On a cold, gray Saturday in March, about a third of all the people living in Windham crammed into the town’s more than 220-year-old white clapboard meetinghouse. One item in particular had driven turnout on this Town Meeting Day: a ballot article that would permanently shutter Windham’s tiny elementary school. It was the third time in three years that the question would be posed to Windham’s 500 residents.
Standing at the back of the room, Bridget Corby took the microphone to describe the year as “traumatic,” adding that one son had come home from school every day crying.
“I am begging this community to put the kids first and stop talking about how the school is the heart of the community and if we lose the school, we lose the community,” she told her neighbors. “That puts the responsibility on young children to keep us together.”
Over the course of several hours of debate, not one person who identified themselves as a current parent in the school, except for school board chair Abby Pelton and her husband, defended Windham Elementary.
It had been a disastrous year at the K-6 school, where enrollment had long hovered in the teens. The school had lost its entire staff to resignations the prior year, and was only able to hire a new teaching principal, Jenna Cramer, with just weeks before the start of the school year. Barely three months later, the board fired her.
With no fully licensed educators left in the building, the school board reluctantly voted in December to temporarily close the school. Children were sent to Townshend Elementary, 10 miles down the road, for the remainder of the year.
For years, Windham had been split down the middle about what it ought to do about its school. But that day, the vote was decisive. By a vote of 82 to 45, the assembled crowd endorsed a ballot item, placed on there via citizen petition, to tuition out the district’s elementary-age students to nearby schools.
It was the exact step that backers of Windham Elementary had been trying to stave off for years, even in the face of dwindling enrollment and mounting costs. They are far from alone. Across Vermont, in places like Cabot, Greensboro and Ripton, communities facing those problems have resisted consolidation and voted to keep their small schools open.
Faced with skyrocketing taxes, crumbling buildings and a steadily shrinking student population that requires a growing number of mental health and social service supports, voters rejected nearly one-third of school budgets on Town Meeting Day. Lawmakers from both parties, education officials and Gov. Phil Scott alike are calling for an overhaul.
“We are at a true inflection point. And I think there’s a series of challenges that we’ve been kicking the can down the road on,” said former Vermont Education Secretary Rebecca Holcombe, who now serves in the Legislature.
There are no easy answers to the system’s myriad challenges, and while state and local agree that something must be done, they are unlikely to come to easy agreement about what that something should be.
The reality is we're going to change. The question is: will we be leading that change for our communities? Or is it just going to happen to us?Rebecca Holcombe, former Vermont secretary of education
With only 15 students when it closed, Windham is an extreme example. But the dynamics at play in this tiny southern Vermont town are nevertheless emblematic of widespread trends. Because while very few schools are as small as Windham, pupil counts across the state are nearly all headed in the same direction — down.
And Windham Elementary’s bitter, messy end offers one key lesson: simply clinging to the past will not save Vermont’s schools.
“The reality is we're going to change,” Holcombe said. “The question is: will we be leading that change for our communities? Or is it just going to happen to us?”
‘Don’t big box our kids’
For supporters of Windham Elementary — and there are many — the school’s miniscule size was its strength.
“I wish it was, like, a bumper sticker: Don't big box our kids. Isn’t that what Vermont is famous for?” said Beth McDonald, who sat on the school board for 16 years. “Buying local, you know? Buying from your local farmer. Buying from your small businesses.”
Windham Elementary was not quite a one-room schoolhouse, although it has, at times, had fewer students than the Elmore School — Vermont’s last remaining one-room schoolhouse. Technically, Windham’s school had two classrooms, which usually served fewer than 20 students in total across seven grades. There were typically three staff members in Windham: a teaching principal, a second teacher, and a part-time administrative assistant.
In such an intimate setting, the school’s backers said, students always got individualized attention, and classmates became family.
One parent, Rachel Spangler, spoke glowingly of Windham Elementary’s former teaching principal, Mickey Parker-Jennings. Tearfully, she recalled how a former special education director had written off her son, and told Spangler that his test scores were so poor that he would never live independently. But Parker-Jennings had believed in her son, she said, who was now thriving in high school.
Spangler said she had initially been hesitant to put her son in such a small school, and with the means to pay out of pocket, she’d explored her options. She’d found larger schools too chaotic, and ultimately decided to stick with Windham.
“I was a convert,” Spangler said.
The school also offered a unique opportunity to engage in nature-based, experiential learning. Once a week, children would head a mile down the road to a privately-owned hobby farm, where they would tap maple trees, plant seeds, and feed sheep, earning “farm badges'' along the way.
