I was disappointed by the somewhat inflammatory reporting on the ANWSD in the news section of the Oct. 24 Addison Independent. As a parent of two children in the school district, I’d like to thank our school board for their hard work in navigating these difficult choices. I’d like to respond to some of the charges in that article and propose an alternative.
First, on the charge of taking undemocratic action, we voted the school board members in, and they are working within their limits and rules to make the best of a bad situation. The undemocratic behavior has actually been at the selectboard level. I listened to a selectboard member try to argue that the school board representation should be based on how much of the budget a community contributes, meaning the unit of representation is the dollar — a plutocracy. The unit of representation in a democracy is the person, and it is our current system. It was also the selectboards who tried to prevent their own constituents from having a say when they refused to warn the votes. Anger and shock are causing these actions, and the towns, all five of them, need to grieve our predicament. But these conversations were happening a year before the announcement to consider closing Addison and Ferrisburgh; we just weren’t paying attention (myself included). Now, the crunch is upon us, and we can’t afford to lose our heads.
It is true that Act 46 does not say we have to close schools, but it is structured to pinch communities who go over the spending cap. ANWSD is already over, and with the increases we will be more so next year. A large part of this increase is because of the way the state is mandating unified healthcare for all teachers in the state. Teachers deserve good healthcare, but the costs are a huge increase in our budget for next year, and we can’t do anything about that at the local level. Perhaps the state is to blame because they’ve capped our spending and raised our costs, but they are also responding to the economic realities in Vermont. The school board didn’t cause the demographic decline nor can they stop it. They can only try to preserve as much of what we have as they can. The anger and shock are real, but directing it at the school board is shooting the messenger.
Given the imposed tax penalty, a huge tax increase is unfair and unlikely to pass, so we have two basic options — combine students who are inefficiently distributed across three elementary schools OR gut the high school programming and other services that aren’t mandated by the state. The first option is unappealing, but it maintains the services and educational programs we already have at all levels in a tighter budget. The second option could accelerate the death of the entire district. Why? Who will choose to move to a school district where the high school only offers the bare minimum required by the state? Who will choose to stay in that district? We, in the five towns, are not competing with each other; our competition is around us — Addison Central, Charlotte, Shelburne and South Burlington. If we don’t protect our programs and keep our taxes reasonable, these districts will siphon off residents that might have moved here and will ensure that our kids are traveling farther for education in larger school districts where our input is diluted even further. The school board members are not destroying our communities, they are trying to save them.
What we need is to work together, not to stymie efforts to address our budget crisis, but to plan for the future of what could be — lemons into lemonade. At the last information session on Oct. 8, we had discussion groups where our questions were answered immediately and we were allowed to brainstorm ways to move forward — what to do with the buildings if they close, what things our communities really need right now that we don’t have, like childcare options, senior learning centers, and maybe a recreation center. Let’s restructure our school system now, so we can work together in the medium and long term to fill these other needs, perhaps repurpose some of these facilities and still survive as a local school district. I believe these amenities will encourage families to move here. Let’s do this.
Amy Tsue-mei Yuen
Vergennes