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MAUSD seeks to fill citizen input panel
BRISTOL — The Mount Abraham Unified School District is seeking residents to serve on a committee that will help evaluate various long-range facilities proposals.
According to a district announcement last week the Community Input Committee, or CIC, will work with the MAUSD’s consultant, Nate Levenson of New Solutions K12, to refine the criteria used to assess and compare facilities proposals, provide feedback on the consultant’s reports, and be a sounding board for the school board and the community, among other things.
The MAUSD board asked the community for proposals six months ago, after it delayed action on the controversial plan introduced by Superintendent Patrick Reen in December, which called for consolidating district elementary schools and merging with the Addison Northwest School District.
Five community groups submitted proposals, which can be found on the district website: tinyurl.com/communityproposals.
A lot has happened since then.
In late May the school board hired Levenson to evaluate the proposals. In June it appointed members to the ANWSD-MAUSD Merger Study Committee. In August, in an effort to preserve their local elementary school, Lincoln residents voted to leave the MAUSD altogether, citing not only Reen’s proposal but also the timelines and implications of Levenson’s work and that of the Merger Study Committee.
In a recent paid column in the Independent, the MAUSD board’s Community Engagement Committee summed up Levenson’s work to date.
“Nate Levenson and his review team have had thoughtful and engaged conversations with primary authors of each proposal, building Principals and Central Office staff members. They also conducted a site visit at Mt. Abraham Middle/High School to see the state of that facility firsthand. The Levenson team drafted a summary of each proposal using a common template which was sent to proposal authors for feedback and review.”
The next step in that work is to form the Community Input Committee.
The 17-member CIC will consist of 11 MAUSD residents — three from Bristol and two each from Lincoln, Monkton, New Haven and Starksboro — and six building principals, the announcement said.
Interested parties should be 18 or older, have resided in the 5-Town area for at least two years and represent a wide breadth of community members in their town.
If there are more candidates than committee openings in a town, a building principal in that town will select names via a lottery system.
Authors of the proposals being reviewed are not eligible to serve on the CIC, but they will have the opportunity to review the draft report from the review team and comment on the assessment criteria.
For more information visit mausd.org or email [email protected].
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