By Tom Ayres, Vermont Standard Senior Staff Writer
H.955 — the sprawling education transformation act passed by lawmakers last Friday after nearly five months of committee hearings and floor votes in the Vermont House and Senate — has proved to be a classic double-edged sword for administrators of the Mountain Views Supervisory Union (MVS).
For the past seven years, MVSU leaders, staff, teachers, families, and students have been grappling with plans to construct an all-new Woodstock Union High and Middle School (WUHS/MS) to replace the current, steadily deteriorating 68-year-old building in West Woodstock. And now, with a shovel-ready plan in place that earned pre-approval from the Vermont Agency of Education (AOE) two years ago and the overwhelming okay of school district voters for a $111.9 million bond issue in March, MVSU administrators are grappling with yet another set of shifting requirements contained in H.955 that will govern how state aid for new-school construction will be allocated in times ahead.
The dilemma faced by advocates for the new WUHS/MS is damning: while the voluntary merger of school districts called for in the education transformation legislation and the decoupling of capital construction debt from the per-pupil spending cap authorized by the 2026 “Yield Bill” are wins for MVSU, the means of obtaining construction funding from state coffers spelled out in H.955 are a morass for local educators and for school systems statewide.
The newly passed education bill — a complex, intricately detailed document that checked in at just under 150 pages — dismisses the pre-approval granted to MVSU in 2024 to proceed with planning, design, and bonding for the new WUHS/MS building. Instead, it calls for the supervisory union to re-engage in a detailed application process for state construction aid that mirrors much of the work MVSU administrators already completed several years ago in the run-up to the AOE’s 2024 pre-authorization. The process for obtaining construction funding spelled out in the new education transformation package means the local rebuild project cannot commence groundbreaking for at least three years unless MVSU administrators can convince the AOE leadership to grant the school district a waiver from the new requirements of H.955.
The unanticipated delay is untenable to MVSU leaders.
“In my deep reading of the portion of 955 that deals with construction, I think facilities [issues] are weighing on every school board and every superintendent,” Sherry Sousa, the MVSU superintendent, said Tuesday morning during a joint interview that included MVSU School Board chair Keri Bristow. “There are lots of promises, there are intended processes, there’s requirements for rule writing — but it’s such a long and winding road that few want to go down that path, even though they have facility issues,” the MVSU leader continued. “With the crisis that we have, it’s such a labor-intensive process: we’ve already invested close to $2 million and years of work — and now we’re hearing that our pre-approval is dismissed. It’s discouraging for us. It feels like the carpet’s been pulled out from underneath us again, because we operated under a set of rules, we followed that process in good faith, and then the rules change,” Sousa noted with exasperation.
“Last year, when Act 73 passed, we pivoted and said we’d play by those rules. And now here we are in June of 2026, and we have yet another set of rules,” the MVSU superintendent added, her voice chock-full of frustration. “I think that you are seeing a board and administration that are wholeheartedly committed to a new facility, because it’s the right thing to do for our kids and community. There are other boards, superintendents and administrations that are just as dedicated — and they just don’t even want to start the path, because it’s so complicated.”
The critical difference between MVSU and other supervisory unions and school districts in the state with renovated or new school builds in the pipeline is that the local school administration’s plans for a new high and middle school are set to be implemented imminently and have been approved by an overwhelming majority of voters in the form of the nearly $112 million bond issue okayed last Town Meeting Day.
“I think we are unique, as far as we know, in that we have everything ready to go,” Bristow offered. “We have a shovel-ready project approved by the voters with permissions already in place from Act 250, with sewer and water already here, and land that we don’t have to purchase,” the MVSU board chair said. “I think the tactic we’re going to use is to lobby for them giving us a pass and complying with whatever else they want, but not having to put another $2 million [of work] in on a fruitless effort when we already have a pre-approved, shovel-ready project. That’s the angle that we’re going to be moving forward with — that we’re ready to go. Just give us a green light that you will fund it when the funding becomes available — that’s the simple message.”
Bristow touted the academic successes of WUHS/MS as strong magnets for potentially drawing other school districts into a voluntary merger with MVSU — and hence into sending students to a new, expanded school complex in Woodstock. Through H.955, the legislature created 20 groups of school districts in the state to consider mergers with the help of a professional facilitator hired by the Vermont Learning Collaborative (VLC). Here in the local area, the merger committee — designated in H.955 as “Group 8” — will consist of representatives of the Hartford, Hartland, Mount Ascutney, Mountain Views, Pittsfield, and Weathersfield school districts.
