The night before the state’s school redistricting task force met for the first time, more than two dozen school officials from the Northeast Kingdom met to discuss the possible effects of the task force’s work, and how they could advocate for themselves.
The mood was stark at the Thursday night meeting, with many officials expressing resentment for attempts to further consolidate Vermont’s school districts. But the ad hoc group of board members and school officials from the North Country, Essex North and Orleans Central supervisory unions planned to develop a shared plan to try and lobby the task force.
“We do believe that given what’s coming, we may have a chance to influence where things are going,” Praneet Menon, the chair of the North Country Supervisory Union, said during the meeting.
On Friday, the 11-member School Redistricting Task Force had its inaugural meeting, which was mostly procedural. Created under Act 73 to craft new school district boundaries for Vermont’s public education system, the task force, made up of legislators, former superintendents and school officials, went over logistics and laid out what they hoped to accomplish.
“This is our moment to create significant change that will benefit our children,” Dave Wolk, a former state senator and former president of Castleton University who was appointed to the task force by Gov. Phil Scott, said at the Friday morning meeting.
As the work to overhaul Vermont’s public education system begins in earnest, supervisory unions and school districts are bracing for impact. Some, like the three Northeast Kingdom supervisory unions, are coordinating how to influence that process.
Part of Act 73, Vermont’s sweeping education law passed during this year’s Legislative session, the new task force will work to consolidate Vermont’s 118 school districts — contained within the 51 supervisory districts or supervisory unions — into anywhere from 10 to 25 future districts.
These new larger districts would oversee a minimum of 4,000 prekindergarten through grade 12 students, but no more than 8,000 students “to the extent practical,” according to the law.
The law’s new mandates around class size minimums and consolidations has created anxiety for school districts and their local communities. Rural communities fear the law’s implementation will eventually force the closure of their schools.
“What you’re working on right now has the potential to have a massive impact on the quality of life for young families and children in our state,” Cheryl Charles, the chair of the Windham Northeast Supervisory Union board and the chair of the Rural Schools Community Alliance, said during the Friday task force meeting.
In the Northeast Kingdom, “there’s a lot of concern among our constituents that what they’re suggesting at the state level will not work for us given the rurality of our area,” Menon, who organized the ad hoc committee, said in an interview this week.
The goal, Menon said, is to formulate a unified plan to present to the task force. That could mean devising an in-house consolidation plan among the three supervisory unions to present to the task force. Or to tell the task force they reject the premise of their work altogether.
“Either way we go, I think it is somewhat of a push back, because in one way, we’re saying, ‘Here’s what we want,’ and the other way we’re saying, ‘We don’t want anything that you’re suggesting whatsoever,'” he said. “What we want to do out of this is influence the task force’s end result so that we can carve out something that is favorable to our constituents, our students, and the regional needs of our area.”
“The mentality is, this is coming, and if it is coming, then we might as well try and figure out how we can influence the process,” Menon added.
Tight timeline
The task force is taking on a significant task on an ambitious timeline — about five months to draw up no more than three new possible configurations to the Legislature by Dec. 1.
“We will do the best we can with the time that we have,” Rep. Edye Graning, D-Chittenden-3, said during the task force meeting. Graning, who together with Sen. Martine Gulick, D-Chittenden Central, was named a co-chair of the task force.
The Legislature plans to take up the task force’s recommendations during the next legislative session, but they are not bound to accept their recommendations.
Much of Act 73’s sweeping provisions hinges on the Legislature eventually agreeing to a new map next session during an election year. In the Northeast Kingdom, some officials on the ad hoc committee questioned whether the process will move forward at all.
“There’s a strong possibility that the whole thing just goes away,” said John Castle, a board member with the North Country Supervisory Union and the executive director of the Vermont Rural Education Collaborative.
“Now, I can’t guarantee you that. I don’t know that,” he said during the meeting, “but there’s a part of me that feels like we should be the biggest pain we possibly can be, and join others in the state to be a real pain, to see the whole thing go away.”
There was plenty of skepticism during the task force’s meeting as well. The consolidation proposed under Act 73 would mark the “biggest governance reform in 100-and-something years,” Rebecca Holcombe, D-Windsor Orange-2, said during the meeting.
She was skeptical of the state’s ability to see such a process through.
“It’s pretty clear we are not capable of doing what we already have on our plate,” she said.
Others on the task force expressed optimism that the work over the next five months could help transform Vermont’s struggling public education system.
Jay Badams, recently retired as superintendent of School Administrative Unit 70, said he led his former district through a consolidation effort that “ultimately ended up closing five schools, eliminating 300 teaching positions and cutting central office in half.”
“We saved money by consolidating. We saved significant sums of money,” he said during the task force meeting. “And for us to get better outcomes, to bring equity where I would argue there isn’t right now, or even substantially equal resources for all of our kids, is going to require some hard choices.”
He said the task force should involve the public in the work and be transparent. He also said the task force members will have to “acknowledge that if we’re going to be successful in this work, there will be sacrifices that we’ll be asking some entities to make.”
“I think you as legislators will have tons of pressure from people who will oppose a lot of those ideas,” he said. “But it can be done.”
The redistricting task force has yet to schedule its next meeting.
Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier photo caption on this story misidentified the meeting that was taking place.
