Sunderland residents hear Act 46 update

Andrew McKeever

GNAT News Project

SUNDERLAND — About 30 area residents turned out Wednesday, Oct. 18, for a discussion hosted by the Northshire Merger Study Committee on their progress to date on a proposed consolidation of several area school districts under Act 46 and how that would affect Sunderland.

Along with questions about school choice and how Sunderland would be represented on the new consolidated school board which would replace the present school board, Act 46 is forcing a decision about how to dispose of a federally financed fund known as Impact Aid, which currently totals more than $1.4 million. This money is distributed through a federal program which offsets land lost to town taxation and off-limits to development because it is part of a federal national forest, in this case, the Green Mountain National Forest.

Under the terms of the federal program, which also goes to assist communities who lose developable, and therefore potentially taxable, property to military bases, the money has historically been used to soften the school’s district’s property tax impact on residents. By law, the money flows directly to the school district, not the municipality, and can’t simply be transferred from the school district to the town, said Interim School Superintendent Jacquelyne Wilson, who was part of a group of school officials and committee members  who updated the community members attending the forum.

“You sit on a fairly large Impact Aid reserve fund; the money is solely used for the purpose of tax relief,” she told the audience. “If we merge, all those reserves become one — they all go to the newly merged district.”

Sunderland would no longer be the sole beneficiary of the federal revenue, and under the school consolidation rules of Act 46 — a statute passed last year which is designed to encourage school districts to consolidate into fewer, and larger, districts to achieve educational and operational efficiencies — would have to share it with all the other towns in the newly formed school district, which is projected to include Manchester, Dorset, Mt. Tabor, Danby, Landgrove, Peru, Weston, Londonderry along with Sunderland. Mt. Tabor is also a receiver of federal funds under the program, she said.

But before that happens — and several steps remain to be taken before a proposal is approved by the state board of education and local voters — the merger committee has suggested that the existing money in the fund be used to directly benefit Sunderland.

About $600,000 of that would be used as a one-time tax break to drive the town’s education tax rate down to $1 per $1,000 of assessed property value. That is the lowest the education property tax rate can go under state law.  The remaining $800-900,000 would be transferred to a buildings and grounds reserve fund, to be used for maintaining or improving the school building. Another option  in a handout distributed at the meeting mentioned investing the funds into school transportation, capital expenditures and educational needs prior to merging with the new district.

How the money would eventually be divided hinges on whether the final proposal the merger study committee decides on passes muster with the state board of education, and then the voters. Committee members said they were hoping to submit such a proposal to the state board by December. If that receives a green light, voters would weigh in during the March, 2017 town meeting. If those votes affirm the proposal for what would be a Regional Education District, authorized under a previous statute, Act 153 (currently Londonderry, Weston, Peru and Landgrove form such a regional district) and operating under the umbrella of the existing Bennington-Rutland Supervisory Union, would take office.

The makeup of such a new school board — which would oversee the operations of Sunderland Elementary School, Manchester Elementary-Middle School, The Dorset School, The Currier School in Danby, and Flood Brook Union School in Londonderry – was also a topic for discussion. The committee anticipates proposing a 13 member school board. Each of the nine towns involved in the proposed merger would have at least one elected representative. The other four would be elected on at at-large basis, meaning that voters from all nine towns would be eligible to vote for the four school board slots, but the candidates for those posts would be drawn from residents of the four largest towns; Manchester, Dorset, Londonderry and Danby. The intent here is to mesh universal representation with proportional representation, said Nancy Wolf, a committee member, told the audience.

“We all agreed, quite quickly, that every town should have at least one voting member on the board,” she said. “We could have gone with a proportionality model or the ‘at large’ approach.”

But the all-proportionality model could easily have meant Sunderland would not have had a single representative on the new board, since its relatively smaller population would have been swamped by voters from larger towns favoring their own candidates.

Another issue discussed at length was school choice. Sunderland currently operates a K-6th grade school, with choice options from grades 7 -12. But under the new yet-to-be-formed district, those options for their 7th and 8th graders would shrink to three — MEMS, The Dorset School and Flood Brook. The merger committee is hoping that a grandfathering clause applying to siblings to students who will be 7th graders in the 2017-18 school year will be approved, so that siblings who will be in the 6th grade that same school year could attend the same school. Students entering the 7th grade in the 2018-19 school year would need to attend one of the three middle schools in the new district.

The committee also reviewed the likely tax impact for Sunderland. From the possible $1 equalized tax rate for 2018, reflecting the one-time impact aid payout, it would rise in increments up to $1.53 after five years. This tax rate will be the same for all the towns in the district across the board.

If voters approve the merger plan crafted more or less as in place at present, the committee anticipated that sharing resources across a larger base will help stabilize taxes over the larger, single budget voters from all the towns in the district will be voting on during Town Meeting. If Sunderland voters turn it down, but other towns approve, the merger will still go forward, since Sunderland’s vote will be technically an advisory one. Sunderland would lose its current state Small Schools Grant, reckoned at about $83,000, and the state could mandate a governance structure without local input, the information sheet handed out stated.

After considering restructuring the current set of school districts into a “supervisory district” under Act 46, the merger committee is opting to try the regional education district route. A supervisory district would mean a single board and a single budget, which is the anticipated outcome under the regional district, but it also means potentially isolating neighboring districts which might not be able to find merger partners, Wilson said.

There remains additional flux in areas such as Pawlet and Rupert, where merger talks with Wells have collapsed, as well as with Stratton and Winhall, where a possible merger with Searsburg and Sandgate has also been scuttled. The upshot is that the current Bennington Rutland Supervisory Union will probably remain, with the new regional district tucked into at, and could possibly also include Arlington and Sandgate as well, after all the dust has settled, she said.

“It will still be an SU (supervisory union), but it will look different,” she said.

(Andrew McKeever photo)
From left, Melanie Virgilio, Sunderland School Board chairwoman, Skylar Labombard, Sunderland School principal, and Jennifer Rosenthal, a Sunderland representative and member of the Act 46 Northshire merger study committee, discuss the merits of how the town’s school district would be incorporated into a larger consolidated district with eight other neighboring towns.