In the seven-town Addison Central School District, school board officials will spend the summer thinking about a wholesale redesign to tackle growing deferred maintenance needs and steadily declining enrollments.
On the more radical end, officials imagine sending students from all seven of the district’s existing elementaries into one, centralized facility. On the other, they imagine whittling down to four to six elementaries.
District-wide, almost 40% of classroom space is going unused, according to a district analysis, and enrollments are projected to continue to decline. The ACSD’s facilities also need an estimated $60 million for maintenance and upgrades.
“The status quo is not sustainable financially and from a student equity standpoint,” said ACSD board chair Peter Conlon.
Addison Central isn’t the only district in Vermont having this conversation. And with many districts now unified across several towns, school officials are thinking about reconfiguring grades, offering choice between schools, and generally taking a more regional approach to delivering education.
Vermont’s schools are generally quite old, and with the state’s school construction aid program on indefinite hiatus now for about a decade, facilities face a slew of deferred maintenance needs. With mergers behind them, consolidated districts are increasingly thinking about bonding for big renovation projects. That’s made officials take a hard look at the facilities they have – and think seriously about whether their footprints shouldn’t shrink.
Lawmakers in the House Education Committee took days of testimony on school construction needs in the most recent legislative session. They didn’t ultimately advance any legislation, but Conlon, ranking member of the committee, expects the topic to be picked up again next year.
Talk of closing schools in the ACSD has been met with particular trepidation in Ripton, the smallest town in the district. Laurie Cox, its Selectboard chair, thinks maybe the local pushback comes from the town’s particularly strong sense of community.
She worries that a shuttered school will exacerbate the town’s depopulation problem.
“If you don’t have a school there, it kind of keeps young families from wanting to move in,” she said.
ACSD officials have argued that larger, consolidated schools are more likely to be able to afford things like a full-time counselor and nurse. But Cox, a former school counselor, says that students often get that support anyway in smaller schools, despite a lack of full-time support staff.
“The thing that happens in a very small school is that all the staff in the school tend to know all the kids in the school,” she said.
Some 40 miles north, in the Harwood Unified Union School District, the school board wants to bring a bond before voters in March of 2020 to address long-standing needs at the Harwood high school campus. At the same time, they want to present plan to redesign grade configurations across the six-town district’s five elementaries and middle school. Ten scenarios are still on the table, but nearly all involve closing one or more elementary schools.
But school officials at in Harwood and Addison Central insist closing schools isn’t just about money. Freeing up resources by closing underutilized buildings, they say, will mean more breathing room to innovate elsewhere and equalize programming across schools.
“It’s not all doom and gloom and savings and taxes,” said Caitlin Hollister, the Harwood school board chair.
“We’ve talked about things like … expanding our sustainability program. We’ve talked about expanding our pre-K offerings,” Hollister said. There’s also a possibility for more community partnerships, she added, including around childcare. Harwood wouldn’t be the first to think along those lines: elsewhere in the state, schools are exploring letting child-care providers use unused space to offer infant and toddler care, which is badly needed, particularly in rural areas.
For many who opposed mergers, discussions about district redesigns and school closures are a vindication of their fears. Act 46, they say, may not have closed schools outright, but regional boards were always intended to do the dirty work of right-sizing Vermont’s education system.
For Margaret MacLean, a leading anti-Act 46 activist, that could mean regional hubs will be strengthened at the cost of small, rural communities, which will lose what’s left of their students and the buildings that anchored their town.
“That’s the direction we’re headed,” she said.
Conlon rejects that logic. Given demographic trends, he argues small schools would have been looking at closure anyway. And within a larger organization, smaller schools have more possibilities and more resources.
“Declining enrollment is a real thing having a real impact. As enrollment declines, a school that is on its own, with its own board, has far fewer options to address the problem,” he said.
MacLean does acknowledge that some schools would have closed anyway. She notes, too, that plenty of un-merged districts have decided to shutter small campuses and send students nearby.
“Communities are used to making tough decisions,” she said. “It’s different when neighbors in bigger towns make those decisions for communities.”
