.”
As a result of Act 46, the pressure to close those small, rural schools is being ratcheted up. A new funding formula will deny small school support grants to most of the small schools that haven’t merged. But Act 46 guarantees those grants to towns that do merge, along with a special reduced tax rate, notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s admonition: “Children who live in property-poor districts and children who live in property-rich districts should be afforded a substantially equal opportunity to have access to similar educational revenues.”(2) The fate of small elementary schools that do merge may be even more precarious. Larger communities in merged districts will have more power to close smaller schools, not necessarily because it is in the students’ best interests, but because it boosts their own enrollment and revenue.
Other states have gone down this same path. In West Virginia children are spending three hours a day on buses. Access to schools, school events, extracurricular activities, and even parent-teacher conferences is much more difficult, especially for disadvantaged families. In Arkansas small, rural communities have been hollowed out; in Maine there have been no savings, instead many of the marriages that resulted from these shotgun weddings are now seeking divorces. As elementary schools close in small, rural communities there is less reason for young couples with children to move to those towns. Property values decline, tax bases erode and bit by bit the heartbeat of small towns flatlines.
The State Board of Education is now in the process of redrafting the formula for allocating small school grants. The consequences of their decisions will be felt throughout rural Vermont, but especially here in the Northeast Kingdom.
Even though students in towns like Lowell and Coventry come to school with greater needs than many larger districts, our teachers leave school with smaller paychecks. If the state board uses a “one size fits all” formula for small schools grants we worsen that equation, making it even harder to retain the high quality teachers every school needs. Relying on test scores with small cohorts and significant annual deviations as a litmus test for support grants is like asking a jury to render a verdict based on 10 percent of the evidence.
Likewise, a simple school to school metric for geographic isolation is inadequate. We have elementary school students coming to school on unpaved mountain roads from Stannard in winter who spend 45 plus minutes just to reach our school in Greensboro. While it may only take 30 minutes to go from Greensboro to Hardwick Elementary a merger could put those students on a bus for 2½ hours a day. When 20-30 percent of the people in a community live below the federal poverty line, neither test scores nor geographic isolation alone should drive the formula.(3)
The more we separate young children, especially disadvantaged children, from their communities, and communities from their schools, the more we create a poorer, more fragmented place to live.(4) To confront poverty that has already become endemic in the Northeast Kingdom we need to attract new, young entrepreneurial people who are going to help create the jobs of the future. That takes good schools, not big schools.
1 According to the most recent U.S. Census, 9.6 percent of the population in Chittenden County is living below the poverty line. In Orleans County 15.5 percent and in Essex County 15.7 percent.
http://www.city-data.com/poverty/poverty-Chittenden-Vermont.html;
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/essexcountyvermont/PST045217;
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/chittendencountyvermont/PST045216
2 Brigham v. State , 166 Vt. 246; 692 A.2d 384 (1997).
3 http://www.city-data.com/city/Stannard-Vermont.html
4 See generally Mara Casey Tieken, Why Rural Schools Matter, University of North Carolina Press, 2014, p. 57 and 186-188.
