This story by Tommy Gardner was published June 15 in the Stowe Reporter.
Voters in Stowe, Elmore and Morristown last week agreed to finally let Stowe go its own way as a school district, along with half the assets the towns had shared during their four years as a merged district.
Residents voted to accept the withdrawal agreement inked in April between the Lamoille South Unified Union School District and the Stowe School District that neatly shuts the door on the shortlived governance experiment.
Per the agreement, Stowe cedes any assets owned by those two towns, and the Elmore-Morristown district will sell back any Stowe property it acquired as part of the merger for one dollar.
The two districts will now split 50/50 any shared assets, and Stowe would be released from any of the other two towns’ liabilities.
School Superintendent Ryan Heraty said last month that the towns find themselves in “a unique and fortunate situation” where the K-12 enrollment numbers in Stowe and in Elmore and Morristown are similar enough that a 50-50 split of the assets is warranted.
Big-ticket items like the campuses themselves aren’t part of the equation, since the school properties are publicly owned by the residents of each town.
Also in the June 6 vote, Stowe residents elected two new representatives to serve on the newly expanded five-person school board.
Ryan Bennett ran unopposed for a one-year term on the school board and Andrew Kohn was also unopposed for a two-year seat.
They join Tiffany Donza, Erica Loomis and Alan Ouellette, who also sat on the shortlived, seven-person merged Lamoille South Unified Union School District Board.
When Stowe decoupled from the merged district last year, after months of fighting the merger forced upon all three towns by the State Board of Education, it was, by default, starting life as a three-person local school board. Voters at Town Meeting Day in March approved expanding back to five, what it was for more than half a century — it first morphed into a five-person board in 1967.
Voters last week also approved expanding the Elmore-Morristown board from the four members it had post-Stowe withdrawal to five representatives. The vote there was 239-50.
The board will likely remain only four-strong until next Town Meeting Day, although Heraty said the board could always hold a special vote between now and then if it felt a pressing need — split votes have been a rarity on the harmonious education body.
Starting July 1, the only entity known as Lamoille South will be the supervisory union, just as it used to be pre-merger.
Heraty said the two-town school district will go back to being called Elmore/Morristown Unified Union or, as most people refer to it, EMUU, like the large bird.
