CABOT – Dear Governor Scott, Secretary Saunders and Vermont State Legislators:
I am a retired educator, with 40 years’ experience in teaching and leadership roles.
I don’t understand how you can continue this absurd push for school consolidation: creating huge districts, closing small schools, mandating class sizes, imposing spending caps: all for the purpose of saving property taxes, without thinking of the children.
Show me the studies indicating improved academic performance when you:
Deprive young children of adequate sleep (because they must get up earlier to get to school)
Subject children to the stress of long bus rides in the cold and dark, snow, rain and mud
Subject children to the ever-present risk of getting stuck, landing in a ditch or having a more serious accident. I cannot imagine the emotional scars we will impose on whole busloads of small children after sliding off the road or getting mired in mud.
Show me the studies with improved social, emotional, mental wellbeing from: lack of sleep, excess stress, longer time away from caregivers, less individual attention to student needs, less community interaction and socialization.
We live in a beautiful, sparsely populated, rural and mountainous state. It is what draws people to live here, raise a family, visit, and start small businesses: the natural beauty, the peace and quiet, the lack of, crowds and stress. And the quality of education that small schools provide.
Vermont schools have a nationwide reputation for Inclusion and meeting the needs of children with a wide range of abilities. Small rural schools in Vermont have historically demonstrated excellent academic outcomes, by addressing individual strengths and needs. In small schools everyone knows everyone else. Principals, teachers, support staff, maintenance and custodial staff, bus drivers, food service staff, all know each child by name and truly care about every child.
Things have only gone downhill, when budget drives staffing decisions and standardized computerized testing and bureaucrats, judge learning, instead of highly trained teachers with intimate knowledge of each individual student.
Please stop this effort to destroy our small rural schools and communities. When you close small rural schools that are the heart of the community, you not only destroy the emotional and social heart of a town, but you also destroy a significant economic driver.
Parents and teachers who work out of town will no longer frequent the local village store, the local garage, the local hardware store, the local post office on their way to work.
Local teachers and support staff will lose their jobs.
Working parents will lose pay and possibly their jobs to attend parent conferences and school events, to retrieve a sick child, or drive an hour each way to take them to the doctor or dentist,
Small schools have been pinching pennies for decades, because of the source and formula for funding. That is the problem that needs to be solved. We need a total overhaul of how we pay for education. Those who have more, should pay more.
These are our children: they are our investment in our future. We need to put the children first.
Cecilia Gulka is a retired educator and resident of Cabot.
