This story by Tommy Gardner first appeared in the Stowe Reporter on Nov. 9.
Stowe voters Tuesday rejected a $39 million bond to pay for a comprehensive overhaul of the Stowe High School and Middle School campus, leaving the school district to find other ways to address what officials say are overdue issues with the half-century-old building.
The vote was 983-562 against, which school board chair Tiffany Donza sees as a strong voter mandate, even if it’s one with which she vehemently disagrees.
“For me, there was so much more than just the actual bond at stake,” Donza said Wednesday. “This really says something about where our community is at and where it’s headed, and that’s the hardest part for me.”
Donza, who has been involved in school construction studies since 2015, before she joined the school board, said she sees the vote outcome as “people unwilling to invest in their schools.”
Now, she said it’s time for someone else to step up and lead the charge for fixing the facilities — she said she’s not leaving the school board, just stepping aside from what has been an eight-year slog to help get a major campus overhaul across the finish line.
Superintendent Ryan Heraty, while also disappointed in the result, saw a silver lining: an increasingly engaged populous that is frustrated with the way the state funds education and does not fund school construction.
“What is clear is that this was not a vote against the schools, it was a vote against the way schools are funded in Vermont,” Heraty wrote in a letter to the editor, and reiterated over the phone Wednesday.
Both Donza and Heraty said there are no plans to simply reconvene and try again, but the problems that have been identified remain and some of them need to be addressed as soon as possible, particularly ones dealing with student safety, like fire protection systems, which are all but nonexistent.
Heraty said those things will have to be addressed within the operating budget, by allocating money each year to facilities work.
“We’re going to have to make more value-based decisions with a limited pool of money,” he said. “That’s just going to be our reality over the next few years.”
Donza said that won’t include a revised bond.
“The process was never designed to be ‘let’s hit the community with a high number and whittle our way down,’” she said.
School officials — who managed to squeeze in four separate on-site informational meetings and campus tours in the seven weeks between the time the figure was proposed — said the campus had only seen two significant renovations since its construction in the early 1970s. They say the building was so long in the tooth that it doesn’t even have a fire sprinkler system because such a thing wasn’t required 50 years ago.
Among the issues the school board, staff, students and members of a facility committee that worked for over a year on studying the school’s needs: there are not adequate fire safety or ventilation systems; the roof and parking lot are in disrepair; the bathrooms are not ADA compliant; the gym and auditorium are outdated; and the middle schoolers are generally something of an afterthought in the campus layout.
The $39 million bond would have included nearly $10 million in contingencies and “soft costs,” such as design and permitting fees. The actual hard costs, the various projects’ estimated base costs, ring in at $29.8 million.
As for those hard costs, this is how some of the estimated school fixes break down:
- $4.7 million for a new gym and connecting areas.
- $2.1 million for new road access and parking areas.
- $2.5 million for new athletic fields and a track.
- $1.2 million for auditorium renovations.
- $8.5 million for systems upgrades, such as sprinklers.
- $6.1 million in other general renovations such as walls, floors, roof and the like.
That rough breakdown might come in handy as the school district determines its next steps, which Donza said is likely to be years of small steps instead of one leap forward, as Tuesday’s vote ruled out.
“I’ll work alongside with the board and administration to continue what’s been done in the past, which is, more or less, Band-Aid fixes to issues,” she said. “It will never be as efficient as completing the work that was proposed in the bond.”
Heraty said the work, in a way, has just begun.
“This is going to take more time than we had initially hoped for, but we’re going to have to figure out better solutions and find creative ways to get it done,” he said. “We’re not going to give up on the project. We’re not going to give up on renovating the spaces that desperately need it. We know that our students deserve it.”
