This article by Tommy Gardner was published July 15 in the News & Citizen of Morrisville.
It’s unclear what Morristown and Elmore will do about Stowe’s vote earlier this year to leave the three-town Lamoille South school district.
Whatever happens next, some Elmore residents want to add a simple message: Keep our school open.
A small group of the lake town’s residents met a few times in June to talk about Elmore’s place in the equation, should Stowe be allowed to leave the district, according to Alan Van Anda, a resident with one child who recently graduated from third grade at Elmore School, and another one he hopes will one day attend the state’s last remaining one-room schoolhouse.
“We love that school very, very much, and that love has come from firsthand experience,” Van Anda said. “The Stowe vote has just presented us a great chance to talk about other things.”
One of those other things is a facilities study prepared for the Lamoille South district that was issued in April; the recommendations trended toward shuttering the Elmore School.
The 101-page study by the New England School Development Council — at the cost of $18,000 — laid out five options for how to use the school buildings in the three towns, everything from using all eight district-owned buildings to shutting down some of them, to building a shared high school for all three towns.
Of those five suggested scenarios, only one kept the Elmore School open. Van Anda said that, since Elmore holds only one seat on the seven-person school board, the deck could be stacked against the town.
“We basically don’t have a say in this,” he said.
So, this informal group of Elmore residents wants to make sure that, when it’s time for their town to vote on Stowe’s departure from Lamoille South, the town include language on the ballot aimed at protecting the one-room school and the lake town’s autonomy.
Van Anda said there was plenty of resistance in town to the initial merger of Elmore and Morristown into one district, with the first attempt defeated, “and the second vote got contentious. The last thing we want to do is create another community hubbub. We want to have (discussions) as neighbors, to have it as friends, just to talk.”
Lamoille South school superintendent Ryan Heraty, who just started on the job July 1, said he has already visited the school, and when he came outside, there were some parents hanging out who shared their thoughts and concerns with him.
Heraty said he realizes the facilities study “caused a lot of concern” across the three towns. But he said there will be no action on any of the scenarios without taking it to the people first.
“There’s a huge step that needs to take place before people would start going in that direction,” he said. “Questions like, is this a reality or not? And why was this done?”
Van Anda and others often speak in reverent tones about the one-room Elmore School. The students may be only in third grade when they graduate, but those third-graders learn to be mentors for the younger kids, and they learn patience from being in the same room as them all day, too — not a lot of bullying in that kind of environment, he said.
“You come into this little village that’s already picturesque and you see the kids on the swing sets and it sets the tone,” he said. “I can’t imagine driving through that town and not seeing children there.”
Next steps still unclear
Stowe voted May 11 to withdraw from the merged Lamoille South district, on a vote of 1,068-464. It is still unclear what happens next, although it does appear clear that Morristown and Elmore need to weigh in at some point.
Morristown Town Clerk Sara Haskins said she has still not received any guidance from the state on how to proceed.
There are dueling legal opinions on the validity of a vote to withdraw from the school district.
In March, Stowe’s lawyer, Nina Atwood, said Act 46, the state’s school district consolidation law, allows for the merger divorce, if Stowe voters approved it and Elmore and Morristown later this year also allowed it.
“Regardless of the decision of the state board, it is our opinion that limiting the ability to withdraw by vote to only those towns which voluntarily merged (and prohibiting towns in forced mergers to remain merged) is discriminatory,” she wrote.
However, Emily Simmons, general counsel for the Vermont Agency of Education, opined April 9 that the law only allows towns that voted to form a union to pull out of a merged district.
A third legal opinion is in the offing. The Lamoille South school district decided last month to get a legal opinion from its own lawyers. Heraty said the merger issue was one of the first things he studied when he started his new job, “because it is kind of the elephant in the room right now.”
Heraty said his main goal is to ensure a smooth administrative transition and getting the schools back to normal after a very abnormal year and a quarter.
He said the district’s lawyers have not yet delivered an opinion on Lamoille South’s role in Stowe’s merger withdrawal.
“We are still in limbo,” he said.
Correction: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the nature of the town of Ripton’s school district consolidation discussions. The reference has been removed.
