The Central Vermont Career Center in Barre will have a big ask for voters this November: $149 million to build a brand new, much larger facility.
As interest in the trades has grown, the school has been turning away around 200 students a year because of limited capacity, according to Jody Emerson, the tech center’s director.
“Every year that I've been here, the number of applicants to our center has increased,” she said.
The ballot item that voters across 18 towns in central Vermont will see on Nov. 4 will come with an explicit warning: There’s no state help available to defray the project’s cost, and there might never be.
“Therefore, 100% of the project shall be built at the school district’s cost without State participation,” the ballot item reads. The tech center’s early calculations suggest the tax bill on a $300,000 home could rise upwards of $400 a year in some of the towns.
Vermont placed a moratorium on school construction aid nearly two decades ago, and a conservative state estimate now pegs the price of deferred maintenance at upwards of $6 billion. Lawmakers have suggested they want to restore some level of state aid, particularly for regional high schools, as part of their plan for a wide-scale consolidation of school districts. But they’ve been mum about how they might pay for it.
Emerson said she’s been asked a lot why the tech center shouldn’t just wait for the state to reinstitute construction aid once redistricting talks are complete.
“The answer is: we don't know if we're ever going to get it,” she said.
Many communities are holding off on capital projects. But others are trying to move ahead. In Orleans Central Supervisory Union, which serves Barton and surrounding towns, the school board is testing the waters now to see if their communities would support building a regional elementary and middle school.
OCSU superintendent Jackie Ramsay-Tolman said she can’t bank on the state stepping in to help later.
“It really comes down to we just don't know,” she said.
Other districts say they just need the state to get out of the way. Two years ago, lawmakers reintroduced a tax penalty to tamp down school spending that can be triggered by capital expenditures.
In the Mountain Views Supervisory Union, which serves the Woodstock area, local officials have issued a public plea to Gov. Phil Scott and lawmakers to hold a special legislative session this fall to exempt capital spending from the so-called ‘excess spending threshold.’
Local officials there have warned for years that their building is in such bad shape that day-to-day operations are imperiled. But they’ve also been unable to convince local voters to back a pricey bond, and they say the tax penalty makes their request to voters impossible.
“At any moment, there could be a catastrophic failure,” MVSU school board chair Keri Bristow said.
State leaders, however, appear disinclined to move much faster.
“We will not be having a special session,” Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, said last week. “January will be coming soon enough.”
Undeterred, leaders in Mountain Views said they would plead their case with state lawmakers. But while a spokesperson for House Speaker Jill Krowinski, a Democrat, said they had not yet had a chance to review the request, the leader of the senate was unequivocal.
“We won’t be coming back,” Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth told Vermont Public.
Committee chairs might begin looking into the matter, the Burlington Democrat/Progressive added, but nothing formal would take place until lawmakers return to Montpelier in January.
Rep. Peter Conlon, who chairs the House Education Committee, said he’s sympathetic to local school officials.
“I suspect school districts are feeling like, ‘Hey, we've been patient enough.’ And they are right in that. So we need to give them some clear guidance moving forward,” the Cornwall Democrat said.
But Conlon also noted that Vermont faces flat-lining state revenues and an increasingly bleak landscape for federal aid.
“This is just an incredibly challenging and hard and somewhat depressing situation to be in,” he said.
