School districts in central and southern Vermont are set to merge after voters approved three Act 46 school district consolidation plans Tuesday.
In central Vermont, the Orange and Washington districts will merge, as will the nearby districts in Northfield and Williamstown.
And southern Vermont voters strongly supported a plan to merge the school districts in Andover, Baltimore, Cavendish and Chester.
Act 46 is the state's school district consolidation law. It requires single school districts to work with their neighbors and form larger school districts, where a single board will oversee a number of schools in the area.
The law offers tax incentives to districts that can get their plans approved before July 1, and this week's successful votes sets these districts up to meet that deadline.
Rama Schneider is chairman of the Northfield-Williamstown Act 46 committee. Voters in both those towns approved the merger plan by an almost 4-to-1 margin.
"The lopsidedness of the vote just shows that folks were thinking about this subject, and were ready to make a decision," Schneider said. "And in general, in this area, they were ready to go with a merger."
The successful merger vote in the nearby towns of Orange and Washington means the two new districts will operate as a side-by-side model.
In the side-by-side plan, the independent districts are governed by their own boards, but work together and receive some incentives from the state that would otherwise be offered to larger districts.
The House and Senate education committees have been talking about making some of the upcoming Act 46 deadlines more flexible, but lawmakers are still hammering out the details in committee hearings.
