In January 2021, fearing the closure of their cherished elementary school, residents of the town of Ripton took to the polls and voted to leave the Addison Central School District.
But after nearly two years of uncertainty and frustration, residents of the roughly 740-person town voted late last month to reverse course: their school would stay in the district, after all.
The fight has spiraled into what Molly Witters, vice chair of the Ripton School Board, called a “weird statutory hellscape”: a tug-of-war that has pitted residents hoping to save their school against state officials who feared that the end result would fail to provide an appropriate education.
Like other school districts in Vermont, the Addison district, which includes nine schools in Middlebury, Bridport, Cornwall, Shoreham, Weybridge, Salisbury and Ripton, has been grappling with declining enrollment and climbing costs.
For the past five years, the district has been considering how best to restructure its schools to accommodate those trends. By late 2019, after a series of meetings, surveys and studies, officials appeared to be slowly closing in on a plan for the district — one that did not seem to include Ripton Elementary School.
For residents, the closure of the institution — a 45-student school nestled in the woods of the Green Mountains — would be crushing.
“We feel that having a school kind of breathes a lifeforce into the community,” Witters said. “It sets forward a whole other generation of kids that can come back and nurture our community. Because we don’t want to just die off in the hills.”
To prevent that, advocates for the elementary school petitioned in fall 2019 for a vote to change the district’s charter, the founding document that sets out its rules for governance.
Currently, the Addison Central School District Board has the authority to close schools on its own. Ripton, however, wanted the power to allow district towns to approve or deny such closures.
Such language is common in school district charters, Ripton advocates say. But the Addison Central board turned down those proposals — not “to be anti-democratic or in fear of the outcome,” officials said in a February 2020 newsletter, but instead because it “believes that the burden of those decisions lies with the board.”
So Ripton turned to another option: secession. Later that year, advocates put forth a ballot question to withdraw the school from the district. In January 2021, voters approved it.
But that decision thrust the school into further uncertainty.
‘We didn’t think it was an appropriate assignment’
When it belonged to Addison Central, Ripton received “supervisory services” — special education, transportation, financial oversight, collective bargaining and more — through the district. Such services are provided by supervisory districts or supervisory unions, which encompass several smaller districts.
Now that Ripton had voted to leave, however, the question became: who would perform those crucial functions for its school?
That concern was at the center of a monthslong series of meetings between members of the newly created Ripton School Board and the state Board of Education, which oversees the withdrawal process.
Could Ripton join a nearby district or supervisory union? School officials in neighboring towns politely declined that suggestion.
Could officials create a new supervisory union, covering both Addison Central and the newly independent Ripton? Ripton’s former district said no — that process “would divert the already strained resources of time and energy of staff and our community,” district officials wrote to the Board of Education.
What if Ripton simply rejoined its former district? Negotiations between the two entities were ongoing, but were, in the words of Ripton’s recently created school board, “disappointing.” The town wanted the same power it had asked for earlier: the ability to veto a proposed closure of its school, to which the Addison Central board did not agree.
In January 2022, the state Board of Education voted to designate Ripton as its own supervisory district — meaning the town would be on its own when it came to supervisory services.
That was an option that Ripton school officials had not wanted.
“In general, supervisory districts are on the order of, you know, 900 kids,” said Steve Cash, chair of the Ripton School Board. “We told the state Board of Education we didn’t think it was an appropriate assignment for the size of us.”
‘This is a train wreck’
But there appeared to be one other option: joining forces with the town of Lincoln, which was withdrawing from its own district, the Mt. Abraham Unified School District. The two towns hashed out plans to create a new supervisory district, named the Mountain Supervisory District, to cover their combined schools.
Ripton brought on a consulting firm, the New Hampshire-based Holistic Impact Foundation, to draw up a report on the status of the Mountain Supervisory District and submit it to the Board of Education.
“Strategies and elements required to successfully transition, stand-up, and operate the new (supervisory union) either exist or are being put in place,” the Holistic Impact Foundation wrote in its report, which was presented to the Board of Education in July. “With adequate and appropriate support and guidance, (Ripton) is confident they will be successful.”
The Board of Education, however, was not so confident. In an August report, the board found an “overwhelming risk” that Ripton would “not be prepared to assume responsibility for the education of its students.”
The town had not drawn up a budget for the transition to a new district, identified a source of funding, hired administrators or made plans for how to fulfill a wide range of supervisory needs, the state board wrote.
Privately, board members were even more blunt. After the July meeting, then-Board of Education chair Oliver Olsen texted board member Tammy Kolbe that the New Hampshire consultants were “a joke.”
“We can’t sugar coat this report,” Olsen wrote, according to text messages obtained in a public records request. “This is a train wreck.”
Kolbe agreed, noting that she and another board member had been “frustrated and concerned” with the presentation.
Two months after that assessment, Ripton residents returned to the polls and voted 148-89 to reverse their earlier decision: Ripton Elementary would stay in the Addison Central School District.
“It was a very troubled vote in our town,” Witters, the Ripton board’s vice chair, said, adding, “There’s a lot of concern that we’ve just given up control.”
The saga appears to have landed Ripton right back where it started. But in fact, the school never left the Addison Central District: the January 2021 secession vote had yet to take effect.
‘A Kafkaesque circle’
The months of uncertainty over the school — what Witters described as a “Kafkaesque circle” — do seem to have made at least a small impact.
In June, Gov. Phil Scott signed legislation that included a two-year moratorium on school closures in certain districts, including Addison Central.
That law also requires the state Agency of Education to submit a report on school closures in merged districts by September 2023, including “an examination of the factors that should be used to determine school viability and sustainability and how those factors relate to school closure decisions.”
Those provisions appear to have been added in response to the situation in Ripton.
The Addison Central school board has set up a research committee to explore the possibility of changing the district’s articles of agreement — the original request made by Ripton nearly three years ago.
Victoria Jette, the chair of the Addison Central school board, said in an emailed statement that she was “pleased” that Ripton had chosen to stay in the district.
“I do believe that this is the best way to provide for their students,” Jette wrote.
She declined to speculate on the effort to amend the district’s articles of agreement but said that the board “has not decided to close any schools, nor has it eliminated school closure from the array of options it must consider to address the significant challenges our district is facing now and will continue to face in the future.”
Ripton’s saga has left many of the people involved frustrated.
“I felt like most of the time was spent educating people about just how complex our education system is,” said Olsen, the former Board of Education chair, “and all the various state and federal requirements that need to be met.”
But for Witters, the vice chair of the Ripton school board, the frustration stems from Ripton’s sense of helplessness.
“We haven’t had any power this whole time,” she said. “Other than the power to keep showing up at meetings and advocating for trying to find a place in the educational system.”