(HOST) Faced with a declining population of school-aged children, the towns of Newfane and Brookline have joined together to educate their kids. Commentator Deborah Luskin puts this recent consolidation of Vermont school districts into historical perspective.
(LUSKIN) Five years ago, my town’s school directors explained that State and national legislation was driving our school’s curriculum and budget. In the Town Report, they wrote, "From where we sit what unites these various acts are increasing mandates – most unfunded – that reduce local control and increase local befuddlement." That year, educational programming was level funded or cut in order to afford a new roof. It was time, the directors reported, to explore new ways to meet the town’s twin obligations of providing a good education while containing the property tax payer’s burden. It was the year the school directors started talking about consolidating with the town next door.
The town next door is even smaller. Next year, they will have only forty students in grades K-6; my town will have about a hundred and five. That’s a dramatic decline from just ten years ago, when both towns enlarged their school buildings because the census was about twenty percent higher. As the number of students declined and the mandates increased, the two schools have shared resources, such as music and art teachers, and they have joined together to field athletic teams and offer winter sports.
Last June, the two towns created a Joint School Board – there are now six in the state. Their goal is "to provide students in both towns with a good education in a fiscally responsible way." Soon, the Joint School Board will bring its first-ever budget before the voters.
It’s impossible to predict which will be the most controversial: the quarter of a million dollar decrease in expenses chiseled from the school budget, the estimated increase in the education tax rates for both towns, or the board’s decision to close the smaller school and move all the students to the larger town.
If the towns hadn’t joined together, the estimated tax increases would have been substantially higher – about fourteen per cent in my town, and nearly 21% for our neighbors. So the money part may be easier to swallow than the consolidation.
There’s a long history of schooling children locally in Vermont, and a long history of resisting efforts at consolidation. According to Vermont historian Sam Hand, in 1850 Vermont boasted 2,594 school districts. By 1860, statewide enrollment had dropped by more than twenty-three thousand students, but the number of school districts declined by just three.
Then, in 1880, the governor reported that the state had plenty of schools, but that some communities were too small or too poor to support them. The governor’s fix was "to have the expense of the schools fall to a greater extent upon the whole State." The first state-wide assessment for education was established in 1890. School districts were consolidated by town, and the money was redistributed according to need – but not without resistence.
This all sounds so familiar. 160 years later, we still want local schools, but with too little money, declining enrollment and too many mandates, what we mostly have is befuddlement.