This story by Liberty Darr was first published in The Other Paper on Oct. 26.
Since April, a South Burlington School Board committee has been exploring a move of the fifth graders to the middle school to alleviate a massive over-enrollment problem in the district’s elementary schools.
But after seven months of meetings, the committee now says the better question to ask is what should the district do regarding its massive infrastructure needs for all five of its buildings?
The fifth-grade transition committee was just one phase in the district’s various capital improvement needs brought on by aging buildings, deferred maintenance and increases in enrollment and population in South Burlington.
“We’d like to maybe take a step back and look at infrastructure,” board member Laura Williams said. “So, looking at a long-term thoughtful, fiscally responsible view of what to do with the five schools.”
The group, led by Williams and former school board member Bryan Companion, met one time as a group since June, conducted a number of listening sessions with teachers, administrators and community members, and gathered information from neighboring districts that follow a fifth through eighth grade middle school model.
Difficulties planning over the summer, as well as the resignation of Companion, compounded the committee’s lack of action. However, some parents and community members have voiced their frustration with the board, calling the work a “waste of time” with no roadmap for a way forward.
“I appreciate your transparency and saying that you met one time. I think that’s something that should be the takeaway from this,” South Burlington resident Erin Sutherland said. “I just think it’s a little bit of a waste of everybody’s time.” She added that the past two committees also discussed moving the fifth grade.
The committee’s work scratched the surface of a decades-long conversation about what the district should do with its more than 60-year-old buildings that teachers and administrators say have become a bad learning environment for students.
“There’s an enrollment issue happening obviously in South Burlington now and that’s kind of why the focus changed to the elementary level,” said architect Lee Dore with Dore & Whittier, who has been working with the school on infrastructure projects since the 1990s. “We’ve started and stopped and changed our focus around but it has always been the fact that the buildings really don’t fit the type of education that’s delivered today. They were built in the ‘60s.”
The fifth-grade transition committee plans to present a finalized official report to the board, but superintendent Violet Nichols said she believes the next move should be to create an infrastructure committee, which she is currently putting together.
History of problems
In April 2022, the education committees in both the Vermont House and Senate commissioned an independent analysis titled “Vermont School Facilities Inventory and Assessment” submitted by the secretary of education that reviewed a broad range of facility-related factors in 54 school districts across the state.
The study utilized a Facility Condition Index to measure the aggregated depletion percentage of facilities for each district. The higher the percentage, the greater the need for infrastructure replacement or upgrades. The average for the districts participating in the study was 71.4 percent, which reflected a considerable amount of concern for the overall condition of school infrastructure across the state.
However, the calculated percentage for South Burlington district was more than 81 percent, the 11th highest district in need of action to address its infrastructure needs, and the second highest in Chittenden County.
In 2018, an independent feasibility study and building assessment was completed for the city’s middle and high schools that showed all of its school buildings were in need of major renovations or full replacement. Deferred maintenance costs at that time were estimated to be well over $30 million for just the middle and high schools and are now estimated at over $60 million. Those estimated costs were also only to extend the life of the buildings and did not address space issues of outdated design or functionality.
“The high school in particular is very difficult to renovate just because of the way it was designed structurally,” Dore said. “All of the interior classroom walls are bearing walls, so it gets really cost-prohibitive to start changing those around. The middle school is more flexible since it’s a steel frame building, but it was designed as a junior high school, not as a middle school model. So to get that back to the way you guys want to make that work, it is a pretty significant change on the interior layout of that building.”
Many options were considered, including renovation to the facilities and adding space as needed, but in 2020 the school board ultimately endorsed a $209 million bond article for the construction of a combined new middle and high school to be located on the existing campus.
The bond failed on a 3-to-1 margin.
Brian Minier, a member of the school board in 2019 and now a current member of the House Committee on Education representing South Burlington, said the hefty price tag was one of the major reasons he believes it was shot down.
