Editor’s note: This commentary is by Robert Bernstein, of Bristol, a retired Vermont municipal official who has served as town and village manager of Bristol, Selectboard member and chair of Lincoln, as well as town clerk and treasurer of Lincoln.
Those who believe that the statewide push to close town schools is badly thought through should be glad that one superintendent of schools announced a plan so anti-democratic in concept that it should be pushed off the table — even by proponents of closing town schools, as apparently he is — as soon as prudently possible: no one should like it. Patrick Reen, superintendent of the Mount Abraham district based in Bristol, has presented a plan that would move all formal instruction of the type we know as elementary education to two schools (of the five in the district) and institute entirely new programs in the other three remaining school buildings and, in two of these, call these new programs “centers for innovation” or something similar.
This proposal was made to the district school board at the beginning of December and charges that board — of about a dozen people — to make that decision to change education in this way by about the time of Town Meeting, the beginning of March. This gives this board a few months to think about whether they should do this, which is as new to them as it is to the populace and undoes about a hundred years of the previous elementary school method. Under this proposal only this board in that amount of time would decide if this change is what is needed for our society.
There are two very obvious problems with this. One, the time allotted comes nowhere needed to what would be prudently necessary for such a large change. Two, there is no plan at present for these innovation centers: How could anyone make a decision so far reaching with so few of the details known? One would either need to be desperate or have so much faith in the unknown to go forward this way and I don’t believe either the populace or the board meet these criteria.
But there is an even greater problem in implementing this proposal, as I note in the first paragraph above. This is that the earlier vote made only a couple of years ago to concentrate power in the district board was made with the legal proviso that voters of any one town in the district could vote for or against the closing of the school in their town. It was thought at that time that this proviso was necessary to gain acceptance of the new board. But the superintendent’s proposal is crafted in a political way to end run this vote, to do without it.
I admire the thought that figured out a way to close the three towns’ schools without calling them closed, though closed they will be in any common sense of the term, I admire the political craftiness of this proposal. With one exception: that it is so obvious a way to elude a vote (a vote that would have a very good chance of defeating the proposal) that it can’t be taken seriously at all. Well, perhaps it should be taken seriously. But, on the face of it, trampling on the earlier, and recent, proviso that citizens could vote for or against their schools, is so anti-democratic that I think all of us can move forward in getting this off the table as soon as possible.
If we think we will do what our mandate is we should find another way. That is, the district board, whatever they think their mandate is, should move quickly past this and try something else. I, we, wish the district board and the superintendent well. A note like this does not even discuss what I and many others think are the educational and societal negatives of a move to close schools — and these are great, and their discussion will wait another time — only the patent absurdity of the current process and this proposal.
