Arlington Mulls Act 46 Options

Andrew McKeever

GNAT News Project

ARLINGTON — A citizen study committee unveiled a proposal, which if embraced by the town’s school board and approved on the state level, would give Arlington’s school district and the Battenkill Valley Supervisory Union of which it is part a five year reprieve from having to join another supervisory union in order to comply with Act 46, the state’s education consolidation statute.

With a deadline of Dec. 26 looming as the point when the board has to file a report with state education officials stating how they planned to comply with the educational and governance goals of Act 46, a law passed in 2015 designed to streamline the number of school districts and supervisory unions, the board heard a report from a study committee authorized by the school board to evaluate possible options for the district going forward. The report was presented during the board’s meeting on Wednesday, Dec. 6, at the Arlington Memorial High School.

“We believe Arlington Memorial High School has the opportunity to take advantage of its small size, the area’s diverse business and creative assets, and its spirit of community engagement,” the report stated, parts of which were read to the audience of about 50 people who turned out for Wednesday’s school board meeting at the high school’s Mack Performing Arts Center by Kate Bryan, one of the members of the study committee. “Our innovative approach enlists our diverse assets to develop pathways to learning and to post-secondary school and employment success tailored to each student.”

The proposal for a five-year pilot program grows out of another piece of legislation, Act 77, which was passed in 2013, and mandates “Personal Learning Plans” for students in grades 7-12. According to the Agency of Education, Act 77 adds options to the school classroom that can lead to high school completion and post-secondary readiness. The pathway options include:  Work-based learning opportunities, including general career, career technical education, and internships; virtual and blended learning (a mix of online and traditional classroom learning) to take advantage of technology, and dual enrollment in two college classes in junior and/or senior years, earning high school and college credit at the same time.

The Arlington study committee proposal looks to segments of the town’s business community  and non-profit  organizations to play a larger role in enhancing the district’s educational offerings. A key component to this would be emphasizing STEAM teaching and learning — shorthand for science, technology, engineering, arts and math.

Another component of the plan calls for the North Bennington School District to join the BVSU, which currently consists of Arlington and Sandgate. That would create a school choice PreK-12 district with a total of about 689 students, according to the report.

The idea of partnering with Arlington to meet the state’s education goals has some traction in North Bennington, said Tim Newbold, the principal of The Village School in North Bennington.

It will ultimately depend on whether the Southwest Vermont Supervisory Union is dissolved, which would free North Bennington from having to obtain favorable votes in the other member towns allowing them to leave the Mt. Anthony Union School District and the supervisory union, he said.

“If that happens, it may open the door to other possibilities,” Newbold said. “It’s one of the options we’re considering.”

The minimum number of students the needed to form a governance unit under Act 46 is 900, but conversations with state officials so far indicated to members of the committee that this provision was not an automatic show stopper.

Florence Belnap, a member of the study group, said that when she approached education officials about the prospects for a 5-year pilot plan under Act 77 as a workaround to the problem the BVSU faced with finding merger partners, the notion was not dismissed out of hand.

Rather, they were encouraged to write their report and support their conclusions as best as possible, and the state board would consider it, she was told, she said to the members of the board.

“The (education) Agency appreciates how hard people in Arlington are working and how much they care about doing what’s best for their children,” stated Donna Russo-Savage, the principal assistant to the secretary for school governance, in an email following a request for comment from GNAT-TV. “We look forward to reviewing the district’s proposal and discussing it with them.  It’s impossible, however, for anyone to predict what SU boundary changes the State Board of Education will decide are necessary to ensure sustainable structures capable of meeting the State’s education goals.”  

The school board heard the proposal offered by the study committee, which was also distributed at the meeting. The board had not yet had the time to fully digest the idea or how it would be implemented, and did not endorse or reject the idea, pending further evaluation.

Whether the board signs on to the idea as a way to satisfy the immediate requirement of explaining to the state board of education and the education agency how they intend to meet the five statutory requirements of Act 46, which include providing substantial equity in educational opportunity, having students meet or exceed state educational quality standards, achieve operating efficiencies and provide educational services at a reasonable cost, is a decision they may face when they hold their next board meeting on Wednesday, Dec. 13.

At the Dec. 6 meeting, board Chairwoman Nicol Whalen described where the school district and the supervisory union stood at that point with relation to Act 46. She recounted the unsuccessful history of the board’s attempts to find merger partners since the passage of Act 46 in 2015. Maintaining the Battenkill Valley Supervisory Union as independent entity didn’t seem a likely possibility before the passage of Act 49, enacted earlier this year, which created some additional avenues for school districts which hadn’t been able to find merger partners, she said.

“Before Act 49, our path ahead was to become part of the BRSU (Bennington Rutland Supervisory Union),” she said. “That’s where we were headed by the end of the 2018-19 school year.”

If the Arlington School District joined the BRSU, it would be as a single, standalone pre-K-12 school district, with its own board and budget, she said.

That remained very much an option, but the new home-grown proposal was one worthy of consideration, given the amount of time and work the study committee had invested since last July, when it began its work.

Their imperatives were to keep the Arlington School District as a distinct entity and maintain the operations at the existing public schools, Whalen said.

An hour long question-and-answer period followed the committee’s presentation and Whalen’s description of where things stood with Act 46. Questions centered on next steps, tax impacts, studies on potential savings through consolidations and governance.

Several members of the audience said the district had little to lose by giving the study committee’s idea a try.

“The worst case scenario is that you wind up in the BRSU so it’s worth taking a chance,” said Todd Wilkens.

With previous studies showing at best meager prospects for financial savings through consolidation, the case was enhanced for trying something else, said Marshall Cross.

“It becomes a matter of volition on our part,” he said. “What do we value and what do we see as our best interest, and we go for that.”