CRAFTSBURY – Roughly 45 people attended a community forum on Act 73 about the state redistricting plan for schools, held September 10.
Craftsbury Town School District Board Chair Kasey Allen opened the meeting with an overview and update on relevant information about Act 73, which the Legislature passed in June and Governor Scott signed into law in July. She said the forum was being held to get community input on which neighboring schools, districts and/or supervisory unions Craftsbury schools might potentially want to work with.
A legislative School District Redistricting Task Force is meeting now, with plans to generate maps of proposed new school districts by December 1, which the legislature will consider in January
Craftsbury School Board passed a motion and submitted a letter to the state task force on August 11, saying “The Craftsbury Town School District would like to remain within a Supervisory Union within a larger governance region,” and “work with our Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union board to reach out to contiguous school districts to explore combining into a larger supervisory union.”
The letter explained the “purpose is to optimize cost-savings and efficiencies where possible while maintaining local democratic engagement, oversight and accountability in order to achieve excellent educational outcomes for our communities’ children and youth at a cost Vermonters can afford.”
Margaret Maclean of the Rural School Community Alliance (RSCA) then spoke to say RSCA exists to represent small schools with under 300 students as a collective body. As of June, 102 towns were members.
While some areas of the state can support the proposed model with local elementary schools, central middle schools and regional high schools, many rural areas cannot, she said. New class size standards would put some schools on a path to closure. The ideal map doesn’t anticipate the many confounding factors, such as population, geography and travel patterns.
The RSCA is asking towns to make a decision between a supervisory union structure and district structure, which Craftsbury has already done.
During a time for public comment and questions those attending learned Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union (OSSU) currently has approximately 1,000 students.
The answer to how big an area it would take to reach the expected 4,000 student district envisioned by Act 73 will depend on what neighboring areas get included and what school buildings are available in it.
There was broad agreement on the need to collect community input through a survey that will be open until October 1 at forms.gle/bCCB6MXq5VYbETSk9
Another governance structure called Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) exists in New York State, where the state provides services to school districts.
Maclean suggested there are certain schools on the path to closure and a scenario under which Craftsbury could be one of them. The high school class size minimum is 18 students and the legislation says the Secretary of Education may take action. Hopefully a case can be made that geography and low population density allow rural schools like Craftsbury to continue serving the population they do now.
The state has never evaluated the cost savings of consolidation and the only real analysis was an undergraduate thesis done by Grace Miller, who went to North Country, then studied the issue at Yale. A study from Arkansas has shown that there’s not evidence that consolidation of this sort saves a lot of money in rural states.
A school board member from Albany said Orleans Central Supervisory Union, just to the north, has six elementary schools all feeding into Lake Region. There are two school districts there, one for high school and one for elementary and middle school. Several years ago they decided to make a plan based on low class sizes, hiring challenges, and aging infrastructure. They started with sister schools at elementary and middle school levels, then hired consultants to present options. The one that saves the most money involves building a new elementary school on the Lake Region. It would be very expensive at more than $100 million), but could save about $700 million over the long-term based on the analysis.
A former Craftsbury student who now attends Lake Region said the drive is hard, but it provides more choice. They have made the decision to have access to more classes and more athletics. For Craftsbury, bringing students in or merging with somewhere nearby could mean minimal upheaval but could have some positive impacts.
A parent said she was devastated with her high school student’s choice to leave Craftsbury, but class size was really small and that made a lot of things feel very limited. “You’d have to pry the K-8 out of my cold dead hands” but at the older grades we could really gain some things out of that transition.
A final comment was made that the Public Assets Institute did some good studies of different ways to fund education that would be more equitable than the property tax-based mechanism. As citizens we can start advocating for what we want in terms of politics and influence.
Paul Fixx is editor of The Hardwick Gazette and lives in Hardwick.
