The Mountain Views Supervisory Union (MVSU) is restarting planning for a new Woodstock Union High School and Middle School (WUHS/MS) for which it previously received approval from the Vermont Agency of Education (AOE) in February of 2024.
The MVSU Board and a newly constituted and still emerging iteration of the WUHS/MS Working Group held a joint meeting on Tuesday evening, July 22, to begin working with Vermont lawmakers to restart consideration of the proposed building project under the terms of Act 73 — also known as H. 454 — the sweeping new education reform bill enacted by legislators and signed into law by Gov, Phil Scott in early May.
At the core of ongoing MVSU discussions about the proposed WUHS/MS rebuild is the fact that the complex, recently enacted education reform package requires a momentous change to education governance in Vermont involving wholesale consolidation of school districts statewide by 2027, including the establishment of public “hub” high and middle schools serving as many as 4,000-5,000 students on a regional basis. MVSU officials and school board members are seeking to get as far ahead of the process as possible by reinvigorating the WUHS/MS Working Group, which will hold its next public meeting on Tuesday, August 6.
“As previously approved by the [AOE] — more than a year before the passage of Act 73 — the all-new facility will serve the seven communities that comprise the Mountain Views School District (MVSD)…as well as the 13 surrounding towns who use a school-choice option for their students to attend WUHS,” the MVSU Communications Committee said in a statement on July 24, following on the heels of the reconvening of the WUHS/MS Working Group two nights earlier. The seven core communities in the MVSD include Barnard, Bridgewater, Killington, Plymouth, Pomfret, Reading, and Woodstock.
To date, the MVSD has received approximately $2 million in taxpayer and donated funds to develop the plans and supporting documents that were necessary to obtain the existing, preliminary approval for the new school build from the Vermont AOE. In their initial messaging upon the relaunch of the proposed WUHS/MS new building effort, MVSD officials, school board members and the MVSU legal counsel Dina Atwood are emphasizing the substantive groundwork that the supervisory union has done on the proposed new build over the past several years and they are also stressing what they contend is the high quality of the educational opportunities afforded by WUHS/MS. Their goal is to position WUHS/MS as the ideal “hub” school.
For more on this, please see our July 31 edition of the Vermont Standard.
