[I]t’s crunch time for the State Board of Education.
The 11-member body on Wednesday wrapped up its statewide Act 46 listening tour with a marathon meeting at Green Mountain Union High School in Chester.
“For the last three months, we’ve really done a lot of listening. Now it’s time to do a lot of talking,” State Board chair Krista Huling said near the conclusion of the nine-hour meeting.
The 2015 law is in the final phase of implementation, and it’s now up to the board to decide what to do with those districts that haven’t yet merged voluntarily. Unmerged districts have submitted so-called “alternative governance structure” proposals to the state, and the Vermont secretary of education in June recommended 18 mergers. The board has since gotten feedback from local communities at three regional meetings; the first was held in Newark in the Northeast Kingdom, the second was held in Montpelier.
A majority of the testimony submitted on Wednesday mirrored the feedback that the board received throughout the summer, with local school officials and several lawmakers urging the board against forced mergers. To do so would ignore geographic isolation and different levels of debt between districts, many argued.
The board also heard from several split boards, or boards that supported mergers where their residents did not. The Putney school district, for example, didn’t submit an alternative governance proposal to the state board because its voters had rejected a merger, and because the board itself couldn’t agree.
Putney school board member Alice Laughlin told the state board she is part of a narrow majority on the board that wanted to see a merger. A consolidated structure, she argued, would better be able to handle the small district’s variable enrollment.
“The three of us understand or believe that the way to keep up the school in Putney and giving the kids an excellent education now and into the future is by making some serious changes,” she said. “We make hard choices every year and are not able to give the kids the educational experience that many towns surrounding us do.”
An overriding theme in pushback against most forced mergers proposed by the Agency of Education has been that residents of local towns rejected consolidating at the ballot box.
Democrat Rep. Carolyn Partridge, who is school board chair in Windham, said town votes are more than opinion polls.
“Our duly warned and voted motion does not represent community sentiment. Rather it represents democracy. And Windham voters said no,” Partridge told state board members on Wednesday. “To ignore our vote makes a mockery of democracy.”
Windham County Sen. Becca Balint, a Democrat, testifying on behalf of fellow Windham lawmakers Sen. Jeannette White and Rep. Tristan Toleno, spoke about legislative intent when crafting Act 46.
“(We) understood when we passed the law that the local vote in regard to any proposed governance merger was designed to guarantee any change in governance structure would have to be acceptable to the voters in the districts affected,” she said.
State board members have been careful so far not to tip their hand. But on Wednesday, they began outlining the fault lines of their upcoming decision-making process.
Board member John Carroll said that the first decision the body would have to make is what to do with “the will of the people” as expressed by failed merger votes. Carroll didn’t argue for or against dismissing anti-consolidation votes, but he said the board couldn’t move forward without first coming to an agreement on the subject.
“It seems that this is kind of a very high-order matter about which it would be desirable for us to reach a working consensus on before we get into the details – what might even be the weeds – about legacy debt and things like that,” Carroll said.
Agency of Education officials also distributed a summary account of the secretary’s proposed consolidation plan. It pushed back against the argument by groups opposed to forced mergers that the agency had dismissed alternative governance proposals out of hand. Out of 47 “decision points” presented by alternative governance structure proposals, the agency agreed with 32, the document argued.
“I just thought it was really interesting – the perception that the flexibility had not been provided,” said Education Secretary Dan French. (French did not himself write the proposed plan. Heather Bouchey, the agency’s interim leader at the time, did.)
The board will meet Oct. 2 and is expected to release a first set of decisions as early as Oct. 17. The legal deadline for them to act is Nov. 30.
