Windsor Southeast Mulls School Choice Options

 

By Matt Hongoltz-Hetling
Valley News Staff Writer

Sunday, August 16, 2015
(Published in print: Sunday, August 16, 2015)

http://www.vnews.com/news/townbytown/windsor/18168762-95/windsor-southeast-mulls-school-choice-options

Windsor — For the residents of four Vermont towns in the lower part of the Upper Valley, it’s a choice about choice — school choice. 

As the Windsor Southeast Supervisory Union’s school districts in Hartland, Weathersfield, Windsor and West Windsor seek to, under pressure from the state, consolidate into a single, unified district, the public discussion has increasingly centered on whether the new district should allow high school students to choose which high school to attend.

Among the four school districts, Windsor has the distinction of being the only one that doesn’t allow school choice, and is also the only one that is home to a high school. 

Right now, high school students who live in the other three towns have their tuition covered when they choose a high school — options include Windsor High School and a variety of other accredited high schools within a reasonable commute time: Springfield High School; Woodstock Union High School; Hartford High School; Hanover High School; Stevens High School in Claremont; Lebanon High School and Sharon Academy.

If the supervisory union comes up with a plan for a unified district that passes muster with voters in all four towns by summer of 2016, it will receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial incentives under Vermont’s Act 46, an education reform bill that became law earlier this year. 

 Local education leaders have been pushing for action, because if Windsor Southeast doesn’t come up with a voter-approved plan, it will lose the incentives, and likely be forced to merge anyway in 2018.

But one of the bedrock ideals of Act 46 is providing equal opportunities to students, and that means districts are forced to come up with uniform policies. 

The sticking point in Windsor Southeast is choice — either Windsor has to start allowing choice for high schoolers, or the other three towns have to give it up.

Windsor Southeast leaders are considering four different options, and plan to recommend a single option to voters in the four towns for a public vote next year. Any consolidation plan must receive a majority of votes in each of the four towns to move forward.

The plans that have drawn the most support are option two, which involves no choice, and option four, which involves choice for high schoolers. The two scenarios offer different visions for the future of the district. 

At the community forums, Rice Yordy, a local business owner and conservative, has been one of the most vocal supporters of the no-choice option, reading prepared statements touting local control and financial benefits. 

Yordy makes the case for building up Windsor High School by requiring families throughout the supervisory union to send their children there. 

“We have a high school built for 900 kids that only serves 300,” he said. “We could control our destiny from within the district, and have control over the tuition and curriculum.”

Every time Windsor loses a student to another high school, he said, it will make it more difficult for those who remain behind. He predicts choice will lead to a downward spiral into unsustainability.

“I think it will happen over time,” he said. “It will be a slow-moving train, but it will happen.”

Yordy said that, as a taxpayer, he also worries about the costs of sending students to Hanover, Woodstock and Hartford — schools with higher tuition rates.

“A lot of people don’t understand that, when the kids go out of the district, their neighbors are paying that additional tuition,” he said.

Nate McKeen, chairman of the Weathersfield School Board, said he sees a different path to a bright future for Windsor High.

His primary argument against a no-choice policy is that it is too much change, for too many people, in too short a time period.

“Having the option to choose high school is pretty important for families,” McKeen said. “Trying to merge as a district without too much upheaval in any one town, we have to maintain choice.”

Option four represents a different vision for Windsor High, in which a unified district that includes school choice will result in a positive cycle of a stronger support system, continuous improvement, and the ability to attract more students. 

“I’m not really scared for the health of Windsor High School,” McKeen said. “It’s a leap of faith certainly, but I think Windsor High School is healthy and it’s only going to increase in its reputation.”

Amy McMullen, chairwoman of both the Windsor School Board and the supervisory union board, noted that earlier discussions about merging into a unified district stalled when the three non-Windsor towns balked at the idea of giving up choice.

“From a Windsor point of view, that is obviously the best scenario,” she said. “But we also have to be realistic.”

One of the biggest unresolved questions of the debate is how many Windsor families would take advantage of the option of sending their students elsewhere.

Student Choice

Shopping for a high school is not an abstraction for McKeen — his younger daughter is going into seventh grade, while his eldest came to a decision last year.

“She shadowed a number of schools including Springfield, Windsor and Hanover,” McKeen said. “She chose Windsor, with our support.”

Right now, the numbers are unclear about how many Windsor students will make the same decision. Those who support the idea of choice point out that about half of the student population lives in the surrounding towns, and actively chose Windsor High, while those who don’t support choice point out that many of the students from those surrounding towns chose somewhere else. 

