By Tom Ayres, Vermont Standard Senior Staff Writer
A proposed bond issue of $111.9 million for the construction of a new Woodstock Union High School and Middle School (WUHS/MS) is rekindling debate about the future of the school in West Woodstock that currently serves approximately 450 students from seven towns in the Mountain Views School District (MVSD) and nearly 30 sending communities.
The bond issue that will go before voters in Barnard, Bridgewater, Killington, Reading, Plymouth, Pomfret, and Woodstock at Town Meeting on Tuesday, March 3, calls for an expenditure for the design and construction of an all-new WUHS/MS at a cost that is $13 million higher than the $99 million bond issue was rejected by school district voters 55%-45% in March 2024.
But before taxpayers in the seven communities of the MVSD panic, they should take note: there is a silver lining built into the 2026 bond proposal, which states that the bond will not move forward even if voters okay it by Australian ballot on March 3, unless two provisos clearly stated in the school district’s Town Meeting warning are met. First, the school district must be awarded at least 25% of the amount borrowed from federal or state grants, private philanthropy and gifts, and other revenues and sources to offset the project costs. And secondly, the Vermont Legislature, prior to the end of its current session in Montpelier in May, must enact legislation to separate capital construction debt from the per-pupil education spending penalty built into the state’s current education funding formula.
If those two conditions are not met, MVSD officials have repeatedly stated, the district will not go forward with the bond later this year. But if the contingencies do transpire at the federal state, and local levels, homestead taxpayers in the seven-town union school district could ultimately bear only $84 million of the cost of the new bond over the next 30 years — $15 million less than the $99 million they would have been asked to pay under the previous bond proposal that was defeated two years ago.
Ongoing public education campaign encourages support for the new bond
MVSD leaders, including school board chair Keri Bristow, Rebuild Working Group chair Seth Webb, district director of buildings and grounds Joe Rigoli, and other school officials, are undertaking an intensive public education campaign to explain the new school proposal to the public in the run-up to the March 3 vote on the bond issue
School district representatives are participating in a series of public forums designed to inform voters about the intricacies of the proposed new school bond, including intensive efforts to “trim the sails” on costs entailed in the previous $99 million bond proposal that went down to defeat on Town Meeting Day two years ago. The MVSD representatives contend they have worked diligently to cut building costs from the earlier proposal, while also striving to build an all-new, state-of-the-art educational facility that meets current state mandates, the diverse needs of contemporary and future students and educators, and long-term economic and environmental sustainability. The school officials are also adamant that the district will not move forward with the bond if the provisos for federal, state, and private funding, as well as the decoupling of capital construction debt from the state’s per-pupil education funding formula, do not occur.
MVSD officials offered a public presentation about the upcoming school bond vote via Zoom last Thursday to the monthly Green Drinks gathering sponsored by Sustainable Woodstock. The forum drew nearly 50 participants from communities throughout the seven-town school district. Presenters Webb, Rigoli, and Bristow detailed design and construction issues related to the proposed new school, explained how the projected cost was determined and how taxpayer savings might occur, and stated why they believe the rebuild is essential and what might happen if the bond vote fails again. The MVSD representatives have also addressed those concerns in recent discussions with the Standard, including in the wake of last week’s Green Drinks gathering.
What does the new school entail — and how does it differ from the 2024 bond proposal?
The MVSD Rebuild Working Group first convened in October of last year, tasked with developing proposals for ongoing architectural, construction, financial, and administrative needs related to the proposed building of a new WUHS/MS in West Woodstock, where the current, steadily deteriorating school building has operated for the past 68 years. The rebuild advisory body is chaired by MVSD School Board representative Seth Webb of Woodstock, who is also the former town manager of Killington. The working group also includes members of the MVSD board and administration, as well as volunteer community members with diverse design, construction, and financial expertise. The group’s first task at hand last fall was to revise the school rebuild proposal from 2024 to shave as many costs off the design and construction aspects of the new building as possible.
“I want to give a little bit of the color of the building situation,” Webb told attendees at Sustainable Woodstock’s gathering last week. “When we started the rebuild group, we looked back at all of the reports that had been done about the facility since around 2016. There have been countless reports from engineers, architects, and regulators about the failing or bad condition of the [current] facility and its equipment. We started there, with the realization that it would be more costly and disruptive to repair or renovate the present building than to rebuild.”
The group’s discussion also focused on restructuring the new bond proposal to save taxpayers money.
