By Tom Ayres, Senior Staff Writer
When the board of the Mountain Views Supervisory Union and School District (MVSU/SD) gathered for its annual reorganization and monthly regular meetings on Monday evening, one topic topped the agenda: a wide-ranging discussion of the defeat, one week earlier on Town Meeting Day, of a proposed $99 million bond issue to fund the cost of building a new Woodstock Union High School and Middle School (WUHS/MS).
All eighteen members of the MVSD board, including two newcomers from Barnard and Woodstock, weighed in with their reactions to the defeat of the bond, which went down by a margin of 1,910 votes opposed versus 1,570 in favor, or 55%-45%. The board members also listened attentively during public comment as critics of the proposed bond issue spoke about their concerns and suggested alternatives to the school’s board simply putting the same proposal before voters in the seven-town school district in the near future. As of the conclusion of Monday evening’s regular school board meeting, no timetable had been set for when the bond issue or a tweaked version of it might once again be subjected to a vote by residents in Barnard, Bridgewater, Killington, Plymouth, Pomfret, Reading, and Woodstock.
Speaking first among the school board members, Board Chair and outgoing Clerk Ben Ford strove to put as positive a face as possible on the Town Meeting Day vote, noting that voters across the district overwhelmingly okayed a $29.75 million school budget for fiscal year 2025, even as they rejected the $99 million school bond issue. “Voter turnout this year was absolutely massive. Looking at the budget numbers themselves, I think we should take a pause here and consider that we were incredibly fortunate to have the kind of community support that we had for the budget,” Ford noted, alluding to media reports that stated that one-third of the state’s proposed school budgets were themselves defeated on March 5. “Ten school districts have delayed their budget votes in addition to those that said no. So to have 80% support of our school budget is absolutely phenomenal. This year, it really goes to the level of commitment that people in our communities have for our students and educators.”
Ford said he remained hopeful, as he did when interviewed in the early morning hours of March 6, the day after the bond defeat, that the bond issue will eventually pass. “The margin of the bond vote was 340 votes out of 3,500 cast,” Ford noted. Referring to the budget vote tallies, which were counted town by town as opposed to the bond ballots, which were comingled and counted across the entire school district per state statute, Ford said that he and his fellow school board members were “reasonably confident” that the bond likely passed in four or five of the MVSD communities, with Killington, which had resoundingly rejected the budget as well on March 5, likely turning out decisively against the $99 million bond issue.
Remarks made by Bridgewater resident Lauren Davie Lemieux and Killington resident Jon Wysocki, a member of that town’s Design Review Board, during the public comment portion of the meeting suggest where many residents stand on the bond issue, especially in towns that rejected the school budget, which Killington did overwhelmingly, together with voters in Bridgewater and Plymouth, albeit by far lesser margins. Woodstock, on the other hand, overwhelmingly okayed the school budget, which based on Ford’s supposition suggests that the school bond support was exceptionally strong in that community, despite the controversy over the vote that roiled editorial pages and listservs for six weeks before the Town Meeting vote. Concerns about the long-term tax impact of the bond, especially on working-class families and on those with limited resources to meet tax hikes, were central to the comments offered by Lemieux and Wysocki, as well as by two MVSD board members — Josh Linton of Plymouth and Ryan Townsend of Bridgewater — during the board discussion of the bond vote.
“I want to express my sincere appreciation for the time and effort that has gone into the bond,” Lemieux said. “And along with a lot of other no voters that I talked to, I want to make sure that our no vote was heard as a ‘No,’ and not a ‘No, never.’ I hope you see this as a serious request for a Plan B. It’s my firm belief that there is not just one way to do things. I heard a lot of that in our town. And I’ve heard a lot as well of ‘This is the way we do it now or we’re going to pay a lot more later.’ I want to express my hope that our community can find a way to come together with something else to do. I would like to see more options on the table. I’ve heard a lot of that viewpoint expressed in the community as well.”
