An item on the ballot this Town Meeting Day instructs the local school board to shutter grades 9-12 at the K-12 Cabot School. If the article, which was added to the ballot by citizen petition, gets enough votes to pass, students would instead be tuitioned out to their school of choice.
The proposal does not have the support of School Board Chair Chris Tormey, who points to financial estimates prepared by the district’s superintendent, which project tuition would cost $424,000 more – not less – than the board’s proposed budget for next year.
Both the central office and Tormey also argue that a tuitioning scheme could hurt Cabot’s middle and elementary school programs. The district would be required to pay whatever other schools decide to charge in tuition, they argue, which would force Cabot administrators to cannibalize programming in the younger grades in lean budget years.
Tormey says that, despite Cabot High’s small size – only 39 are enrolled this year – it provides students with a great education.
“I think we have a really strong project-based learning model in our high school this year that’s gotten a lot of our kids fired up,” he said.
This isn’t the first time the town has considered closing its high school. Voters resoundingly rejected closure of the school in 2013, when residents petitioned to put the question on the ballot in a bid to save money.
Concerns about the ability of Cabot High, one of Vermont’s smallest high schools, to deliver an adequate range of programming perennially bubbles up in the community. While discussing plans to reassign Cabot to a new supervisory union, State Board of Education officials in November expressed regret they couldn’t do more. Board members depicted a district cut to the bone as enrollment dwindles. One member described the school as being “on life support,” according to the Times Argus.
A flurry of letters to the editor followed the paper’s report. One student wrote in to the Times Argus to defend the school, naming each of Cabot’s extracurricular offerings and calling its project-based curriculum “exciting and engaging.” In another letter, a parent derided Cabot High a “sub-par program for part-time homeschoolers” and said they’d moved to a different town to get their child into a better school.
Washington Northeast Supervisory Union Superintendent Mark Tucker acknowledges that it’s “difficult to offer a full range of traditional high school programming in a small high school.” But he says that that’s why Cabot has embraced a project-based learning approach, where students learn through self-designed, multi-disciplinary projects.
“We are providing a better education in high school this year than we were in years past, because when you do (project-based learning), you teach the soft skills that students need to be successful after high school – self-advocacy, project management, critical thinking, public speaking,” he said.
For his part, Tormey says that Cabot’s size is precisely its strength, and that a small student body allows the school the flexibility it needs to give students a more customized education.
“Since Act 46, I think there’s been not a good understanding of what small schools are capable doing,” he said.
