[T]he Huntington school district has filed a third legal challenge to forced mergers under Act 46.
In its final plan reorganizing districts under the school district consolidation law, the State Board of Education asked the Mount Mansfield Modified Union School District to absorb Huntington. In an appeal filed in Washington County superior court Thursday, Huntington argues Act 46 shouldn’t apply to the Mount Mansfield district, and that only the Legislature – not the state board or a fellow district – has the power to dissolve school districts.
Huntington’s lawsuit names the state board, the Agency of Education, and the Mount Mansfield district as defendants.
The state board’s plan merged 45 districts into 11 new union school districts. But in four instances – including Huntington’s – it asked existing union districts to hold votes on incorporating an independent elementary district. Under the board’s order, if a majority of the combined electorate of Mount Mansfield’s member towns vote to absorb Huntington, the autonomous district will be dissolved. A vote to do so hasn’t been warned yet.
The towns of Bolton, Jericho, Richmond and Underhill comprise the Mount Mansfield unified district. Huntington operates a pre-K to grade 4 elementary school, and then sends its students in grades 5-12 to the Mount Mansfield middle and high schools.
Despite the Mount Mansfield and Huntington’s close relationship, Huntington school board Vice Chair Tara Fowler said that there are manifold reasons for the two districts not to merge and that the community feels strongly about remaining independent.
“They voted four times no. They feel very passionately about it,” she said.
Two separate legal challenges to forced mergers have also been filed this month. The Stowe and Elmore-Morristown school districts together filed suit last week, and 31 school boards jointly filed their own appeal, also Thursday. All three suits were filed in Washington County superior court and ask for preliminary injunctions to block mergers from going into effect immediately, while a judge weighs the merits of the cases.
Like the lawsuits filed by the two other groups of districts, Huntington makes the argument that the Legislature acted unconstitutionally when it handed the state board the authority to form or dissolve districts under Act 46 and Act 49. Only the Legislature can do that, they argue, and that power can’t be delegated.
But even if the state board could be granted that authority, the plaintiffs argue the process for deciding which districts should merge and which districts would get a pass was never properly spelled out.
“Neither the General Assembly, nor the Agency of Education, nor the State Board of Education has defined key standards – ‘practicable,’ ‘possible,’ ‘the best model,’ ‘best means,’ ‘where necessary,’ – to approve or reject an alternative structure district,” Huntington’s attorneys, Stephen Coteus and Nicholas Low of Tarrant, Gillies & Richardson, wrote in their complaint.
The board’s decision-making, the plaintiffs argue, was ultimately ad-hoc, and didn’t allow for proper due process.
The body’s decisions, the complaint says, “are unsupported by factual findings or a clear record of evidence, were not the product of formal rulemaking or contested-case procedures designed to comply with due process, are void for vagueness, arbitrary and capricious.”
The Agency of Education doesn’t comment on pending litigation as a matter of policy. State Board Chair Krista Huling declined to comment.
