By Matt Hongoltz-Hetling
Valley News Staff Writer
Sunday, July 12, 2015
(Published in print: Sunday, July 12, 2015)
(Published in print: Sunday, July 12, 2015)
Windsor — In an effort to make
the best of a new state education law, the four school districts that
make up the Windsor Southeast Supervisory Union are exploring plans to
form a new entity: the Mount Ascutney School District.
As they gear up for a series of community
forums, supervisory union leaders say they’d rather take advantage of
incentives offered to early adopters under Vermont’s Act 46 than risk
being forcibly consolidated by the state in a few years.
If the plan moves forward, the five different
school boards governing Albert Bridge School, Hartland Elementary
School, Weathersfield School, Windsor schools and the supervisory union
as a whole would be collapsed into a single school board with as many as
18 members.
The five distinct budgets of those entities would also be combined.
School board members anticipate that the biggest
sticking point of the deal will be the issue of school choice — right
now, most districts in the union allow their local families to choose
where to send their middle and high school children, but Windsor does
not, according to Amy McMullen, who serves as chairwoman of both the
Windsor School District and the supervisory union boards.
“If we consolidate under any of the scenarios
that allow choice, then Windsor families will have the opportunity to
send their high school students to any high school,” she said, including
schools in Hartford, Thetford, Hanover and Woodstock.
Under Act 46, districts must have the same
choice policy for all of their students, which means that, if the
community moves forward with the merger, Windsor has to begin allowing
choice or families in Hartland, Weathersfield and West Windsor have to
stop allowing choice for the upper grade levels, according to a message
to the community sent out by supervisory union Superintendent David
Baker last week.
McMullen said she favors choice for high school
students in the district, which she said wouldn’t have much of an impact
on Windsor’s student population.
In FY 15, Windsor High School attracted 93
tuition students from Hartland, Weathersfield, West Windsor and Cornish,
according to a May report from Principal Bridget Fariel to the Windsor
School Board.
McMullen said that’s a sign that the school is
of sufficient quality to maintain its student population. “I personally
feel that we have a good high school,” she said.
Baker has presented three different
consolidation options for the community to consider; the options vary
only in which students, if any, would be allowed choice.
In the option that McMullen favors, all high
school students would have choice, while West Windsor families would
lose the option of allowing their seventh- and eighth-graders to choose a
school outside the consolidated district, she said. “They could go to
any of the existing seventh- and eighth-grade schools, which are
Windsor, Weathersfield and Hartland,” she said.
McMullen said other concerns include the loss of
local control that would come with the consolidation of the school
boards and the possible watering down of outstanding programs, which
would have to be offered districtwide as part of Act 46 provisions that
seek to provide equitable treatment of students across districts.
For example, she said, Hartland Elementary
School’s after-school program, which offers a homework club and a later
bus option, would need to be offered districtwide.
In order for the merger to work, voters in all
four towns must agree; if any one of the four existing districts goes
its own way, the entire merger will fail. McMullen said all four
district boards have agreed to move forward to explore options together.
While none of the merger options are likely to
make everyone happy, McMullen said that financial pressures under the
law mean that some kind of merger is needed.
“As far as the board chairs, we definitely feel
do-nothing is not a viable option,” she said. “We feel that will put us
in a very vulnerable place.”
According to Baker, if voters in all four towns
approve a unified district by summer of 2016, the supervisory union will
be considered an early adopter, and will gain hundreds of thousands of
dollars in state funding over the next several years.
The state has offered early adopters a
transition grant of $150,000, and a separate merger support grant, which
would be “equal to or greater than” a small schools grant of $88,000
that would be lost under the new law.
The new district would also be exempt from a
looming spending cap, which would otherwise limit the budget growth for
the current four districts to amounts ranging from 0.92 percent in
Hartland, to 2.73 percent in Windsor.
Finally, if the district is an early adopter,
its towns will enjoy large exemptions in the homestead tax rate — in the
first year, it amounts to 10 cents per $100 of valuation, or $250 on
the property tax bill of a home valued at $250,000. The benefit
diminishes by 2 cents per year over a five-year period.
Districts that don’t merge early will
effectively subsidize the incentives that will be given to schools that
do merge early, according to Baker.
The supervisory union needs to act quickly in order to be considered an early adopter.
Over the next two months, the union will hold a
series of community forums and surveys, and in the fall, administrators
plan to draft a consolidation proposal. In December, the boards hope to
finalize a warning, followed in March by a vote of residents in all four
towns.
A total of eight community forums have been
scheduled; the first is on July 20 in Room 210 of the Windsor K-12
complex, with a second meeting at the same location on Aug. 3.
Meetings are also scheduled for the
Weathersfield School on July 22 and August 10; the West Windsor Town
Hall on July 27 and Aug. 26; and in the Hartland School Library on Aug.
11 and Aug. 17. All meetings are scheduled for 6:30 p.m.
McMullen said people throughout the district are welcome to attend any or all of the meetings.
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.
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