Vermont’s education may be in for an historical overhaul if legislation passed in Vermont’s house of representatives last month passes at the end of this legislative cycle.
The proposed bill, H.883, would radically consolidate public education in Vermont by reducing the number of school districts in the state from 273 to 50 in the next five years.
Historically, the Vermont public education system has struggled to reconcile impulses for local governance with the financial benefits of consolidation.
In 1777, Vermont’s state constitution was the first in English-speaking North America to mandate universal public funding for education. This initial mandate led to the creation of a number of tiny, independent village elementary schools.
The importance of agriculture in the early development of Vermont’s residential landscape created a highly diffuse population across the state — and a highly diffuse network of public schools across the state to provide education to all corners of the state.
In the nineteenth century, migration to Vermont swelled due to increased prosperity and the success of Vermont’s agricultural industry.
The simultaneous increase in agricultural productivity and overall population led to an increased school-going population that remained spread out through the state due to the continued importance of the agricultural sector.
The diffuse network of tiny schools and school districts in Vermont persists in modern Vermont. The average number of students per Vermont school district is just 313 students, which is less than one tenth of the national average, according to a 2009 report.
Opinion on school board consolidation is mixed in Vermont, and each side of the argument has vocal advocates and opponents.
Proponents of school board consolidation argue that pooled financial resources will enable small schools and school districts to diversify the educational offerings available to students.
“Are you going to cut your music program or are you going to cut your art program?” asks Dan French, superintendant of the Bennington-Rutland Supervisory Union. “That’s where [Vermont] is heading if we don’t do governance change.”
Proponents think that consolidation will afford students in rural districts the opportunity of sharing teachers and other educational resources that individual districts would not be able to afford them individually.
Critics of consolidation are equally vocal. Most detractors of school board consolidation cite the loss of venerated schools and of local influence on education as detrimental byproducts of consolidation.
Vermont schools may be generally small, but they are reliant on the input of local people for educational policy. Critics of consolidating policy measures argue that eliminating school districts would undermine local control by putting undue power in the hands of representatives from larger towns — at the expense of students in small towns who would have benefitted from specialized education.
“Access to decision makers and local community involvement is what makes Vermont successfully tick and our schools succeed,” said Debra Stoleroff, director of the Renaissance Program at Twinfield Union High School in Plainfield, Vt.
In addition to the argument that small schools are more attuned to the needs of students, opponents of consolidation have also voiced concerns over the lost social benefits of small-town schools. Stoleroff says that small, local schools serve an important social function by fostering higher graduation rates, discouraging risky behavior and mitigating the divisiveness of poverty.
The H.833 Bill does not mark the first time that Vermonters will consider consolidation at a large scale, however.
In 1892, Vermont’s state legislature required that Vermont schools — which all functioned as independent school boards unto themselves and thereby constituted more than 2,500 school boards across the state — to consolidate into localized school districts.
These original districts were created in accordance with historical settlement patterns in order to maintain cohesive local value systems.
In most cases, settlement patterns lined up neatly with town boundaries, and therefore the 1892 legislation had the effect of incorporating numerous schools within towns into a single school district — thereby reducing the costs of operating up to 8 school districts in a single town.
In 1896, the state passed legislation that enabled individual districts to form “supervisory unions” in which individual districts still continued to control hiring, budgetary decisions and policy decisions while jointly electing a largely nominal “superintendent” meant to liaise between school boards and federal tax purveyors.
Beyond the town-scale consolidation, however, Vermont schools have resisted any attempts to further merge administrative bodies.
Since the 1896 decision, though, the many large-scale attempts to continue the process of consolidation by merging school districts have floundered. The school district landscape has remained largely unchanged, therefore, since the 1892 consolidation.
In 2010, the state legislature passed Act 153, the Voluntary School District Merger Act, which offered town school boards a number of incentives to consolidate. An interim report published by U.V.M.’s Jeffords research center in 2013, however, confirmed what many education commentators had already realized — that the act was ineffective at encouraging consolidation.
A number of school boards have already issued formal statements in response to the passage of the H.883 bill in the house. On March 26, the Rutland Northeast and Rutland Addison supervisory unions passed resolutions formally rejecting the consolidation bill.
In a statement issued by the Rutland Northeast and Rutland Addison supervisory unions, the board stated their belief that “eliminating local school board governance is not conducive to promoting our democratic ideals and fostering social capital.”
The Vermont Superintendents Association endorses the bill, but the Vermont School Boards Association has declined to adopt a formal stance due to the diversity of opinion among members of the association.
The conversation about consolidation is far from over. Steve Dale, head of the Vermont School Boards Association, reminds his colleagues and fellow citizens that “[the consolidation conversation] requires us to strike a balance between the students and the taxpayers [and] balance that with our deep love of our very, very local democratic processes.”
The bill still has to go through the state’s Ways and Means and Appropriations committees before it undergoes final deliberation in the house — and then the state Senate must still deliberate on the bill. The huge surge in debate, however, seems to foreshadow continued consideration of educational consolidation and perhaps a dramatic shift in Vermont’s school-board landscape in the near future.
