The persistent deterioration of 66-year-old environmental systems at Woodstock Union High School and Middle School (WUHS/MS) has prompted Mountain Views Supervisory Union (MVSU) officials to press for a new “hub” school bond vote on Town Meeting Day, Tuesday, March 3 of next year.
The most recent problems at WUHS/MS vexing MVSU director of buildings and grounds Joe Rigoli and school administrators include the failure of a backup boiler at the very outset of the Vermont heating season and repeated issues with significantly compromised cast-iron piping used to remove wastewater from the kitchen and cafeteria that serve both the high and middle schools in the aging complex on Amsden Way in Woodstock. Both the failed boiler and the underground piping serving the cafeteria date back to 1958, when the current WUHS/MS was built.
The infrastructure challenges at WUHS/MS come at a difficult juncture for school officials, not only within the seven-town MVSU district, but statewide. All of this is occurring against the backdrop of ongoing, sweeping education transformation in Vermont, including the proposed consolidation of well over 100 school districts in the state into a handful of much larger districts and continued discussion about how the state will fund new school construction moving forward.
Rigoli and MVSU school board chair Keri Bristow sat down Tuesday morning for a Zoom interview regarding pressing challenges facing MVSU administrators relative to the worsening conditions at WUHS/MS, which serves students from Barnard, Bridgewater, Killington, Plymouth, Pomfret, Reading, and Woodstock, as well as students from sending districts throughout the region that pay tuition to the school.
For our full story on this, please see our October 16 edition of the Vermont Standard.
