[I]n a bid to avoid a forced merger under Act 46, Holland residents have voted to close their elementary school at the end of the year.
The vote was decisive – 57 to 21 in favor.
It’s unclear if the strategy will work. The decision to send the school’s roughly 40 kids to nearby Derby came Tuesday night despite a last-minute statement from the Vermont Agency of Education suggesting a vote to close the district’s only school wouldn’t block a merger.
School officials had framed closing as the only way to save the district’s school board and keep the school building under local control.
North Country Supervisory Union Superintendent John Castle, who once attended Holland Elementary and served as its principal, said he disagreed with the agency’s assessment and could see the school board going to court if the state imposed a merger despite the vote.
“It’s hard enough for a community to lose its school and to come to the conclusion to make this kind of decision. And then to be told by the agency that we don’t have that authority — I think it’s an attempt to diminish our dignity,” he said.
The tiny Northeast Kingdom town has for some time been mulling closing its lone school, which serves children from pre-kindergarten to grade 6, because of declining enrollment.
An information sheet passed out to voters estimated that the town’s tax rate would have been cut by 16 cents if it had tuitioned this year and sent students to Derby, which has the lowest per pupil cost in the region.
Under a tuition agreement, a district without a school pays directly to another, as opposed to a voucher system in which individual families would decide where to send their children. By remaining autonomous, small towns still decide where to send their students and set their own budget, rather than having minority representation on a combined school board.
On a desktop browser, hover over any area of the map below to see a close-up of the regions in question. Holland is in green near the northeast corner of the state.
School leaders in Holland said they brought the closure question before voters now in hopes of blocking the possibility of a state-imposed merger with Derby, a community nearly eight times the size of Holland.
“Our numbers have dwindled so much that it was time, in all reality,” said school board chairperson Lincoln Petell. “But it doesn’t help ease the pain any. And when you feel like you’re being pushed into it, it makes it worse, somehow.”
Several towns potentially facing forced mergers under Act 46, the school district consolidation law passed in 2015, are exploring closing their schools or eliminating certain grades in order to avoid mergers, because the state cannot compel two districts with different operating structures to consolidate. If towns like Holland adopt a tuition system, they would, theoretically at least, become ineligible for a merger with a district that has its own school.
The law itself does not mandate that schools close, but small communities skeptical of Montpelier’s directive say that larger towns in consolidated districts would promptly act to close small schools to save money.
Proponents of the close-on-your-own strategy say it’s better to shutter now to sidestep a merger and at least maintain autonomy,
It’s why so many in Holland on Tuesday said they blamed the state for what was, technically at least, a self-inflicted wound.
“I voted yes,” said Vick Petell, a lifelong Holland resident, of the vote to close. “It was maybe the hardest thing I’d done for awhile, because I hate to see it close. But the state has pushed it down our throats.”
Holland sits along the Canadian border, and its population hovers around 500. It does not have a community center to speak of; it even lacks a post office. The town’s annual meeting is held at the elementary school, and many described the facility as the center of town.
The importance of the building led Suzie Moulton, the school’s bus driver and occasional substitute for the past 27 years, to voted to shut down her employer.
“I want to keep us in control of the building and I want us to have a board that can have some say-so,” she said. “Truthfully, I would have preferred to have voted no on the whole deal. But we’re going to be forced to shut down regardless. Because my heart’s here in this school. This school is our town.”
The agency late last week released a statement to the press arguing that school closures could only block mergers if they came before the State Board of Education released its final plan under Act 46. That plan is expected as soon as next month, and districts exploring this strategy have been planning to postpone actual closure until, at the very earliest, the end of this school year.
For several in Holland, the state’s latest missive has compounded the pain.
“We’re voting to close. And the state is coming in and saying ‘No, we’re not even going to let you do that,’” said Kelli Dean, Holland elementary’s principal.
“At what point does the state give towns some opportunity, some ability to maintain their dignity as a community?”