Voters in Addison and Ferrisburgh will head to the polls Nov. 5 to decide whether to close their local elementary schools.
School officials in the Addison Northwest Supervisory District say closing the Addison Central and Ferrisburgh Central schools is the best option for heading off a giant bump in the tax rate for the second year in a row. This year, the rate went up by 9 cents, said School Board Chair Sue Rakowski, and the budget was approved on a razor-thin margin. Next year, if the district maintains the status quo, administrators project a whopping 18-cent hike.
“We felt like we had sort of run the end of the line. The voters were asking for relief on their taxes,” she said.
The plan before voters would send all students pre-K to 4 to Vergennes Elementary. The district’s students in grades 5 to 8 would attend Vergennes Middle, and students in grades 9 to 12 would attend Vergennes High. The middle and high schools are housed in the same building.
The savings would largely come through personnel cuts. Rakowski said closing the two schools would mean the ANWSD could reduce its workforce by as much as 33 full-time employees – 19 professional staff, 12 support staff, and two administrators.
Administrators say all students can fit in into the elementary and middle-high schools in Vergennes without the need for major building additions, but acknowledge some renovations may be necessary to reconfigure some classroom space. They say they do not anticipate needing a bond, but haven’t yet priced out what the work could cost.
The proposal has been met with fierce community opposition. Signs now dot the lawns of Addison and Ferrisburgh, and in a blistering editorial, the local paper criticized the school board for burdening the towns with “no-win choices.”
In order for the Addison or Ferrisburgh elementary to be closed outright, the town’s electorate must approve the measure by a simple majority. But the school board can reconfigure grades by fiat, and members have suggested they are likely to do so, even if communities vote no.
“Surely, when the idea of consolidated governance was conceived in Act 46, no one imagined district boards would rule like kings,” Angelo Lynn, the editor of the Addison Independent, wrote last week.
Carolinne Griffin, a Ferrisburgh resident and mother of two children at the local elementary, says residents of the two towns have gathered in an ad-hoc group called the Rural School Alliance. The name, she said, is a nod to the “statewide” nature of conversation about school closures.
Addison Northwest, after all, isn’t the only district thinking about closing a school in order to deal with steadily declining enrollment. Post mergers, unified districts have been reconfiguring grades, repurposing schools, offering intradistrict choice, and generally taking a more regional approach to education.
In several instances, that’s also included talks of closing schools, especially where school officials are looking at bonding projects for the state’s aging high schools. School closures are under consideration right now in both the Harwood Union and Addison Central school districts.
And since 2015, at least eight schools – four elementaries, and four high schools – have closed in Vermont as communities confront shrinking headcounts.
Critics of closure like Griffin acknowledge that declining headcounts pose a real problem for rural school districts. But they say the process in the ANWSD has been rushed and left officials and community members little time to vet an enormously consequential decision. School officials have been talking for years about declining enrollments – but only started discussing closure in concrete terms late this summer.
Griffin says the compressed timeline has given the community no time to also propose alternatives to closure – ideas that might even bring new people to town.
She and her husband helped found State14, a lifestyle magazine promoting Vermont. So she says it feels particularly ironic to be dealing with a policy proposal in her own town that she believes is so counterproductive to attracting young families to the state.
“It’s frustrating to see that there’s such an obstacle put in the way of small communities,” she said.
