After a year of deliberations, a closely-watched effort to close two elementary schools in central Vermont ran aground this week after the local school board voted against putting the measure on the November ballot.
By a vote of 8-5, members of the Washington Central Unified Union school board voted Tuesday evening against endorsing a plan that would have shuttered two of its five elementary schools, Calais Elementary and Doty Memorial School in Worcester.
The decision came at the conclusion of an emotional four-hour meeting, in which even some proponents of consolidation said the board and administrators had failed to make a convincing case for closure.
“You all aren't the only people frustrated with this process,” Daniel Keeney, a Calais school board member who voted alongside the pro-merger minority, told the crowd. “I want you to be really clear about that, and I continue to be disappointed with the lack of articulation of benefits.”
In a presentation before the vote, superintendent Steven Dellinger-Pate told the board that closing the two schools and moving all district sixth-graders into the union middle school at U-32 in East Montpelier could save over $2 million. But several on the school board and members of the public — many of whom came to the meeting wearing red in protest — argued that they needed more.
“There has not been a study of the taxing impact, the economic impact, the health impact or even the impact of what we can expect for educational outcomes. I'm disappointed in this process,” Rachel Seelig, a Calais resident, told the board during a lengthy public comment period.
Residents who packed Tuesday’s meeting, held at Calais Elementary, overwhelmingly opposed consolidation. Many parents said that their children thrived in the district’s small schools, community members argued the elementaries were an integral part of the towns, and several argued perhaps other schools should close instead — including in a neighboring district.
Allen Gilbert, a former longtime Worcester school board member, urged the board to merge with Montpelier instead and bring the capital city’s high schoolers to U-32.
“That's the only reconfiguration that can provide long-term budget stability. Don't waste time closing schools that serve their communities well,” he said.
Washington Central’s five towns — Middlesex, Calais, Worcester, East Montpelier and Berlin — draw a circle around Montpelier, and the two districts have flirted with a merger for years.
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Informal talks between the Montpelier-Roxbury and Washington Central districts have indeed tentatively picked up again recently. But pro-closure board members in Washington Central have argued that such a merger, while worthwhile, would be a far more complex undertaking, and no argument for postponing action on the Worcester and Calais schools. And Zach Sullivan, an East Montpelier school board member, also argued that Montpelier's board members, which recently closed the elementary school in Roxbury, would never merge with Washington Central unless it reconfigured first.
One Berlin board member, Jonathan Goddard, who voted against consolidation, argued that the proposal to close the schools was “premature,” and that, among other things, the board should wait to see what state lawmakers would do.
“Hopefully that'll include more funding for public education, because Vermont has been sorely behind that angle for decades in terms of underfunding public education,” Goddard said, to cheers from the audience.
Vermont spends more per-pupil on its pre-K-12 system than nearly all other states in the country, and lawmakers are unlikely to be in a generous mood when they return to the Statehouse in January. Since nearly a third of school budgets failed on Town Meeting Day, Democrats and Republicans alike have generally emphasized that they believe cost-containment is in order.
Groups representing school boards, superintendents and business managers even wrote to their members earlier this summer, warning them that if they did not find ways to cut costs, Montpelier would do it for them.
“Without successful efforts to significantly reduce the rate of increase in school district spending … more budgets could fail, leading to statewide proposals designed to suppress spending rather than address costs,” the associations wrote in their joint memo. “This would likely result in increased disparities in education funding across the state.”
In fact, lawmakers have already reinstituted a tax penalty for spending over a certain threshold — which Washington Central will trigger if it continues current operations next year, according to budget estimates prepared by the superintendent.
Vermont has been wrestling with whether or not to close smaller schools for well over a decade as school enrollments steadily decline. Those debates, which were largely put on pause during the pandemic, have come back in full force as schools deal with skyrocketing health care, special education and facilities costs. With so many budget pressures out of schools’ control, consolidation advocates have argued that combining smaller schools is one of the few levers available to local officials.
“Last year's school board budget process was a warning call for the coming tsunami,” East Montpelier school board member Amelia Contrada told Tuesday’s crowd.
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All of Washington Central’s schools are operating well below their capacity. Asked by one board member how the union middle and high school could absorb sixth-graders without new staff or increasing class sizes, Dellinger-Pate replied that U-32’s enrollment had dropped by roughly 100 students in the last three years alone. According to the superintendent, the district’s entire fifth grade class — who would attend the union middle school next year — counted just 83 students this year.
But while much of the impetus for merging is financial, some consolidation proponents have tried to stress the potential educational benefits as well. With faculty spread out over so many buildings, and serving fewer students, staff are either overburdened or under-utilized, depending on location, administrators say. And larger schools, merger advocates say, can also offer more balanced and diverse peer groups.
“We've heard from parents, from people about cases where there's been one boy in a class or one girl in a class, and that is really, really hard for those kids,” Sullivan said.
And while Calais and Worcester’s elementary schools might stay open for now, Sullivan added later, preserving the status quo isn't actually on the table.
“I think it's a question of, do we keep five elementary schools that we’re forced to start hollowing out, or do we move to something that's better, more sustainable?” he said.
While the plan to close the Calais and Worcester schools appears dead — at least in the short term — the proposal to move sixth-graders to U-32 can still move forward.
According to the district’s articles of agreement — its charter — closing a school outright requires a vote in each affected town. But reconfiguring grades can be done through board action alone, and Dellinger-Pate confirmed after the meeting that such a proposal was likely to emerge during the budgeting process for the upcoming school year.
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