Education Secretary Rebecca Holcombe is calling on Vermont school districts to begin a community dialogue to ensure that all students have a wide range of educational opportunities.
Holcomb says that in some cases this will lead to the consolidation of smaller school districts.
One of the unresolved issues of the recent legislative session was a bill that called on many of Vermont’s smaller school districts to consolidate over the next four years.
"Are we committed to making sure that every child has opportunities to learn, or do we see this as a local town responsibility ?" Education Secretary Rebecca Holcombe
The House plan gave these districts until 2018 to merge, if that didn’t happen, a special committee would design the boundaries of a new larger district.
The Senate rejected the mandatory approach and made its bill completely voluntary. It also included additional financial incentives to encourage districts to merge.
Education Secretary Holcombe hopes that communities that are part of a smaller district will begin a discussion about how to provide all students with equal educational opportunities.
“One of the tensions is this tension between as a state are we committed to making sure that every child has opportunities to learn or do we see this as a local town responsibility so it’s really up to each town,” said Holcombe. "Because if our goal is every child then we’re going to have to have conversations across districts because we are increasingly socially (and) economically stratified state.”
Holcombe says she’s concerned that some middle schools in a number of smaller districts are experiencing severe budget pressures. As a result, these schools have been forced to make cuts to important programs.
“There is a school that provides no foreign language very limited math preparation or options to middle school and no music and limited art,” said Holcombe. “When they arrive at the high school they’re joining children from other schools who’ve had much richer preparation and that really means they begin their high school career at a disadvantage.”
One third of all Vermont school districts have fewer than 100 students. Holcombe says it’s inevitable that some of the schools in these tiny districts are going to need to close.
“Some of these very small towns, they can have conversations until the end of time and at the end of the day, some of them, their schools will close because they do not have the resources internally in their communities to actually build a sustainable future," she said. "And as our population in the state ages, that will only be more of the case.”
Holcombe says her agency is compiling a detailed analysis of the various courses that are offered in schools across the state. She thinks this information will be very helpful for lawmakers when they take up this issue again in January.
