Calais and Worcester residents will be asked to vote next week on whether to close their elementary schools as part of a broader effort to consolidate operations in the Washington Central Unified Union School District.
Under the plan, the Doty Memorial School in Worcester and the Calais Elementary School would close by the end of the school year. Residents can vote early, and in person on Tuesday, Feb. 10.
The district currently operates five pre-K-6 and K-6 schools in Berlin, East Montpelier, Middlesex, Calais and Worcester. Students at Worcester and Calais would respectively be served by the Middlesex and East Montpelier schools, under the proposal.
The debate in these central Vermont towns mirrors similar questions state lawmakers are confronting as they work towards goals envisioned under Act 73, which will consolidate school districts and retool the state’s education finance systems.
Vermont’s school districts have had to grapple with concerns over what rising education costs and Act 73 mean for their communities. Districts like the Montpelier Roxbury Public Schools have moved to shutter schools, while other towns have rejected efforts to close schools.
While Act 73 has not mandated school closures, fears abound that larger consolidation will inevitably result in small, rural schools closing their doors.
Washington Central school district officials say closing the schools is not an arbitrary decision. Declining student enrollment and other factors, like the ever-rising cost of employee health insurance, are forcing the district’s hand, according to superintendent Steve Dellinger-Pate and school board chair Flor Diaz Smith.
The district has had trouble providing quality programming for its roughly 1,400 students and maintaining five elementary schools while staying under the state’s excess spending threshold, which penalizes districts that spend well above the average, Diaz Smith said.
“We’re having to spread resources very thin across the district now because we just don’t have the funds to be able to do all the programming that we would like to be able to do,” Dellinger-Pate said.
But, unlike in other communities where the same debate has played out, district officials will need a majority of voters’ approval to close the schools — a stipulation agreed to when the district was merged under 2015’s Act 46. Diaz Smith said the board has contingency budget plans prepared in case both or one of the communities votes against closure.
While there’s some mixed opinion in both towns, many residents are adamant against seeing their community schools close. They’ve argued the district has not explored alternatives.
Catherine Coteus, a Worcester resident and parent of a Doty Memorial School student, said the consequences of closing schools in Vermont’s rural towns would be “massive for the health of small communities, and for just the shape of rural economic health and rural life in general.”
“I think that’s a profound loss for Vermont,” she said.
It’s not the first time the Washington Central district has considered closing schools. School board members in 2024 reviewed plans to close both the Worcester and Calais schools before walking them back.
Then, as now, closing the schools offers the chance to expand academic and extracurricular opportunities for the student body, and would lead to larger, more ideal class sizes and prevent merging grades, officials say.
The Calais and Worcester schools currently serve fewer than 100 students each, Dellinger-Pate said. One school’s kindergarten class has only seven students.
The Washington Central district has seen about a 14% decline in students in the last decade, Dellinger-Pate said. He projects a similar decline over the next decade.
By consolidating operations at the three other schools, officials hope to improve on educational quality. Diaz Smith in an interview said the move would help the district provide “consistent, equitable and sustainable” standards for students and their communities.
While the state’s reform efforts have loomed large over school districts, officials say consolidation is being considered independent of those broader efforts.
“People are questioning what’s going to happen as a result of Act 73,” Dellinger-Pate said. “But for us, regardless of Act 73, we have to make some decisions about how we want to educate our kids and what we want to provide them with.”
Still, some parents and residents aren’t convinced, and have voiced their displeasure with the plans at informational meetings.
“I think the sad truth is that the board has had an agenda about this from the get-go,” Coteus said in an interview. “And the agenda has been to consolidate, that bigger is better, and they have sought answers within that framework without a more creative solution being even allowed to enter the conversation.”
Diaz Smith acknowledged it’s been a challenging period for the two communities but said that “this is really grounded in a vision for what we want for our kids.”
“Nobody wants to close schools, but we don’t have the students for the schools,” Diaz Smith said. “We know this is really, really hard, and it’s hard on us too. It’s not an easy conversation to have with anybody.”
Clarification: This story was updated to note that early voting is available for residents in Calais and Worcester.
Correction: A previous version of this story omitted pre-K from the grades operated by Washington Central schools.
