[T]he State Board of Education has moved to forcibly merge several more districts.
On Thursday, the board voted to merge school boards in Barre City and Barre Town; and six Lake Region Union High school districts; and upheld its previous vote on the merger of Stowe and Elmore-Morristown districts.
The state board has now weighed in on all 43 alternative proposals put forward under Act 46. The controversial consolidation law requires the board to make the final call on all districts that have not voluntarily merged. Unconsolidated districts put forward so-called “alternative governance structure” proposals, most asked to remain basically as-is. In June, then-acting Secretary of Education Heather Bouchey submitted her recommendation for mergers.
The state board has until Nov. 30 to reorder districts, and it has been issuing provisional decisions on a rolling basis since October. A meeting is scheduled for Nov. 28 for the board to formally adopt its decisions, none of which are technically final yet.
The merger in Barre includes consolidation of Barre City, Barre Town, and Spaulding High school boards. Some Barre officials argued for a merger by pointing out a bulk of operations had already been consolidated to the supervisory union level. And others, meanwhile, said that the current arrangement worked well and that no one would choose to serve on a school board that would oversee a system of about 1,500 students.
Local officials tried one last-ditch effort to voluntarily consolidate the districts during last week’s general election. But in both Barre and Orleans Central, voters rejected mergers at the ballot box.
State board members who voted in the majority to consolidate the Barre Supervisory Union noted that, while Barre Town had voted against a merger, the city had voted in favor of it by much larger margins, and that, if the vote were combined, the total tally was pro-merger.
Huling also appeared struck by how much school spending in Barre City and Town had been centralized to the supervisory union level. Supervisory union budgets are not voted on directly by residents the way town school district budgets are, and proponents of Act 46 have argued that district consolidation could save money at the supervisory union level.
“We have have an SU budget that is on the order of about $14 million. And then each of our three district budgets are about $10 million. So the largest budget that we have is in the SU,” Barre superintendent John Pandolfo told state board members.
In the Northeast Kingdom, six school districts (Albany, Barton, Brownington, Glover, Irasburg, and Orleans) that all funnel into Lake Region Union High in the Orleans Central Supervisory Union will be consolidated.
Ironically, the lone district in Orleans Central that voted in favor of a merger last Tuesday – Westmore – will remain a standalone district. That’s because the district doesn’t operate a K-8 school like its partners in the supervisory union, and the state board cannot merge districts that have school structures.
In a presentation to the state board, Orleans Central superintendent Bev Davis and supervisory union board chair Amy Leroux both said the school board was fully behind a merger despite opposition from the communities themselves.
“How do you, as a board, resolve that dilemma. The people tell you one thing, and you think another?” state board member John Carroll asked.
“I’ve been thinking about that very much for the past week or so,” Leroux answered. “I unfortunately don’t have an answer.”
Both Davis and Leroux said a unified structure would make it easier to recruit and retain the necessary staff to better address inequities across the supervisory union’s member schools, especially its smaller buildings.
And state board member John O’Keefe asked the two officials if, with opposition to mergers so high in the communities, anybody had tried to run against school board members.
“No. That would be phenomenal. Again, that’s one other thing we struggle with – is finding someone to serve on the school boards,” Leroux said.
The board also went over earlier decisions, and in one case – a proposed merger between the Stowe and the Elmore-Morristown districts – nearly reversed course. The board had voted just two weeks ago to merge the two districts despite the secretary’s plan recommending they remain independent. The decision took local school officials in both districts by surprise, and representatives from both the Elmore-Morristown and Stowe board jointly attended the state board’s meeting Thursday to plead for autonomy.
David Bickford, from the Elmore-Morristown board, told state officials that a forced merger between the two communities would cause people on the ground to “retreat” from the considerable – and voluntary – work already done to bring the two districts closer together. And Stowe school board member Jim Brochhausen read off a litany of data points to argue the two districts already had basically the same curriculum and substantial equity in both academic offerings and outcomes.
Their presentation almost convinced the state board, who revisited their decision later in the meeting at the prompting of student member Callahan Beck.
Carroll made a motion to reconsider the board’s earlier vote, saying that while he hadn’t agreed with the secretary’s reasoning in her proposed plan, a study of the districts’ joint alternative governance proposal had made him rethink his earlier decision.
“There’s pretty compelling evidence that the AGS proposal of these communities, and their track record of years and years of collaboration, shows that the AGS is highly responsive to the objectives of the act,” he said.
But the board split 4-4, with Huling then breaking the tie to vote against reconsideration.