“We essentially came to a solution that would reduce the local share of the bond cost by $15 million, making the [school] district voters responsible for 75% of the bond cost, with 25% coming from state, federal or private sources,” Webb noted. “The second way to control cost was to make cuts to the 2024 plan. We looked very carefully at that plan and thought, ‘This would be nice to have, but the community can’t afford this — let’s see where we can cut’. We made some reductions. We took the gabled roofs and made them flat roofs. We squared off the facade. We reduced the number of windows. We are [proposing] reusing furniture [from the old building]. And we ended up cutting a million dollars in cost from those [changes].”
The size of the proposed WUHS/MS facility will jump from the current 139,000 square feet to just under 158,000 square feet if and when the school is completed three years hence. (The current projection is that the school, if okayed by the voters in March, will open for the 2029-30 school year.) “The current square footage of the building is 139,000. The building that was built in 1958 housed up to 700 students in the early 2000s,” Webb noted last week. “The current population is around 450 students, but the classroom size of the current building is around 500 to 700 square feet per classroom. The state requirements for new classroom sizes are 750 [square feet], so there’s some upsizing that had to happen in the new building from the old building to meet [those] requirements.” The school, as now proposed under the new bond issue, would serve up to 600 students and would be scalable via additions to handle up to 750 to 1,000 students, depending upon population growth or how school redistricting efforts proceed regionally and statewide in the years ahead.
Responding to questions from the Standard at the Green Drinks event, MVSD building and grounds director Rigoli and Rebuild Working Group leader Webb also spoke to the economic and environmental sustainability aspects of the updated WUHS/MS proposal. “The building will be 100% electric. Our HVAC system is going to be a hybrid system of geothermal and water-sourced heat pumps, and we’ll be offsetting all of that energy through solar arrays,” Rigoli offered. “We currently have a lot of space on the roof – and we’re engaging with folks right now to determine where we might be able to access additional [siting] for solar to offset the building’s use completely. Then we’d become net zero.”
Webb drilled into the sustainability issue in more detail. “The overarching principle for us was to be environmentally responsible and cost-efficient. First, we’ve heard very much from voters since 2024 about cost efficiency,” Webb said. “Number two, [the project as proposed] adheres to permit and code requirements like Act 250 for site drainage and river corridor constraints, which are climate-focused. We meet the required footprint limitations for these and the requirements around floodplains.
In describing the proposed new school, Webb said, “It’s designed to be as energy efficient as possible. We have high-performance systems that are highly insulated. The building minimizes external surfaces to conserve heating and cooling, while the minimal footprint maximizes green space.” He continued, “It’s solar-oriented to enhance the daylighting of classrooms. It’s electric. It’s certainly not net zero, but we have the ability, if we can raise enough private money or find grants, to maybe get there one day by finding land partners [for siting additional solar arrays]. So we have that possibility in the future. The building has a zero-carbon footprint — and there’s the hybrid geothermal system, [which is] the most efficient in terms of minimizing upfront costs while maximizing [long-term] operating efficiencies. We’ve designed it to be low maintenance and durable, inside and out.”
Why is there a critical need
for a new school?
As discussions about the need for a new high school and middle school in Woodstock have escalated over the past seven years, MVSD officials have consistently argued that the current, 68-year-old facility has deteriorated to an alarming degree, such that it compromises the school’s day-to-day ability to function.
“Literally and quite simply, it’s [almost] a 70-year-old building — it’s at the end of its lifespan,” Rigoli said at last week’s web-based public forum. “I use the analogy of a zombie: parts of the body are falling off one at a time — that’s what we’re encountering now, I wake up every morning wondering, ‘What’s the next system or issue we’re going to have [a problem with] and will I be able to open the doors?’ It’s been quite trying, especially over these past few weeks with these cold temperatures. We’ve had some system failures. At the end of the day, it is not time for repair, it’s time to replace. I think that’s the best analogy I could give.”
The MVSD building and grounds director went on to detail many of the most persistent problems with the current HS/MS building, which Webb said has been rated as 98% deficient by the Vermont Agency of Education [AOE] — currently the highest rate of school building decline in the state.
“I’ve been with the district for about eight years — and over the past five years, I’ve invested probably close to $3 million [into WUHS] just to keep the doors open,” Rigoli said. “The repairs that I’m making are urgent. For instance, the steam system. The building that was built in 1958 had technology [that was] completely different. One of the issues that we had was that the high school portion of the building was heated by steam over the years. The steam was pushed through cast iron pipes, and over [nearly] 70 years, those pipes wear out. The infrastructure for that steam system was located underneath the building, running through tunnels. It started to develop leaks, it wasn’t very efficient, and it was very expensive. We were burning probably over 50 gallons an hour of home heating oil, and it started to get cost-prohibitive, so we switched over and converted the high school portion of the building from a steam heating system to a hot water heating system. That project alone cost us $1.3 million.
