Buoyed by the passage of a $111.9 million bond for a school rebuild on Town Meeting Day, officials of the Mountain Views School District (MVSD) are moving forward with an intensive advocacy and lobbying effort targeting state lawmakers engaged in an ongoing debate over education transformation in Vermont.
Voters in Barnard, Bridgewater, Killington, Plymouth, Pomfret, Reading, and Woodstock on March 3 approved the bond issue to rebuild Woodstock Union High School and Middle School (WUHS/MS) over the next three years by a vote of 1,648 to 1,047. The bond proposal was drafted with conditions that would save taxpayers $15 million versus the $99 million rebuild bond that was rejected by school district voters in 2024. The new rebuild bond passed 61.5% to 37.5% this time around.
Empowered by the strong mandate for both the school bond and the passage of a $32.5 million school budget for fiscal year 2027 by an even greater, two-to-one margin, MVSD officials, public school advocates, and state legislators are now working toward passage of legislation in the current State House session that will reinstitute comprehensive school construction aid for Vermont public schools at the state level. School administrators and boards statewide are also pressing lawmakers to enact legislation to separate capital construction debt from the per-pupil education spending penalty built into the state’s current education funding formula. Both issues are related to the contingencies attached to the school rebuild bond approved by voters at Town Meeting last week. If the issues are not resolved by lawmakers and Gov. Phil Scott before the end of the current legislative session in May, MVSD officials will not move forward with borrowing under the rebuild bond.
“We want to roll up our sleeves and get to the lobbying stage with the people who matter about how they can help us to get our voice heard,” MVSD School Board chair Keri Bristow said during a three-way conversation with MVSD superintendent Sherry Sousa and the Standard last Friday. “We’ve got to ride this momentum now and to keep it going forward so that we don’t lose a year or two years in securing at least a promissory note on the school construction aid,” Bristow added. “I think the decoupling will probably happen. It’s a no-brainer. Anyone who got a bond [passed] is probably over the threshold themselves, or maybe not, depending on how big their district is. They might be able to absorb it like we have in the past. But anybody that needs to do renovations, which is probably many schools in Vermont, they’ve got to be freed from this coupled per pupil-spend,” Bristow insisted.
For more on this, please see our March 12 edition of the Vermont Standard.
