A former secretary of the Vermont Agency of Education and current state legislator and member of the Vermont School District Redistricting Task Force appeared before the Mountain Views Supervisory Union (MVSU) School Board on Monday evening, seeking to allay district-wide fears about one of three statewide redistricting maps currently under consideration by the task force, which is charged with making its recommendations to the state legislature by December 1.
State Rep. Rebecca Holcombe, a Democrat who represents Norwich, Sharon, Strafford, and Thetford in the Vermont House, was invited to the regular monthly meeting of the MVSU board on Monday night by Windsor State Sen. Alison Clarkson and State Rep. Charlie Kimbell, both of Woodstock. While Holcombe’s overall agenda was to address the ongoing work of the state school redistricting advisory group, the veteran educator, appointed and elected official first addressed the proposed redistricting map presented at a task force meeting on Oct. 28. The map drew strong consternation and concern from MVSU officials, teachers, and families, as reflected in an email missive that MVSU Superintendent Sherry Sousa sent to school district community members late last week.
“The third redistricting proposal from the Task Force…outlines a wholesale reform of Vermont’s public education system centered on establishing regional comprehensive high schools,” Sousa wrote. “The plan’s goals include protecting scale and access in rural areas and supporting districts to merge to create regional high schools that expand opportunities while reducing long-term costs. Key considerations involve using a 30-minute travel constraint to site these schools, addressing the complications of school choice and tuitioning, which threaten public school sustainability, and prioritizing construction aid to incentivize collaboration among districts.”
From an MVSU perspective, however, Sousa wrote that the overarching problem with the proposed regional high school map as it was presented to the statewide redistricting task force last week is that it “would result in the current towns of MVSU being placed in four new governance regions.”
“This model dismantles the MVSU current configuration, and while there is no statement in this presentation regarding closing schools, it is difficult to see where WUHS/MS [Woodstock Union High School & Middle School] would be maintained,” Sousa opined in her email letter to the MVSU community.
Holcombe immediately took pains to dispel concerns about the merits of the regional high school map, while noting the improbability of its moving forward as one of three redistricting recommendations the state task force will make to state lawmakers no later than Dec. 1.
“I think if you listened to Jay Badams [at the task force meeting], the first thing he said is that this is a half-baked proposal. And he explained why — because it is an iterative program,” Holcombe explained. “He said that it is not ready for game time — he’s not moving that map forward as is. What he was trying to get at is this question of taking the number of kids that you have and divide them into that minimum size of high schools that you need and identify the gaps where the needs currently are.
“That map is not going forward as is, and I understand why you would be very worried about it. I apologize for that. I can tell you that Jay [prefaced the map presentation] by saying this is a thought exercise and it is not a map that is viable yet,” Holcombe concluded.
For more on this, please see our November 6 edition of the Vermont Standard.