“The impact on folks was estimated to be a 25 percent hike in their property taxes. I mean, that’s huge,” he said. “Also, you look at the buildings and you say, They’re ugly, and they need a roof, but how can it possibly be that expensive?’ But, once you go in and do something like the boiler, which you have to do, that triggers all sorts of codes that we’ve been grandfathered under previously.”
After the loss and as the district grappled with the onslaught of a worldwide pandemic, infrastructure needs took a backseat to the other problems facing the district.
In 2021, the district administration switched its focus to the elementary schools that, at the time, exceeded the state-recommended 85 percent capacity by more than 100 students. An enrollment committee pushed for zero-emission modulars (ZEMs) as an immediate solution to handle the projected increase in enrollment for the next five to seven years.
A bond vote for nearly $15 million was passed at last year’s Town Meeting Day to cover $6 million of the costs of implementing eight modular classrooms and $8.55 million for various capital improvements that include roofing, HVAC systems, window replacements, bathrooms, and work to parking lots, sidewalks and kitchens.
In a presentation by Dore & Whittier in May, the team reintroduced renovation plans similar to the plans outlined in 2019 that show the temporary classrooms as a way to buy time for the district to reassess its needs, but now, “time is of the essence,” said Dore, adding that this impending massive infrastructure project would be the largest South Burlington has ever faced.
“You’re getting to a point where you just spent $8.5 million dollars on a capital improvement bond to extend the life of the buildings,” he said. “At some point, you’re going to get to, “Why do we keep putting more money in?’”
But some board members felt leery about restarting that larger conversation.
“I’m a little shy at getting back into something as big as this,” said board member Alex McHenry, who was also on the board in 2019. “Certainly we can talk about it and think about it, but something would have to be done differently, even for a much smaller bond.”
But high school teacher Erin Buzby emphasized the unworkable conditions of the high school and urged the board to persist.
“We have at least five kids here who go to the high school, and it is not a workable building. It’s really bad and they deserve better,” she said. “You should not be afraid to take it on again because it really is not an acceptable situation for our community what these kids go to school in.”
Statewide issues
For decades, Vermont provided state money to cities and towns to build or renovate schools, but the state shut down its school construction aid fund in 2007. The program used to fund up to 30 percent of a school infrastructure project.
“You have to remember that it was right before the 2008 recession,” said Chittenden County Sen. Ginny Lyons, who was involved in these infrastructure conversations in the Legislature in 2007. “A discussion was had about finding savings and reducing property taxes. So historically, there were good intentions about helping people with their property taxes, but the bad outcome is that it put significant pressure on school boards to find additional money when schools were failing.”
Vermont is now the only state in New England without a school construction aid program, along with the second oldest building stock of school buildings in the country, said Jill Briggs Campbell, the Agency of Education’s operations director.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean that those buildings are going to be in poor condition if they’ve been well maintained, it’s all about ongoing maintenance and operations,” she said. “It’s more that we have a huge backlog of deferred maintenance, and school districts have not been able to budget appropriately for ongoing maintenance and operations.”
Through Act 72 of 2021, the state restarted a conversation about setting standards for school facilities —which the state does not currently have — for things like training and certification standards for facilities managers at a district level and doing a thorough comprehensive facilities assessment for every public-school building in the state.
“That work is being completed now,” Briggs Campbell said. “We’re getting the final reports in. That also allows us to do modeling on what the need is with dollar amounts attached to it. So we’re going to have a better sense of the actual condition of our school facilities.”
All this is meant to inform the work of the State School Construction Aid Task Force, which was created in the appropriations bill of this last session, Act 78. It creates a 17-member group co-chaired by the Agency of Education and the Vermont treasurer’s office, which will present a proposal to the Legislature in January on a reinstated state school construction aid program.
“What we’re looking at is a proposal to restart in this next legislative session and the question, of course, will be balancing the needs that we’re identifying with the funding resources available,” Briggs Campbell. “We’re at this pivot point. At the agency level and on my team, it is our understanding that if the mission is equitable access to high-quality education, that includes facilities.”