“They're outside and they're playing and it's just — gosh, it's what every kid should have,” said McDonald, who also works at the farmstead as livestock manager.
But for certain parents, the farm did not make up for the basic amenities — like a hot lunch program, afterschool, or a dedicated art teacher — that the school struggled to offer. For them, the farm instead came to represent a pastoral fantasy, kept alive at the expense of their children’s education.
“I have a kid who's way behind in reading,” said Windham mom Anne-Marie Jones. “But they know how to milk a goat!”
‘Nibbled to death by ducks’
Those looking for parallels to today’s education debates need only rewind the clock a decade — or six. In 2014, Vermonters in roughly 14% of districts rejected their school budgets on Town Meeting Day. The following January, then-Gov. Peter Shumlin offered his blunt appraisal of the system’s shortcomings.
The state had 24,000 fewer school-aged children than it had in 1998, but more teachers and paraprofessionals than before, the Democrat said. With the smallest class sizes in the nation, a fifth of all Vermont elementary classrooms had between two to nine children.
“The question is: Are we getting quality education for our higher price in these micro-classrooms? The answer is no,” Shumlin said during his budget address. “We buy those very small classes at the expense of foreign language, tech classes, the arts, sports, and other critical offerings. Our kids suffer as quality declines, and it is their future that takes the hit.”
Shumlin was not the first governor to bemoan these trends. His Republican predecessor, Jim Douglas, had given nearly the same speech five years prior. But criticism in Montpelier of Vermont’s hyperlocal, decentralized approach to schooling also predates the state’s demographic crunch.
In May of 1963, only a few months into his first term, Democratic Gov. Phil Hoff famously told a reporter that it was “ludicrous, utterly ridiculous and wasteful,” for a state the size of Vermont to have 800 school directors, 246 road commissioners, and 246 overseers of the poor.
“It may be political suicide but I am determined to end this sort of provincialism,” Hoff said.
The progressive reformer’s six years in office would radically reshape Vermont, successfully wrestling power from municipalities and dramatically expanding the scope of state government. But Hoff’s vision of a regionalized school system was only partially realized. With federal funding available to sweeten the deal, many communities came together to create union high schools.
School governance, on the other hand, remained stubbornly local. And today, very small schools still dot the landscape — there were 13 schools in Vermont last year with 50 or fewer kids, and 58 schools with 100 or fewer, according to state data.
Lawmakers responded to Shumlin’s call in 2015 by passing Act 46. At the time of the law’s passage, there were more school districts in Vermont than there were cities and towns, and the reform required districts serving fewer than 900 students to consolidate. By streamlining governance, the thinking went, schools might trim administrative costs, share resources, and improve their offerings.
Proponents of the law argued that larger districts would be the only way small schools might remain viable. Critics, however, saw little more than a cynical ploy to do just the opposite. In their telling, larger, more regional districts were dreamed up by the powers that be in Montpelier for one reason, and one reason only.
"It can only be intended to close small schools," John Castle, then a superintendent in the Northeast Kingdom, told the Caledonian Record in 2015.
Few districts fought Act 46 more fiercely than Windham. A hilly town in southern Vermont popular with retirees seeking beauty and isolation, Windham is small, but it is not tight-knit. There are no restaurants or bars, no stores, not even a gas station. The only civic infrastructure is the school, the meetinghouse, and the town office. Centers of social gravity lie outside the town’s borders — and in opposite directions. For those in north Windham, shopping and work usually take place in Londonderry and Manchester, for those in south Windham, Townshend or Brattleboro.
Without their school, many feared, Windham would be little more than a name on a map. And a regional district would surely close Windham Elementary, local leaders insisted. Carolyn Partridge, a state lawmaker and the town’s school board chair at the time, was fond of telling the press that in a consolidated district, Windham’s tiny school would be “nibbled to death by ducks.”
Windham’s neighbors in Newfane, Jamaica, Townshend and Brookline took a different route, joining together to form the West River school district under Act 46. Despite pushback from many in their towns, the merged school board decided to cut sixth grade from each individual town’s elementary school, and instead send them to Leland & Gray, the union middle and high school in Townshend. For merger skeptics in Windham, this was clear evidence of the new law’s sinister end game.
First the consolidated district would take Windham’s sixth graders, they feared, and then they would take the fifth graders — and eventually there would be no school at all.
Certain parents in Windham did see promise in what neighboring towns had come together to do. Erin Kehoe, for example, wanted her stepdaughter to be able to attend the union middle school, where she would have more peers her age to socialize with. And she was also excited by another prospect: the consolidated district was offering free, full-day prekindergarten — a rare amenity in Vermont (and the country).