“As a Killington resident, I want to chime in, following up on Lauren’s point,” Wysocki said of a community where opposition to the school bond was the most vociferous in the run-up to Town Meeting Day. “Today, I received a survey via Garon Smail, [the principal] of Woodstock Union High School, from the New Building Committee,” Wysocki continued. “It talked about the vote, how people voted and so forth. And I think there was one critical question missing, to back up Lauren, which is that perhaps the first question on the survey should have been, ‘Would you like another option?’ Should renovation be considered, versus just a straight build?
“I feel as if the voters have spoken and come out and expressed their feelings as it relates to the bond. Should we only be looking at the build option? A very simple A or B question would give the School Board better direction on how the people voted the way they voted. We have very limited resources — and it seems like you folks are putting a tremendous amount of time into this effort. And it also seems that, if the taxpayers have spoken, it would seem that we would want to follow suit with the majority of the taxpayers.”
MVSD School Board member Townsend of Bridgewater supported the bond issue, but with some trepidation, he told his fellow board members. “You’ve done an incredible amount of work on this,” Townsend said, turning to look at Ben Ford and others integral to advocating for the $99 million bond issue. “Regardless of that, a lot of the people I have spoken with in the town of Bridgewater and elsewhere voted against the bond based on the tax impact on their wallet. And for a lot of people in my community, they just didn’t see the benefit for them personally, with a lot of people below the poverty line or with a lot less income than the people whose kids are going to college and can afford it. They wonder why we don’t offer more trades. We need to look more long-term at the school. The best thing that we could do here is give more kids a shot at the trades. That’s the best way to keep enrollment up in my opinion — an education that will keep them here and allow them to stay here. That’s why I am here: I’m part of the third or fourth generation to go through the high school.”
Linton, one of two MVSD Board representatives from Plymouth, was outspoken in his initial opposition to the $99 million bond and continued to bring that point home Monday evening. “As someone who is openly opposed to the bond, part of it comes down to the fact that there were not many kids who we graduated the year I graduated — and it has been going down ever since. That wasn’t just a trend for my class — it was a trend for every class moving forward. There are not many kids that I know from my class who are still living in the Woodstock area,” Linton offered. “We all know that’s an issue and it isn’t going to get any better moving forward. It’s made worse by adding this bond to people’s debt. You are taking it and making it harder for people to stay here. By adding this bond, you’re now going to increase taxes again, which will increase property taxes. There’s this whole spectrum of things that go in correlation to one another with respect to cost.”
Linton reiterated Townsend’s concerns that WUHS/MS does not adequately address the educational needs of non-college-bound, trades-oriented students, although he acknowledged, as MVSD Superintendent Sherry Sousa pointed out, that by state statute technical education at the secondary level in the state is relegated to regional technical centers, such as the Hartford Technical Center, where students from the MVSD school district are able to pursue studies as potential electricians, auto mechanics, culinary and food service specialists, textile design, computer technologies, and other trades.
MVSD School Board Chair Keri Bristow, who led the spirited discussion of the bond vote on Monday night, saved her remarks for last, just before closing the public comment period of the regular board meeting. “I want to sum up and I don’t want to say too much, because my role is supposed to be impartial,” Bristow noted. “I will sum up by saying that there is no one who put more hours into this than Ben Ford. He mostly kept his cool under great provocation at certain public meetings. Like everybody, I was very disappointed in the bond vote, but when I looked at the 340-vote margin, I didn’t feel as badly as I initially did. We can go back to the board, take the ideas we’ve heard here, take the survey results and triage them, and hopefully, people will hear that information and not say, ‘You’re not listening to me.’
“We’ll go back out into our communities and we’ll do what we need to do to move forward with a new school. There’s no way that renovation is an option for a building that has been determined [by the state] to be 97% depleted. So the only option is to get a different building. So we are looking to find places to have more listening sessions, or whatever, where we just sit and listen and take it in and then see what we come back with. Thank you all for the honesty, the perspective, and your thoughts. It’s a wide range of things to take into consideration,” Bristow concluded.