[T]o save Windham Elementary, local school officials want to close it.
If residents approve both articles on the ballot on Nov. 26, the school board will have the authority to close the district’s tiny K-6 school next year, sell the building to the town, and convert to school choice for the less than 20 students currently enrolled there.
The proposal is an attempt to side-step a forced merger under Act 46 with the West River Unified School District, which includes Townshend, Brookline, Jamaica and Newfane.
“Our goal is to maintain control so that our students can be educated in a safe, healthy situation here. And that does not include bussing them down a treacherous hill,” said school board chair Carolyn Partridge, referring to the main road connecting Windham to towns in the West River Valley.
As the consolidation law winds down into its final and most controversial phase, a handful of districts resisting potential state-imposed mergers have explored an unexpected strategy for maintaining autonomy: shutting down.
That’s because the state cannot consolidate districts with unlike operating structures (a district that tuitions out its high school students cannot be merged with a district that operates schools K-12, for example).
Act 46 itself cannot close or consolidate actual schools – only school boards. But proponents of the close-on-your-own strategy argue that consolidated regional boards will inevitably choose to close smaller campuses to save money and prop up declining populations in larger schools.
Better to close now, they say, and at least maintain governance autonomy.
In some places, including Windham, a separate group of community members has volunteered to eventually reopen a private school in the public school’s former facilities (school board members can’t be involved in these plans).
Whether the strategy would work is unclear.
The Agency of Education has said a vote to close does not necessarily preclude a merger. In Holland, voters went ahead and closed the town’s lone school anyway, and the State Board of Education, which will get to make the final call on forced mergers under Act 46, opted not to consolidate Holland after all.
Board members didn’t cite the vote to close when making their decision, but instead just said the proposed merger was too small to offer opportunities for efficiency. And in Franklin, voters rejected a vote to close after local school officials warned them the strategy was risky.
“The agency has issued a number of opinions, and they’re just that. They’re not law,” Partridge, who also represents the area in the Vermont House of Representatives, said about the state’s argument that a vote to close couldn’t block a merger.
The Windham school board opted to ask voters to give them the authority to close – instead of putting closure itself on the ballot – to give the district a little added flexibility as it explores ways of blocking a merger, Partridge said. The school board has also voted to join a lawsuit that a coalition of districts facing forced mergers plans to file once the State Board has issued its final plan – due out by Nov. 30 at the latest.
The West River district, which Windham is slated to merge with, is governed by articles of agreement that include some of the strictest protections against school closures in the state.
According to the rules, the town in which the school is located must itself vote to close. And local school officials, including West River school board chairman Joe Winrich, say there haven’t been any discussions yet about what would happen to Windham if it were merged.
“We’re really just going to see how it plays out. But there’s no one that’s actively advocating to close any of the schools,” he said.
But Partridge still says she believes a merger would mean the end of Windham Elementary. The West River district has been exploring restructuring its elementary schools, and a plan to send all sixth-graders to Leland & Gray has been met with resistance from the community.
“If we’re forcibly merged, they will dismantle our school,” she said. “The school will be so pecked apart that it will really not be viable.”
