Manchester Act 46 forum held

Andrew McKeever

GNAT-TV News Project

MANCHESTER — The proposed consolidated school district the merger study committee has been charged with developing has a name.

The Taconic and Green School District — named for the twin mountain ranges that flank the geographical boundaries of the proposed new district designed to conform with the statutory requirements of Act 46, the education governance overhaul bill enacted in 2015 and amended slightly earlier this year — will include Manchester, Dorset, Danby, Sunderland, Mt. Tabor and the existing Mountain Towns RED, or regional education district that already binds the towns and former school districts of Weston, Peru, Londonderry and Landgrove.

The merger study group unveiled that new title along with a presentation on their plan they expect to submit to the state board of education later this month or shortly afterwards. If the state board approves it, it will bounce back to local voters to approve, or not, sometime in the Spring of 2017, presumably during March Town Meetings.

A new elected board of directors would then begin overseeing the new district the following June, which would technically be a regional school district as developed under Act 153, previous legislation passed in 2010 which was designed to encourage school districts to merge and consolidate. A transition year is envisioned which would existing school boards in place before the new elected 13-member board took over complete operation of the new district in July, 2018.

Jon Wilson, a former Manchester School Board member and current faculty member at Burr and Burton Academy, has served as the chairman of the Northshire Act 46 merger study committee, and led a presentation given Thursday, Nov. 3, at the Manchester Community Library. He walked the roughly 40 people attending it through their proposed plan and its likely impacts, outlining changes that the new consolidated district might bring in terms of tax rates and educational governance structures.

A shift in the way residents think about their local school populations may be the biggest hurdle area residents living in the towns included in the proposed consolidation have to grapple with, he said.

“It may — it does — require a shift in the mindset about who we believe our kids are,” he told the audience. “Our kids will be all the towns in the districts,” adding that this could be a harp jump for some people used to thinking town-by-town.

“All of our kids are all of our kids,” is the motto the merger committee adopted, he said; “if we are going to do this (referring to the proposed merger) we need to change our mindset.”

The forum, one of several that have been conducted in recent weeks by the committee for towns involved in it, focused on the impacts on Manchester, the largest town in the group. The new district would present one common budget for all the towns involved, have one annual meeting and one equalized tax rate after it is fully operational.

A key issue for some towns has been school choice. If the merger goes through, Sunderland, Danby and Mt. Tabor would lose their present school choice options for 7th and 8th grades, but for Manchester that would not change. School choice would continue for grades 9-12, just as at present, Wilson said.

What could change is the tuition amounts the various communities set at present. Manchester has different tuition reimbursement rates for Burr and Burton Academy and Long Trail School than the Mountain Towns RED has at the moment, and those would have to be unified, he said.

By ratifying the changeover to the new unified district by July 2017 would allow residents to reap some short-term tax benefits, on a sliding scale of 8 cents per $100 of assessed property value and decreasing by 2 cents per year over four years. At that point a unified tax rate, identical across the district would be in place.

A key advantage to the merger could be stability in terms of tax fluctuations and spreading of costs across a larger base. By being able to consolidate part-time teaching positions into fewer full-time positions, the district would likely attract a deeper pool of applicants, leading to hiring more qualified teachers. It also opened up the possibility of creating a regional middle school or a magnet school, one which stressed or specialized in areas such as technology or the arts.

The new board would consist of 13 members. Each of the nine towns involved would have one seat, with four seats to be determined by “at large” voting across the district with candidates drawn from the four largest towns. This is an attempt to straddle the need for proportionality with having each town guaranteed at least one seat.

But this is one example of a trade-off that has not sat well with some. Currently Manchester has a five-member school board focused solely on Manchester. It’s possible, though unlikely, that Manchester could find itself with only one member on a 13 member school board.

“This idea of local control is one of the big knocks against Act 46 — that it forces local districts to give up local control,” Wilson said. “The counter-argument to that is — what is local control? Is it a function of the number of options you have  — it’s hard to make a number of changes when you have limited options,” an apparent reference to the greater degree of flexibility a unified school board would have to shift resources from place to place as well as centralizing some administrative tasks.

The proposed merger, if approved when the committee meets Monday, Nov. 14 to vote on it (it was originally scheduled to hold its meeting on Nov. 7, but the meeting was re-scheduled), does not need to pass in all six school districts to take effect. In three districts — Sunderland, Danby and Mt. Tabor — the votes will be termed “advisory” rather than “necessary.”

If it fails in one or more of the “advisory” towns, the merger can still go forward, so long as it is approved in all the “necessary” towns.

Melanie Virgilio, the chairwoman of the Sunderland School Board, questioned whether or not the study committee should consider a so-called “side by side” merger, where Manchester, Dorset and the Mountain Towns RED were grouped together, with Sunderland, Danby and Mt. Tabor  placed in another group alongside them. This would match up districts with comparable K-6 schools and maintain the 7-8 grade school choice position they enjoy, she said.

“As good as this agreement is with the partners who were at the table, I would urge you guys to think is this actually viable for all the communities at the table,” she said, noting that the long term tax benefits were hardly jaw dropping and towns like Sunderland would lose their choice option. “A side-by-side might look better for all of us.”

That might avoid the scenario where if one of the “necessary” votes failed next Spring, that would cause a scramble to salvage a merger by the following July, she said.

That still wouldn’t leave enough time to re-group and develop another plan. The merger study committee would have to dissolve and start over, Wilson said.

Mary Van Vleck, another Sunderland school board member, expressed skepticism about the long term tax benefits and what real educational and administrative benefits might accrue to the current school districts, since the Bennington Rutland supervisory Union had already consolidated and centralized many functions that used to be handled school by school.

“The way we are delivering the services now, versus the way they would be delivered in a merger, really doesn’t help us,” she said. “You get four years of tax benefits, but after that, you have no control over what the state will tell us what the tax rate will be or what our threshold will be. It looks good, but when the incentives are gone, everyone will be paying a higher rate.”

Jay Ouellette, a board member from the Mountain Towns RED, pointed out that one benefit would be a greater level of stability. Some of the tax rate fluctuations some towns have seen, would be tamped down and minimized. While there may not be much of a decline of total costs, there could be more stability, he said.

In any event, even though the BRSU as presently constituted may be running very well and efficiently, remaining the same is not an option under the law.

“The State Board of Education has made it very clear that maintaining what you have is not acceptable,” he said. “They’ve made that very clear that’s not going to fly, so we have to do something.”

At present, the BRSU consists of additional towns and districts in Winhall, Rupert and Pawlet. Currently the Act 46 merger status is in disarray in those towns, as discussions with potential merger partners have broken down for the time being. Additionally, Arlington and Sandgate  have been unable to match up with other partners, and down the road, all those towns could conceivably be part of a new supervisory union, with a northern and southern district, according to one of the slides in the powerpoint presentation Wilson gave.

For a full video of the entire presentation and meeting, go to gnat-tv.org.

Andrew McKeever Photo
At right, Jon Wilson, the chairman of the Northshire Merger Study Committee, leads a presentation Thursday, Nov. 7 on the likely to be proposed plan the committee will submit to the state board of education. The committee plans to vote on it next week.