McKeen said that, in Weathersfield, where about 90 percent of the high school students are evenly split between Windsor High and Springfield High, the biggest determinant of school choice is geography, plain and simple.

“Windsor is closer on the Ascutney end of town, and at the Perkinsville end of town, Springfield is closest,” he said.

Academic research is mixed on why parents choose the schools they do.

Some studies, including a January one by the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, find that McKeen’s assessment is correct: The single biggest factor in a parent’s choice of school is location, not the quality of the school, though parents usually say the opposite when asked.

“Surveys of parents tend to overstate the role of academic factors in school choices,” wrote the researchers.

And parents who do send their kids to distant schools because of the school’s academic credentials don’t always look to authoritative sources to rate those schools, according to a 2008 study by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice, which found parents tend to rely on informal information channels, such as word of mouth and social networks, rather than hard data. 

If choice becomes a reality at Windsor High School, its fate may be dependent on its students: Families that have a positive experience will recommend Windsor High to friends, while those who have a negative experience will encourage those in their social circle to go elsewhere.

Jacob Curtis, a sophomore who was attending a summer drivers-education class at the high school on Thursday, said his own decision would be an easy one.

“I would stay here,” he said. “I’ve been here since kindergarten.”

Curtis likes the culture at Windsor High.

“I like the people, the size of it. At other schools, a lot of kids don’t know kids in their own class,” he said. “I think that’s kind of sad.”

But Mindi Mayo, a senior who lives in Cornish and who chose Windsor High primarily because of its location, now regrets that decision, despite having earned high honors for her academic performance.

“I really wish I had chosen Hartford,” she said.

Mayo, who plans to graduate in December and move on to cosmetology school, feels that Windsor didn’t provide enough support for her to consider and apply for colleges. If she talks to friends about what school to choose, she says, she won’t hesitate.

“I would say pick somewhere else,” she said. “Hartford in a heartbeat.”

The power of a friend’s experience was apparent in the case of Windsor parents Lisa Kribstock and Inez Walker. Walker’s son, now 23, dropped out several years ago because, she said, he was targeted by bullies and didn’t feel like most of the teachers heard or understood him. That makes Kribstock concerned about sending her own young son to Windsor High when he turns of age. 

“It would have to do with how they deal with bullying,” she said. “I want him to be safe.”

It can be difficult to know whether Windsor’s reputation among its students will be its doom, or its saving grace, but one teacher with long ties to the school has a positive prediction. Andy Tufts has been teaching history with the district for 25 years, long enough that he’s begun to see children of former students in his classrooms. Tufts, whose own son graduated in 2012, said he would match the Windsor High experience against that of any other school in the area.

Windsor High is an intimate, tightknit community, he said, that allows teachers to intervene and give specialized attention to students. 

“They get to know you,” he said. “You get to know them.”

He recalled one example of instructor cooperation in which a baseball pitcher left the mound after the sixth inning, was hurried across the campus to the rear doors of the auditorium, and changed quickly to participate in a performance.

“One thing we pride ourselves on, because of size, kids really can try to do it all,” he said. “At much larger schools, they can’t.”

Unintended Consequences

What’s happening in Windsor could have broader statewide implications, as Act 46 pushes more local educators to get on board with school choice.

Traditionally, conservatives champion school choice as a free-market solution that will lead to efficiency and quality, while educators decry it as a resource drain on public schools and the sometimes-vulnerable populations they serve, but in Windsor Southeast, the roles have been reversed.

“This is really surprising the state,” said McMullen. “It never occurred to them that a school district that already has a high school would say merging is more important to us.”

Bill Talbott, deputy secretary and chief financial officer of the Agency of Education, said that, so far, Windsor and Richford High School in the Franklin Northeast Supervisory Union are the only two districts with high schools that are now considering school choice, though other schools may come forward with similar situations.

Right now, it’s unclear whether the Vermont State Board of Education would even permit Windsor to offer choice. 

“We’ll have to see what the state board allows,” Talbott said.

He said that a state board committee took up the issue during a meeting last week, and will likely make a recommendation to the full board to approve the idea, though students in that situation would be limited to attending public schools.

In Windsor Southeast, there are two more community forums to discuss the consolidation. The first is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. on Aug. 17 at the Hartland School Library, while the second is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. on Aug. 26 at West Windsor Town Hall. 

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Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.