“Pre-K is very important for learning routines and structures,” she said. “I think that's one of the building blocks in education.”
But parents like Kehoe were in the minority, and Windham’s leaders tried everything they could to stave off a merger. They sued the state. They explored privatization. And when the dust settled, Windham ultimately maintained autonomous control of its tiny school, sixth graders and all.
But keeping Windham Elementary open — and locally governed — did not bring students back to town. Indeed, when the school unceremoniously closed in December, not a single sixth grader was enrolled.
‘A seething cauldron of hatred and rage’
Concern about the viability of Windham Elementary was not resolved when Act 46 retreated from the scene. While the school board had generally been a unified front in support of the elementary school, the community grew bitterly divided.
In 2021, two back-to-back referendums revealed just how split the town was. In September, residents voted to close the elementary school — 137 to 135. But supporters of the school refused to accept the results. They organized a revote, held in November, which reversed the outcome by a similar margin: 142 to 139.
Inevitably, the pro-closure camp refused to accept that result, and filed a lawsuit alleging that three people who had voted in the election were no longer residents of Windham. An overlapping group of parents then filed a second suit in 2023, alleging the school was too small to offer an adequate education and demanding tuition to schools of the families’ choice in exchange. The voter fraud lawsuit has since been dismissed. In April, a judge dismissed all counts in the second suit, except for the central charge that children had been denied a basic education.
Both camps admit that years of Windham Elementary-related court battles, referendums, and testy school board meetings have left whatever was left of the town’s social fabric in tatters. The personal enmity neighbors feel for one another still sometimes surprises Meredith Tips-McLaine, one local parent who joined the lawsuit asking for tuition. (Her son attends a nearby private school.)
“My mom always says ‘Ah, yes, Windham, a bucolic town — and underneath it's a seething cauldron of hatred and rage.’ And it makes me wonder, like, are all small towns this f----- up?” she said.
‘Viable, but precarious’
Castle, the executive director at the Vermont Rural Education Collaborative, is currently consulting with school districts wrestling with the fates of their small schools. A former superintendent and prominent critic of Act 46, Castle remains staunchly devoted to local decision-making. But he does also believe there is such a thing as too small.
With the right educators, Castle thinks a school with as few as 50 pupils can still be “viable, but precarious.” Once enrollments drop below that threshold, he thinks that communities need to have proactive and clear-eyed conversations about what they can sustain.
“It can be very emotional,” he said. “In the end, I tend to be fairly pragmatic about it.”
As enrollment dwindles, it’s not uncommon for staff to head for the exit in search of more secure employment, administrators say. While popular narratives about small schools fighting for survival often focus primarily on student counts and community support, they often overlook the key role staffing plays in whether a school lives or dies.
Rural schools in Vermont are increasingly plagued with acute workforce shortages. To keep their schoolhouse doors open, administrators must frequently lean on substitutes and educators on emergency licenses.
And while large and small schools alike struggle to retain staff in rural areas, smaller ones are much more prone to crisis when a teacher leaves — or simply calls in sick for the day.
“You can't absorb any shockwaves. You can't absorb any change,” said Bill Anton, the former superintendent in the Windham Central Supervisory Union, which oversees Windham. “You're really at a knife's edge of survivability simply by your design.”
In 2014, the New York Times chronicled Vermont’s consolidation debates, and made the town of Rochester, which then still operated its own high school, a poster child for rural, anti-merger defiance. Three years later, Rochester High was back in the news — for having just two students. Families had left en masse, according to a Seven Days story at the time, after several teachers quit. The school closed the next year.
A similar story unfolded in Jamaica, 10 miles southwest of Windham, this spring. In May, the West River school board voted to temporarily close down the Jamaica Village School starting July 1. Only nine students were slated to attend the K-5 school in the fall, and, crucially, both of its teachers had decided to leave. (For a permanent closure, the full town will have to vote in a referendum.)
The district received no applicants to fill the vacant teaching positions, according to WCSU superintendent Bob Thibault. Fewer teachers are interested in teaching in multi-grade classrooms, he said, because it’s often harder. And those that do, particularly if they’re young, will find it doubly hard to find housing in a rural town like Windham or Jamaica.
“The challenge of a small school isn't necessarily the size. I think the location of it is actually more of a driving factor,” he said.
Merger skeptics in Windham have long pointed to persistent doubts about Jamaica Village School’s viability, even as it consolidated with the West River district, as evidence that a merger would have done Windham no good.
