Mountain Views School District Superintendent Sherry Sousa won’t speculate yet on where the seemingly inevitable spending cuts arising from the new state education bill will land the heaviest. But she does know how much students and parents care about the variety of “co-curricular” programming the district provides — and especially its beloved Woodstock Wasps. “Sports are really important to our communities, and theater, music, fine arts,” Sousa said, “But [House Bill] 454 really takes all that out of our hands.”
“Everything is on the table,” was the frank message that Sousa had for the Standard in a recent interview. The most current estimates project a reduction in MVSD’s budget of more than $6 million as a result of the new foundation funding formula laid out in the education bill.
“Two thousand dollars less per student means that we have to evaluate every program co-curricular beyond what is required,” Sousa continued. “So that means everything has to be on the table, which would include sports.”
Even though concrete changes remain years away, concerns about the potential fallout from H.454 on school sports programs were echoed by administrators and legislators throughout the Upper Valley in recent conversations with the Standard. Among the issues most frequently raised were the likelihood of school closures, reduced participation rates, and questions around the impact on equity and access to school sports for lower-income Vermonters.
For Sousa and others, it is a prime example of how a matter of high local priority was largely overlooked during recent debates in Montpelier, which focused almost exclusively on bringing down the cost of education statewide.
For more on this, please see our July 3 edition of the Vermont Standard.
