Education News
“This attitude of ‘the state knows best,’ and ‘voters can’t be trusted,’ is a clear sign of a democracy in retreat.”
— Herb Olson
STARKSBORO — Another Mount Abraham Unified School District community has officially launched a campaign to withdraw from the district.
The Starksboro group Save Our Schools began circulating a petition last Wednesday, March 16, asking the selectboard to hold a town-wide vote on the matter.
Supporters of the petition believe they have run out of options to guarantee their right to determine the fate of Starksboro’s Robinson Elementary School, whose future has become more and more uncertain during the past year and a half.
SOS member Herb Olson summarized the situation in his March 8 testimony before the Vermont House Education Committee.
“In the case of Starksboro, the past 15 months have resulted in a broken relationship between the school district and the community,” Olson said. “The district planned for months to close our school without a town vote, despite provisions of our articles of agreement guaranteeing a town vote before closing a school. Then a merger study committee was formed that will allow new articles of agreement to circumvent the town vote promise.”
Frustrated with recent activities in the Legislature and the ANWSD-MAUSD Merger Study Committee, and believing they might not have any alternative for preserving their school, SOS decided to pursue its option of last resort: withdrawal.
“If we wait any longer to withdraw it may be too late, and our school may be closed,” wrote SOS member Nancy Cornell in a March 21 Front Porch Forum post.
STICKING POINT
There are many in Starksboro who want to preserve Robinson Elementary School without leaving the MAUSD, Cornell told the Independent, and she includes herself among them.
In fact, she’s pleased with a recent facilities planning report commissioned by the MAUSD board, as well as the board’s response to it.
“I think the report lays out a whole array of very good options that will allow us to keep our school open,” she said. “I’m so encouraged by that and I feel like our school board has made a commitment to do everything they can to keep all of our schools open.”
The sticking point, she said, is the ANWSD-MAUSD Merger Study Committee, which was created a year ago to explore the feasibility of combining the Bristol-area MAUSD with the Vergennes-area Addison Northwest School District.
While MAUSD’s articles of agreement specify that no school may be closed without voter permission in the town hosting that school, similar articles in the ANWSD expired in 2020. And even while those particular articles were still in force, the ANWSD terminated the elementary program at Addison Central School in favor of a district-wide special education program, despite overwhelming opposition in the town.
Starksboro residents, including members of SOS and the town selectboard, have repeatedly asked the Merger Study Committee for assurances that articles for a potential merged district will honor the articles embedded in the MAUSD agreement, but they have thus far received no such assurances.
That the Merger Study Committee operates independently of both district school boards, without any local legal oversight, is also a concern for many Starksboro and Lincoln residents.
The committee’s next meeting was scheduled for Wednesday night, after the deadline for this story.
HOUSE BILL H.727
Starksboro residents are also concerned about a bill the Vermont House passed, easily, on March 18.
H.727, which was sponsored by the House Education Committee, is described as “an act relating to the exploration, formation, and organization of union school districts and unified union school districts.”
The word “withdraw” appears on 55 of its 172 pages, and its detractors, including those in Starksboro and Lincoln, claim it essentially rewrites the rules towns must follow to withdraw from their districts, effectively doing away with local control of schools.
If passed by the Senate and signed into law by Gov. Scott, it would be enacted on July 1 — even as Lincoln, Stowe and potentially Starksboro are in the middle of pursuing withdrawal according to the current rules.
In Starksboro’s case, it could mean having start all over again, Olson said.
Both Addison-4 state representatives — Mari Cordes, D-Lincoln, and Caleb Elder, D-Starksboro — voted against the bill.
In a March 8 letter to the House Education Committee, Olson called it “an affront to democracy.”
“The State Board of Education and the bill’s proponents claim the restrictive withdrawal process is needed to protect uninformed and emotional ‘locals’ from their ill-considered decisions to withdraw from a union school district,” Olson wrote. “This attitude of ‘the state knows best,’ and ‘voters can’t be trusted,’ is a clear sign of a democracy in retreat.”
THE PETITION
Starksboro’s withdrawal petition provides voters with more options than just “withdraw” or “don’t withdraw.”
Article 1 asks, “Shall the legal voters of the Town of Starksboro, Vermont, withdraw its membership in the Mount Abraham Unified Union School District and be reconstituted as the Starksboro town school district?”
Article 2 adds more options: “Shall the Selectboard of the Town of Starksboro be authorized to terminate the withdrawal process commenced by an affirmative vote on Article 1, above, if either of the following two conditions are satisfied:
“Condition #1. The Merger Study Committee … includes in expressly warned Articles of Agreement a statement in substantially the following form: ‘A town elementary school program shall not be closed, repurposed or otherwise terminated for any students in each of the grades K through 6 resident in the town without the approval of the voters of the town.’
“OR Condition #2. The proposed merger of the Addison Northwest School District and Mount Abraham Unified Union School District is not approved by the voters.”
“The point, I think, is that we’re not burning our bridges,” Olson said. “We’re doing what we think we absolutely have to do but we’re trying to keep open lines of communication and following the district activities very closely.”
The Independent reached out to MAUSD Superintendent Patrick Reen and school board chair Dawn Griswold for this story, as well as to ANWSD-MAUSD Merger Study Committee co-chairs Marikate Kelly of Monkton and Martha Degraaf of Panton, but was unable to connect with them before deadline.
NEXT STEPS
More than 10% of Starksboro’s 1,316 registered voters — more than twice as many as necessary — had signed the petition within the first week of its circulation, Olson said. The group intends to formally file the petition on or after March 30.
The town selectboard is required to act on the petition within 60 days, which means Starksboro voters could be heading to the polls as soon as this May.
Olson predicted the earliest possible date for a district-wide ratification vote, if warranted, would be mid-August, to coincide with the statewide election primaries.
Reach Christopher Ross at christopherr@addisonindependent.com.
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