“We’re also experiencing deterioration of waste lines in the building,” Rigoli continued. “This is the piping that carries all the waste out of the building, the fluid and that type of stuff. Again, cast iron pipes over the years [have] become oxidized and [broken] apart. We’re at that point now where I’m starting to lose waste lines, so we’re unable to push out all the waste from the building. We’re having a project that’s hopefully going to be completed by the end of the summer that’ll cost us around $300,000 just to replace around 200 feet of waste line that is exiting the cafeteria out to Route 4 to the lift station that we have there. And again, a lot of the infrastructure is underneath the building, encased in concrete or in the walls, also encased in concrete. When we have these failures, it’s extremely difficult and disrupting to the students and faculty because we’re literally hacking open walls trying to locate leaks. I could go on and on, but as I said, this is a [nearly] 70-year-old building at the end of its lifespan.”
How will the impact on taxpayers be minimized?
Webb tied the $13 million uptick in the cost of the newly proposed bond issue to two factors: the expanded size of the new WUHS/MS facility as dictated by state regulations and the impact of inflation and current federal tariffs on imported products.
“The costs keep rising — with tariffs and inflation, the cost went up 13% since the last bond vote in 2024,” Webb said at the Green Drinks event. Webb, Rigoli, and MVSD board chair Bristow told the Standard last month that the impact of the price hike on taxpayers will potentially be mitigated by the “mixed funding solution” that MVSD administrators are proposing for the new school.
“Our cost control measures are one, the mixed funding solution, where we do a 75% local share and 25% from state, federal, or private sources,” Webb reiterated last Thursday. “Two, we make some cuts to the design but retain our [current] pre-approval so that we can get state aid, and three, we pass legislation to eliminate the penalty we’re currently facing for taking on any capital debt. This was a problem. It’s probably why nothing happened last year — not because the building issue wasn’t urgent, but because the state legislature put a penalty in place at the end of the 2024 legislative session that combined the per-pupil spend with the capital spend.
“The effect for us is that any debt you take on for a capital project ends up being penalized twice, so you’re paying twice for any capital debt,” Webb added. “We have advocated very strongly to eliminate that, and we’ve gotten great support, thanks to state representative [Charlie] Kimbell and our state senator, Alison Clarkson. They’ve introduced bills in the legislature that have picked up support from around Vermont — and we’re cautiously optimistic that those bills will go through. What are we left with? We’re left with a proposal that costs around $84 million for the local share of the [new] bond.”
What are the likely consequences if the bond vote fails again?
At the Green Drinks gathering, Webb shared insights into what will happen in the wake of the upcoming bond vote if it does not pass muster with voters at Town Meeting, despite the cost-saving provisos built into the ballot measure.
Webb noted that the MVSD will not be eligible for state aid for a rebuild if the bond does not pass; moreover, he said, the current WUHS/MS facility does not qualify for Vermont Agency of Education aid for repairs due to the extremely deteriorated condition of the building. He also noted that the district would be forced to forfeit approximately $2.5 million in private donations that have been pledged to the rebuild effort to date. “Voters will need to consider a more expensive plan to rebuild, renovate, or repair” at the November general election later this year, Webb averred.
Most concerning, Webb said, is that MVSD, its educators, students, and families “run the risk of losing our school depending on how state redistricting proceeds” during the 2026 state legislative session currently underway in Montpelier. “State funds for school construction are planned for July of [this year] that will focus on the most urgent building projects,” Webb continued. “We already have pre-approval. This pre-approval is critical for state aid and took approximately seven years of work and $2 million in private funding to secure. If we delay, we risk losing it and the investment made.” Highlighting the redistricting discussions that are ongoing at the State House, Webb said, “Local control is at risk,” adding that if redistricting moves forward and the current WUHS/MS location is not positioned to serve as a regional high and middle school “hub” facility, “we could lose significant local control. If we are moved to a larger district, our towns have less representation and less control over spending priorities. This could result in greater challenges to rebuilding or facing the risk of closure.”
Even with a “Yes” vote on the school bond on March 3, Webb and Bristow again reiterated that state lawmakers must act favorably prior to the expected mid-May closure of the current legislative session to pass the legislation proposed by Kimbell and Clarkson to eliminate the double penalties for capital projects currently imposed on local school districts statewide.