“We already have an educational side that is doing extremely well [at MVSU],” Bristow opined. “The AOE came down here last week to see our literacy program in action and visit [Woodstock Elementary School], the high school and middle school. They met with the various coaches and literacy experts in our schools because they saw the changes in our scores. They know our program is excellent — and they say our level of education is high. Now it’s a matter of them saying, ‘Okay, build your project.’ They want it to be bigger — and now they’ve opened things up so that we can talk with other communities outside of our current school district, and say, ‘If we build it, will you come? Because you’re welcome here.’ We want more students, we want more students to have the advantages that we can offer and the excellent education that we provide.”
Given the rapidly failing condition of the WUHS/MS physical plant, Sousa and Bristow are both adamant that MVSU simply cannot wait as much as three more years to begin construction of a new school complex. “We’ve done all the reports, we’ve done all the assessments,” Sousa argued. “The assessment done by the Agency of Education stated that we had one of the most diminished buildings in the state. This past year, we lost the septic system in a portion of the building for weeks. This winter, we lost a boiler. If the other boiler failed, we would not have had heat. We have no place to put 450 students. I think the health and safety argument is an easy one for us to win. We have the experience, we have the reports, we have the data — so it is our intention and our responsibility as administrators to move forward now.
“We have had the community engagement, we passed a bond, we’ve been playing by the rules, and the goalpost keeps moving,” the superintendent continued. “And meanwhile, we have students who show up every day and expect healthy and safe classrooms. There’s lots of irony there when you play by the rules, and you see the urgency of the situation — and Montpelier changes the rules year after year after year and doesn’t fund what’s there. There’s no statutory responsibility,” she lamented. “We’re reviewing what our next steps are. It would be negligent for the board and the administration not to pursue every opportunity possible to accomplish the goals that were established in the bond that was passed. We have no Macy’s down the street,” Sousa observed, referencing the former department store where Burlington High School students studied while their all-new high school complex was built over the past several years. We don’t want our students to have to be in trailers on the football field. We want them to have a viable facility.”
Bristow said she and Seth Webb, a school board member from Woodstock who chairs the WUHS/MS Rebuild Working Group, expect to meet with senior AOE officials within the next few weeks to begin charting a path toward a waiver from the new school construction funding mechanism spelled out in H.955. If the pair is successful in that effort over the next half year, Sousa said MVSU officials are aiming to break ground on the new high and middle school project in the spring of next year.
There’s good news, too
Administrators, educators, families, and students within the MVSU school district were heartened by two legislative actions that occurred at the very last minute in the final days of the 2026 session in Montpelier last week.
First, lawmakers struck a compromise with Gov. Phil Scott, allowing the proposed school mergers that are central to the H.955 education transformation act to be voluntary rather than forced. And secondly, lawmakers passed the so-called “Yield Bill,” which annually sets education spending limits and tax rates in Vermont. The legislators opted to decouple capital debt from per-pupil spending for school bonds passed by July 1, 2026 – a one-to-two-year extension from the cutoff dates cited in previous versions of the education transformation package okayed separately by the House and Senate earlier last week. MVSU administrators, in particular, orchestrated a furious, last-ditch, and ultimately successful campaign to persuade lawmakers to extend the decoupling cutoff date to July 1 of this year.
“I would say that our communities won,” Sousa said Tuesday morning regarding the decoupling decision. “It was not because of the board or administration — it was really our families, our faculty, our community members who made their voices heard in Montpelier. It took one email from me out to that community, and the response was profound, personalized, and committed to serving our students well. Learning of the decoupling at 9:30 last Thursday night was exciting — even more so was seeing how quickly and effectively our communities organized for the sole purpose of serving our students. That is probably one of the proudest moments of my superintendency.”
Bristow praised the compromise that legislators forged with Gov. Phil Scott to foster voluntary rather than forced school district and supervisory union mergers statewide.
“I would just say that anyone that made it through Act 46 and was able to merge successfully understands the intricacies and difficulties of changing your identity,” Bristow stated, referencing the previous school consolidation initiative of nine years ago. “It’s not easy, and it’s not always welcome to force people into mergers versus saying it’s voluntary. There’s a huge difference in anyone’s attitude towards the work ahead. If we’re going to be successful and build bigger school districts, it has to be by consensus and agreement that we’re like-minded and have the same goals. You can’t do that overnight if you’re forcing people and [telling them] now go figure it out. There would be no appetite for any group of educators and school board members to say, ‘Oh sure, we’ll just do what they said.’ It’s just not reasonable.”