[T]he State Board of Education made its first round of decisions on the question of forced mergers under Act 46 on Wednesday, issuing provisional judgments on most of the alternative proposals put forward by school districts.
The State Board must make the final call on 43 proposals put forward by roughly 90 school districts that haven’t consolidated voluntarily yet under the law. Most districts have asked the state to leave districts as stand-alone entities; a handful ask to be merged.
The Agency of Education, under then-interim Secretary of Education Heather Bouchey, released recommendations earlier this summer on the alternative proposals. And in most of the cases so far, the State Board has taken their cue from the secretary’s plan, voting against the Agency’s recommendations in only four instances.
As of Wednesday, the State Board had made decisions on 30 of 43 alternative proposals.
The board started with “easy” cases, voting quickly – in agreement with the secretary’s plan – not to merge 10 districts that just didn’t have structurally alike neighbors. Act 46 won’t allow forced mergers between two districts with different operating structures.
Those districts were Arlington, Canaan, Coventry, Sharon, South Hero, Strafford, Thetford, Vernon, Windsor/West Windsor and Wolcott.
“We are doing ‘dessert first.’ These are the easy ones,” board chair Krista Huling said. “In the next (ones), we’ll have plenty to talk about.”
The board then moved on to proposals governing union high schools with elementary districts operating the same grades. Members decided to merge the Brattleboro Union High school board with the Brattleboro, Putney, Guilford, and Dummerston boards. It also voted to consolidate the school boards of U-32 High and its five member districts of Berlin, Calais, East Montpelier, Middlesex and Worcester.
The board also opted to merge together the Missisquoi Union High board with its three member districts of Swanton, Highgate and Franklin. Sheldon, which is also in the same existing supervisory union at the Missisquoi districts, has a different operating structure and cannot be merged with its current partners. The secretary’s plan reassigns Sheldon to a different supervisory union, but the State Board has not yet voted about what to do with the orphan district.
Board members voted to consolidate the Oxbow Union High board with Newbury and Bradford. But board disagreed with the secretary’s plan to also merge the Blue Mountain Union school district with Oxbow and its sending towns. Several state board members said they were concerned about forcing BMU – an already consolidated district which spans Ryegate, Groton and Wells River – to unify with Oxbow, in a supervisory union that is not currently in compliance with existing laws around special education administration.
Secretary of Education Dan French echoed their concerns, arguing that the state should likely intervene and send additional resources to the supervisory union to get it to where it needs to be. Requiring two different mergers would be asking too much.
“It’s just a really challenging scenario. I don’t see how it would be successful,” French said.
The board then considered the elementary districts of Windham, Cambridge, Huntington, Orwell and Barnard. In all five cases, the districts were the sole holdouts in otherwise consolidated supervisory unions. And in all five cases, board members ultimately decided consolidation was the way to go.
State Board members broke most often with the secretary’s plan in the case of union high school districts whose member districts had different operating structures.
The secretary had recommended three separate mergers within the North Country Union Supervisory Union – consolidating Charleston with Brighton, Derby with Holland, and Jay with Westfield. Board members disagreed, arguing that such small mergers wouldn’t help achieve economies of scale and would leave behind complicated governance structures all the same.
“Merging for the sake of merging doesn’t seem to get us anywhere,” board member Stacy Weinberger said.
In two other cases, board members rejected the secretary’s recommendation that for the Bellows Falls Union and the Hazen Union districts, no mergers occur. The board, which supports a merger, will have to decide at a future meeting what consolidations would look like for the two regions.
Board members agreed with the secretary’s plan to leave the non-operating districts of Pittsfield, Sandgate, Searsburg, Stratton and Windhall as stand-alones.
The State Board has until Nov. 30 to issue its final plan under the law, but it has set several special meetings to help school districts get started with their budgeting cycles. The board has 12 alternative proposals left to make decisions about. The next meeting is Oct. 29.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that Rochester was a member town of the Union-32 Middle/High School district. It is not; Worcester is.
