By Tom Ayres, Senior Staff Writer
The Mountain Views Supervisory Union (MVSU) has agreed to work with the Hartford School District (HSD) and the Windsor Southeast Supervisory Union (WSSU) to explore the advantages of creating “a single, larger, more efficient and equitable school district,” MVSU board chair Keri Bristow said in a statement sent to the Standard last week, following her participation in a meeting of the state’s school redistricting task force on Monday, Sept. 29.
Bristow elaborated on the perspective of MVSU administrators in the statement, citing a letter signed by all three boards, stemming from the resolve to work together following a consensus that the three school governing bodies share similar educational goals, a regional career and technical center in White River Junction, and a geographical alignment that will support the formation of an effective regional unit.
Representatives of the MVSU, HSD, and WSSU, including Bristow, presented the state redistricting task force with the letter, that termed merging the three school governing entities into a larger unit in compliance with the state’s recently enacted education transformation legislation, Act 73, “a practical and effective path to meeting the state’s goals while protecting our communities and ensuring the long-term sustainability of our schools.”
Speaking directly to task force members at the Sept. 29 gathering, Bristow told them that “almost all Vermont communities both embrace their schools and hope to keep them open,” adding that, “School closures have the negative effect of erasing our communities’ identities.” This has been a central concern of school leaders and rural educators in Vermont, especially in smaller, more pastoral communities in the state, ever since discussions surrounding Act 73 heated up in the last legislative session at the State House in Montpelier over the past two legislative sessions.
“Closing schools and reducing the numbers of staff and teachers is the most realistic way to achieve [Act 73’s] scope of efficiencies, which has its own implications and will be highly unpopular,” Bristow said in speaking before the state redistricting panel last week. “No financial model has been presented to convince communities that this reform process is worth losing their schools and community identities,” the MVSU board chair added.
In the face of such possible issues, according to the statement distributed following the statewide meeting on Sept. 29, Bristow noted that she warned the task force members about “the near-certain economic impacts that could result when residents of towns where schools no longer exist choose to sell their homes – many to out-of-state, second home buyers with little interest in advancing Vermont’s education system in the future.”
At the regular monthly school board meeting this past Monday evening, MVSU officials reiterated that they are continuing to explore both supervisory district and supervisory union structures to determine the most efficient operating procedures for any newly reconstituted educational and geographic entity in the region. An MVSU board representative from Barnard, Carin Park, who helped draft the Sept. 29 letter from the three area school unions and districts to the redistricting body, is helping to lead ongoing local board discussions about the best possible template for school governance in the new world of education transformation outlined in Act 73.
