There’s plenty of construction troubles afoot at Woodstock Union High School and Middle School (WUHS/MS) this summer, with hallway floors torn up, cafeteria and lavatory plumbing ripped apart, boiler rooms asunder, and new propane tanks being installed underground at the steadily deteriorating education complex — all at a voter-approved cost of $550,000 in bonded funding.
To hear Mountain Views Supervisory District (MVSD) officials tell it, the school system is locked into a seemingly endless cycle of throwing good money after bad in keeping the 70-year-old secondary and middle school building one step away from a catastrophic systems failure that would force as many as 600 students, faculty, and staff into trailers on site or some other form of temporary housing in the local area for an extended period of time. The formidable frustration of MVSD and WUHS/MS administrators is exacerbated by the fact that school district voters in Barnard, Bridgewater, Killington, Plymouth, Pomfret, Reading, and Woodstock okayed a $111.9 million bond issue last Town Meeting Day for the construction of an all-new WUHS/MS facility over the course of the next three years.
The voters in March also authorized the issuance of bonds of $300,000 and $250,000, respectively, for the wastewater system and boiler replacement projects now underway at WUHS/MS while students and faculty are in recess until the building reopens for a new school year late next month.
In a Zoom conversation with the Standard on Monday and in a follow-up press release on Tuesday afternoon, MVSD superintendent Sherry Sousa, school board chair Keri Bristow, and director of buildings and grounds Joe Rigoli, vented their displeasure with state education policies and called on the Vermont Agency of Education (AOE) to give its final approval of the WUHS/MS new-school construction plans and the release of emergency funds to make the building effort possible expeditiously. In the statement issued by the MVSD on Tuesday, Bristow “urgently” requested an in-person meeting with Vermont Secretary of Education Zoie Saunders and AOE deputy secretary and chief operating officer Jill Briggs Campbell to discuss the present impasse. A date for the confab with the AOE officials has yet to be set.
In the meantime, Rigoli and work crews at WUHS/MS are mired in a myriad of difficulties. The considerable amount of work this summer is indicative of the seriousness with which the steady deterioration of the school is being monitored. After extensive inspections, Rigoli said that the seven-decades-old cast-iron sewer pipes beneath the food-preparation areas of the cafeteria, the lavatories serving the cafeteria, and the hallways from the lavatories to the staff parking lot cannot be repaired. The repair team used ground-penetrating radar to identify sewer pipes distinct from others and cameras to confirm what Rigoli defines as a “complete, catastrophic failure” of the sewer pipes.
“For all the money we’ve asked taxpayers to approve, these expensive repairs are a drop in the bucket: they cover a very small section of the total sewer system that extends throughout the entire structure — all so we can keep the cafeteria open and operating,” said Rigoli. “What keeps me up at night is that we could experience similar system failures anywhere else in the building at any moment. The system could easily break down, even five feet from where we’re working now, and there goes another quarter-million-dollar expense that the taxpayers of this district will be forced to approve.”
In the MVSD statement circulated shortly before noon on Tuesday, Rigoli amplified the remarks he shared with the Standard by adding, “Bottom line: we’re being held back from rebuilding our school because the legislature can’t figure out how to appropriate the funds we’ve qualified for and been promised.”
The building and grounds director noted that the replacement of a failed boiler also began this month. The cost of the two new propane boilers required stands at $300,000, also part of the system replacement approved by voters in their March bond votes.
The 70-year-old WUHS/MS building is now considered the worst case of school-building deterioration in Vermont, according to the AOE’s own reporting, Bristow noted. “It therefore requires immediate and urgent state aid, which many state legislators have acknowledged,” she said, noting that emergency funding has been granted relatively recently to other school districts struggling with failing infrastructures. She cited the rescue by the state of the Burlington High School rebuild project in November 2022, after voters approved a bond for $165 million.
As the Standard went to press on Wednesday, the AOE leadership had yet to respond to Bristow’s “urgent” request for a meeting with Secretary Saunders and Deputy Secretary and COO Briggs Campbell.
For more on this, please see our July 9 edition of the Vermont Standard.
