[F]amilies in a half dozen districts in Vermont are being given a choice of which school they want their children to attend, in a move that educators say could keep even the smallest schools vital.
Some of the newly unified districts are creating intra-district choice programs in the early grades, and at least one district envisions a magnet-style system with themed instruction in its four elementary schools.
The new arrangements are made possible after formerly separate, oftentimes single-school districts, merged with neighbors under Act 46, the state’s school district consolidation law.
“It’s made simpler by the fact that the schools are in the same system,” said Jeff Francis, the director of the Vermont Superintendents Association.
Most districts initiating choice options are letting families pick from all or some of a unified district’s schools for certain grades. In many cases, transportation isn’t available if parents pick a school outside their town.
But at least one district is being more ambitious.
Administrators in the Mill River Unified Union School District, which includes the central Vermont towns of Wallingford, Shrewsbury, Clarendon, and Tinmouth, want to offer parents their pick of four elementary schools with specialized instruction.
Mill River superintendent Dave Younce said the district’s schools had spent considerable time standardizing curriculum and instruction. With more administrative flexibility post-unification, the district felt like it had the chance to take the next step.
“What we realized is that with a good foundation of consistency, we now have an opening where we can find the areas where we can be unique in our elementary schools,” he said.
School officials are calling the plan “Vision 2020” both for the pun, Younce said, and for the target roll-out date. The elementary schools will build programming around four themes: project-based learning in Clarendon; multi-age classrooms with advancement based on skills in Wallingford; sustainability in Shrewsbury; and wilderness in Tinmouth.
Both Shrewsbury and Tinmouth will also host a semester-long, immersion wilderness program for students in grades 10-12 from Mill River Union High School. The program — conducted in yurts — will allow 15 to 20 students to conduct fieldwork to work on science proficiencies and culminate in a personal project.
Jodie Ruck, the principal at Shrewsbury Mountain School, said the themes “quickly and naturally emerged” from projects already in place at the four schools.
“For example, Shrewsbury is already carbon-neutral with energy. It’s already doing a lot of work in the community garden and teaching kids sustainable practices,” she said.
The plan is still in large part conceptual. The unified district already offers families the chance to pick any elementary school, but transportation isn’t yet available if parents pick a school outside their town – something administrators say they plan to change to make sure all students have the same opportunities.
Facing anxieties that merged governance will pave the way to small school closures, educators say reconfigured offerings under unification as a way to shore up their smallest campuses.
In the Otter Valley Unified Union School District, which merged Leicester, Brandon, Whiting, Sudbury, Goshen, and Pittsford, families are also getting the chance to pick whatever elementary they want from within the district.
But officials also restructured the newly unified district’s smallest elementaries – in Whiting, Sudbury, and Leicester – so that instead of all offering the same grades, Whiting will offer pre-K, Leicester grades K-4, and Sudbury grades 5-6.
That eliminated the problem of schools sometimes finding themselves with a fifth grade or kindergarten class consisting of just one student.
“This allowed every class to have a cohort,” Otter Valley Superintendent Jeanne Collins said.
And a major advantage to the Vision 2020 plan is that it gives all of the district’s schools – including its smallest – something unique to offer the community, Younce said.
“If your school of fifty kids is providing opportunities that people can’t get anywhere else, then nobody looks at that place and says ‘Hey, that place shouldn’t be around any more,’” he said.
“It’s the places that are doing the exact same thing as a different facility five miles down the road – that’s where the vulnerability lies.”
