State Board approves Taconic and Green Act 46 Merger plan

A press release was issued Wednesday announcing that the merger proposal developed by the Northshire Merger Study Committee has been approved.

The text of the press statement reads as follows:

EAST MONTPELIER — On December 20, the Vermont State Board of Education unanimously approved the Northshire Merger Study Committee’s proposal to merge into the Taconic and Green Regional School District.  Chairman Jon Wilson, Vice-Chair Richard Grip, and committee consultant Dan French presented the merger proposal to the board on Tuesday morning at U-32 Middle & High School.

With this vote, the State Board of Education followed the guidance of the Secretary of Education’s recommendations and determined that the proposed merger is “in the best interests of the State, the students, and the school districts.” The board also provided “preliminary support for a waiver regarding supervisory union board composition” if the merger is passed by the voters. After the meeting, Chairman Jon Wilson said, “We are very pleased with how things went today. Not only was the board very complementary of the report we put together, but they also indicated that they would work in good faith to grant us adequate representation on a future supervisory union board.” The current statutory default mechanism for determining supervisory board composition says that each district that operates a schools receives three representatives regardless of its population. With the knowledge that the state has final say in drawing a supervisory union’s boundaries, the Northshire Committee modeled out the most likely scenarios of which other districts would likely coexist in an SU with Taconic & Green. “Based on our models we developed this fall, we operated on the assumption that our proposed district would have about 60% of the population of the entire SU,” Vice-Chair Richard Grip said after the meeting. “We were very clear with the state board that this proposed merger would lose a lot of popular support in our electorates if the proposed merged district did not receive at least half of the representation on a future SU Board. They listened, responded, and capped off the end of a very pleasant meeting.”

Secretary of Education Rebecca Holcombe was also pleased with the hard work of the Northshire committee. A few minutes before the board approved her recommended actions (see actions listed at bottom), the Secretary said “I want to say a special thank you for taking such a regional approach because we do need regional solutions. I appreciate your willingness to take a long view, and have a broad vision because I think that is going to be critical to getting good solutions in your area.”

While Wilson breathed a sigh of relief once the meeting was over, he acknowledged some of the hardest work is yet to come: “We have a lot of outreach to do in the coming weeks and months before voters cast their ballots on this merger and new prospective board members on Town Meeting Day. Our work will now shift from seeking out feedback and developing merger recommendations, to educating the public on the details of the proposed merger. As I emphasized to the board today, there are many complexities inherent to this merger and our region, but I am more than confident that this peerless study committee will continue to tackle any obstacle in exemplary fashion.” Wilson urges voters to begin educating themselves by reading the report presented to State Board of Ed. It can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/northshiremergerstudy/ . Community members can also reach out to Wilson at Jon.wilson@brsu.org.