Like dozens of other school districts in the state, the Champlain Islands Union School District had a rough go of it during its last budget cycle.
After its first budget was voted down, district officials were forced to cut funding for a mental health professional, a teacher, and an after school program, while striking several building maintenance projects from the budget, according to the board’s chair, Michael Inners.
After those cuts, voters eventually approved a budget that resulted in a 17% education property tax hike, Inners said.
Once the dust had settled, the school district charged themselves with studying a possible reorganization of its schools to reduce operating costs and finetune the district’s student educational experience. The district hired Elaine Pinckney, a former superintendent of the Champlain Valley School District, to oversee a restructuring committee.
The committee’s efforts — and the ensuing debate — show how one school district is facing existential questions amid a larger, statewide debate over school funding. With ever-increasing cost drivers like health insurance, one of the options now being considered is whether the board should close or reorganize one of two remaining schools in the district.
The Grand Isle School and the North Hero Elementary School together serve just under 200 students in Pre-K through sixth grade, but only 28 of those students attend the North Hero school. With a declining enrollment and a long list of deferred maintenance projects, officials have questioned whether it’s financially viable to keep the school open as it is currently structured — and whether the district should move all its students to the Grand Isle School.
There are few other options for cost savings. Without a high school, about half of the district’s budget is dedicated to tuition payments to send students to other high schools in Vermont or even New York state. The district paid tuition to send 228 high school and middle school students elsewhere in the last school year, Inners said.
“Like many small schools, the enrollment is beginning to dip to the point where there are questions whether (students) were getting an appropriate educational environment for some of the grade levels, with very small numbers of students in a classroom,” Inners said in an interview. “Does it make sense to have a grade with three people?”
But officials acknowledge it would be a tough sell for a community that recently saw the Isle La Motte school close down. Asking parents and kids to travel from North Hero and Isle La Motte to Grand Isle — a roughly 30 minute round trip drive — could be too much to ask, particularly during the winter.
“There are some people who really think that closing the school is a solution,” Pinckney said at the board’s November meeting. Still, she added, others feel that closing the North Hero School “would hurt the communities, and will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“You close the schools, so fewer people move to the community who are raising kids,” she said.
‘A wonderful school’
The district’s restructuring committee first met in late August — the first of five meetings where about two dozen community members deliberated over how to restructure its schools.
A survey was later released and responded to by 161 people to better understand what options would be favorable.
A final report was presented to the board at their November meeting, with several options for the district to consider.
Those options included closing the North Hero school altogether; reconfiguring North Hero as a primary school and Grand Isle as an intermediate school; tuitioning out sixth grade students — or alternatively, bringing back seventh and eighth grade students; and exploring a merger with the neighboring Alburgh or South Hero districts, or even the Franklin West Supervisory Union.
Officials earlier this year had hoped for a final recommendation. But ultimately, the report, released on Nov. 7, left open the possibility of exploring any of these options.
The final report comes as the district is beginning to craft next school year’s budget, leading to concerns among community members and staff at the North Hero Elementary School about the building’s future.
Mary Ellen Hutchins, a staff member at the school whose child also attends, said during the November board meeting that closing the school should be “the absolute last resort.”
“I think that has to be the last resort, and I hope, as a board, you will listen,” she said. “I don’t want my child to be put in a classroom of 20 or more students. My daughter has the education she has because of what she received at North Hero with those small classes.”
Other community members said the school and its small class sizes provide a quality educational experience that should be prioritized.
Diane Bahrenburg, a North Hero resident, called the North Hero School “a wonderful school, and it’s a wonderful resource for all of us.”
“I could envision it being a kindergarten through second grade school, and I’m not saying that that’s what we have to decide,” she said, “but before you just close that option, take a look at asking educators, asking people who are experts… and then see if that would fit for North Hero, instead of just removing it.”
Instead, many survey respondents and community members expressed a desire to bring back more middle-school aged students.
The district is currently serving sixth grade students, who then must transition to a new school outside of the district and join other students, which can be difficult for a student that age, community members and school district officials said.
“There is a strong belief that moving kids into the middle schools at grade seven puts them at a big disadvantage,” Pinckney said.
District officials have heard similar sentiments — that a school with smaller class sizes in a community perhaps should be prioritized.
“I think there’s some fear from families — they want to have their kids close, they want to have kids going to school in the community in which they live,” Lisa Ruud, the superintendent of the Grand Isle Supervisory Union, said in an interview. “But is that something that’s viable in the long run?”
‘Their backs are up against the wall’
The school board expects to begin deliberating on a draft budget at their next meeting on Dec. 10, Inners said, when the recommendations of the committee will be considered.
Cuts to the district’s operating budget seem inevitable, Ruud said.
“There’s no way that we can avoid them with the rising costs of healthcare and everything that’s happening with the state,” she said. “We’re just uniquely situated in a really horrific spot.”
With a new legislative session coming up, lawmakers have a tall task ahead of them in addressing the educational finance crisis. Legislators have said addressing education finance is the number one priority.
There is a possibility, Inners said, that the board decides to punt to next year, “and get one more year with the current configuration while we sort out more options.”
But pressure on the board to cut operating costs remains. Inners said the district will likely run up against the state’s “excess spending threshold,” which penalizes higher spending school districts. (Because of the common level of appraisal adjustments, Inners said there is little else the district can cut in its budget to draw down its tax rate increase for voters).
He added that he believes that shuttering the North Hero school building altogether would be a mistake. “I think we would regret it in a few years if we gave up that building,” he said.
Still, other board members say much of the anxiety they feel is because of the state’s education formula.
“There are a lot of different things we have to evaluate,” said Sylvia Jensen, a school board member. But she said a lot of the focus in reorganization has been driven because of the education tax.
“We just keep getting punished every year on this education tax formula,” she said.”With the election that’s come and gone, what is the feeling that we’re going to have a different formula next year?”
Some involved in the discussion, Pinckney said at the November meeting, noted that “it feels a little bit like we just went through a really bad budget time, and now all of a sudden, we’ve got to do something, and it feels a little bit rushed.”
Ruud said she feels the board should hold off on making major changes. She questioned whether any of the options on the table would generate significant cost savings.
“My argument is, let’s take a little bit more time,” she said. “I think the feeling from the board is, they feel their backs are up against the wall, that they need to move. I think it would be a no-brainer if we knew we could do X, Y or Z, and there would be a huge cost savings, but it’s actually not playing out that way.”