But aside from an orderly wind-down, Jamaica’s experience will differ from Windham in one key respect. Its families will have access, for free, to public full-day preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds. And this year at least, it’ll be offered right in town, at the Jamaica Village School.
‘This is going to happen’
A spate of school budget failures on Town Meeting Day preceded the passage of Act 46, and a larger tax revolt in 2024 is prompting talk, yet again, of consolidation.
But Windham’s experience suggests that closing schools alone will not solve the problem of Vermont’s high property taxes.
The $546,000 budget passed by Windham’s voters in June, to pay for tuition and transportation to schools out of town, represents only a modest reduction from the $596,000 the school board had initially sought in March to keep the school open.
But decisions to close small schools have never been strictly about money.
The beginning of the end for Windham Elementary was sparked by a single personnel change. Its teaching principal Mickey Parker-Jennings, who had taught at the school for 19 years, left abruptly in April 2023.
His exit was the first in a series of cascading problems for the school. Corby, one of the parents who spoke at Town Meeting, had been working as Windham Elementary’s part-time administrative assistant, and stepped in as a long-term substitute. She’d never worked as an educator before, she said in an interview, but the supervisory union’s central office provided her with lesson plans. At the end of the year, Corby left Windham Elementary for a job in another school in the supervisory union, as did Windham’s only other teacher.
Windham struggled to attract qualified applicants to replace them. Thibault, who had just stepped into his role as superintendent, told the school board last June that there was just one licensed candidate left in the school’s applicant pool — and that he was not recommending the board hire them.
“You’re obligated to educate the kids in Windham. At some point you’ve got to figure out how to do that if you don’t have teachers,” he said, adding that he expected the conversation to be “heated.”
But school board member Abby Pelton made clear that there was only one option for the fall: reopening.
“We will hire somebody. I don’t care if we have to have a special meeting after special meeting after special meeting. This is going to happen,” she told Thibault.
And so it did. With just weeks to go before the new school year was to start, Thibault hired a new applicant: Cramer. About half of all the parents in town had filed requests with the board to tuition their kids out of the school, but the board denied all requests and forged ahead with plans to open.
Six families subsequently filed suit, alleging the school was clearly too small and inadequately staffed. Cramer, their complaint noted, had been fired from her job as a principal in Boston in 2018. And while she was later vindicated by the courts, which found that she had been wrongfully terminated, a subsequent job ended abruptly, too, the lawsuit said. Her job as the principal of a suburban Boston area elementary school ended after just four months in 2019. (Cramer told Vermont Public she left this job voluntarily, while dealing with a divorce.)
A judge turned down the families’ requests for tuition to schools out of town. But barely two months later, Cramer was placed on administrative leave, and then fired by the Windham school board.
Recalling the events that led to the school's closure, Pelton said in an interview that the board had made the decisions as best it could, and argued that they hadn’t always received the information they wanted from Thibault or his predecessor.
The school board has never publicly said why they fired Cramer. But parents alleged in updated court filings, according to the Brattleboro Reformer, that she frequently let students watch videos in class.
They complained, in particular, about children watching a music video depicting a man’s head being blown off by a shotgun. In an interview, Cramer said she had put on the song “Lemon to a Knife Fight” by The Wombats while students were on a “movement break,” and did not think the students could see the video. She had actually never watched the video, Cramer told Vermont Public, until she was put on leave over the incident.
“I would be very alarmed if someone would show this to kids, and I wouldn't show it to my kids, and I would never show it to students — and I didn't show it to students,” she said.
Videos were only used in class for instructional purposes, she said. In her view, Thibault buckled to pressure from parents who wanted the school closed.
“I was ready for this challenge,” she said. “As long as I was supported.”
‘We were destined to make it here’
While skeptical from the start about enrolling her children in such a small school, Corby, the parent who had previously worked at Windham Elementary, said there actually had been a time when her kids had had, in a prior year, a “really unique and really special” experience at the school. But that moment had been fragile. The right teachers had been in place, she said, and, in a fluke, the kids were close in age because there were no older students enrolled that year.
She now believes making a place like Windham Elementary work relies on a special set of circumstances that just aren’t in place. And she thinks blaming the superintendent, as some in Windham have done, ignores the much wider forces — a housing crisis, labor shortages, aging demographics — at play.
“We were destined to make it here in one way or another,” Corby said. “We were just trying to hold on and try to Band-Aid and patch things and keep it going. But the reality is the challenges that we're facing weren't going to go away.”
This June, Windham’s school board asked residents to weigh in one more time on the fate of its school. By a nearly two-to-one margin, residents affirmed they wanted the school closed. ■
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