Danby, Mt. Tabor and Sunderland residents could soon see their community elementary schools shutter. On Tuesday, residents of the three towns will vote in a non-binding referendum over whether to close the Sunderland and Currier Memorial schools.
The Taconic and Green School District oversees four elementary schools and an elementary-middle school for nine towns including Manchester. Residents will vote by Australian ballot on Oct. 28. The district board will then have the final say on closing the two schools during its Nov. 4 meeting.
The board will need 10 of its 13 members to vote in favor of closure — a rule that was enacted during the 2017 merger and creation of the Taconic and Green School District under Act 46. Taconic and Green school board chair Melanie Virgilio, of Sunderland, said the board will consider the results of the referendum but is not bound by them.
“We’ll vote however the entirety of the board chooses to vote in November, but we’ll be given the results, and we’ll have to consider that,” she said. “It’s a huge consideration for board members.”
The move to consolidate the southern Vermont school district’s facilities comes amid declining enrollment and persistent costs to repair and maintain aging infrastructure at the schools — a common dilemma for school districts across the state.
The Bennington-Rutland Supervisory Union, which encompasses the Taconic and Green, the Mettawee and Winhall school districts, is also simultaneously developing plans for a regional middle school. Superintendent Randi Lowe said she expects the supervisory union will request voter approval in the spring or summer of 2026 to bid for that work.
“We’re moving to consolidation, just because we don’t need as many schools as we’ve got,” she said. “We want to update our facilities, because, just like everybody in the state, we’re facing really, really aging facilities.”
The supervisory union pays tuition to send its high school-aged students out of the district, many to two nearby private schools, Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester and the Long Trail School in Dorset.
Both the Sunderland School and Currier Memorial School in Danby, which respectively serve grades K-6 and pre-K through 5, currently have fewer than 50 students at each school. The closures are necessary, district officials say, to give all of the kids in the district’s schools equal learning opportunities.
The district’s other schools — the Flood Brook School in Londonderry, the Dorset School and the Manchester Elementary-Middle School — each have 30 to 40 kids per grade, and Virgilio said those schools enjoy more robust programming. Staff at the Sunderland and Currier Memorial schools, meanwhile, have a difficult time providing the same resources, which creates an “inequity of opportunity” for students in the smaller schools.
“There’s just so few kids that they’re not really able to build learning communities,” Virgilio said. “That just is inequitable as a district. If there are kids in the district that are having access to this kind of elevated level of programming and then the smaller schools aren’t, that’s not really fair.”
If the school district board votes to approve the closure, both schools would shutter on July 1, 2026. The remaining students at the two schools would transfer to the Dorset Elementary School, while the district would shift all of its seventh and eighth grade students from the Dorset School to the Manchester Elementary-Middle School, Lowe said.
Getting ahead
The move to close the two schools, and the plans to build a regional middle school, represent a microcosm of sorts of the changes currently underway on the state level.
Act 73, the education reform bill signed into law in July, has set Vermont on a course to transform its public education system and rework how the state pays for it. But the first step is to consolidate the state’s 119 school districts and 52 supervisory unions into anywhere from 10 to 25 future districts.
The school redistricting task force is currently working to create no more than three possible map configurations for the Legislature to consider, and will meet again on Monday.
While Act 73 has a ways to go before its full implementation, its effects are already being felt. Future ramifications in the law around class size minimums and other provisions are pushing school districts like Taconic and Green to try and exert control over their future.
More than a dozen school districts in the last two months have written letters to the state’s redistricting task force to convey their preferences around merging.
In the Bennington-Rutland Supervisory Union, the reorganization efforts serve as a preemptive step to get ahead of the consolidation efforts underway at the state level, its superintendent said.
The state’s push to reform its education system, Lowe said, provides “a greater context that says, ‘Hey, this is the right thing for our community, no matter what.'”
“As far as I’m concerned, we know we spend a lot of money on education,” she said. “We are an operationally inefficient state, and we are an expensive state.”
“If we can stabilize our programming for our students and be as efficient as possible with our budget, then we have an opportunity to really make the best decisions for our community, independent of what the state does or doesn’t do,” Lowe said.
Urging caution
Not everyone appears to be on board with the plans. At one of several recent community forums, residents expressed fears that closure of the schools could have a wider impact on their communities. Without schools, why would young families settle in their town?
But residents also expressed a sense of futility that there was little they could do to influence the process — both at the local level and on the state level, according to reporting from the Bennington Banner.
Sandy Pinsonault, R-Dorset, who represents some of the areas that would be affected by the closures, said she hoped that the Taconic and Green school board would “weigh the opinions and concerns of their stakeholders carefully.”
“I think it’s difficult for most people to wrap their minds around the complete picture and how it will affect their families,” she said in an email.
She specifically pointed to uncertainties and “variables” at the state level. The Legislature will ultimately need to vote to approve a new school district map. Without that, much of the provisions in Act 73 would not move forward.
Pinsonault urged caution, and said the board should follow the results of the public referendum.
“If support is low, the board should pause and regroup,” she wrote. “If support is high, I would recommend deferring any formal action until after the legislative session and committees complete their work.”
Nonetheless, school district leaders point to the uncertainty around what the Legislature will decide as a reason to move forward.
Act 73 sets parameters around class size minimums, requiring at least 12 students in grades 2 through 5, for example — below the current enrollment at the Sunderland and Currier Memorial schools.
District members and community members also fear the district could lose access to their school choice system.
“There’s every reason to believe that when the state reconfigures our boards, that a new board will be forced to close the schools anyway,” Virgilio, the school district chair, said.
The Taconic and Green board can at least move forward now with some community input, but they can’t guarantee the same with the state’s reconfiguration.
“There is a protectionist methodology to this,” she said. “If we do this now and come together, it hopefully fortifies the boundaries of our district.”
