MIDDLEBURY — The town of Ripton, two years removed from a bruising battle to safeguard its elementary school, finds its public education hub in crisis.

Parental backlash over a recently launched K-1-2 combined class came to a head on Monday with the sudden resignations of both the teacher of that multi-grade class and Ripton Elementary School (RES) Principal Megan Cheresnick.

Also on Monday night, the Addison Central School (ACSD) board met in special session to discuss Ripton’s enrollment conundrum and staff defections. The board flirted with the concept of suspending kindergarten and grade 1 instruction at RES for the balance of the 2024-2025 academic year. This would require parents to pick another elementary school to send their students until next fall, by which time the ACSD board would have formulated a long-term plan for addressing Ripton’s education needs.

But the panel, following a three-hour discussion that drew impassioned testimony from several Ripton residents, ultimately voted 6-5 to delay action on a resolution to the RES crisis until its next meeting, on Monday, Sept. 23. The board has asked ACSD Superintendent Wendy Baker to develop a menu of possible panaceas, including alternative grade configurations and/or personnel changes that will either keep RES’s youngest students on campus or result in them being transferred elsewhere, including Salisbury and/or Mary Hogan elementary schools.

In the meantime, the K-1-2 class — which contains a combined total of 13 students, including two children tuitioned from Hancock and Granville that don’t have elementary schools of their own — will continue to function. Baker said she believes Cheresnick and K-1-2 teacher Melissa Giroux will serve in their current roles until a transition plan is decided. It wasn’t clear as of this writing whether the duo would request reassignment to another ACSD school or leave the district altogether.

Cheresnick’s decision comes after one year as RES’s principal. She had previously taught eight years at Bridport Central School.

“While I have appreciated the opportunity to serve Ripton students, staff, and families, the present level of conflict within the community has led me to the realization that I will need to leave my position as principal,” Cheresnick wrote in a Monday, 4:10 p.m. email announcing her departure to parents. “I have let Superintendent Baker know of my intention and will work with her to determine how a leadership transition can best be handled.”

Giroux’s resignation announcement was also succinct.

“After careful consideration and with the support of my family, I have made the incredibly difficult decision that I will not be staying at RES moving forward,” she wrote. “RES has and always will be a very special place for me, I am so grateful for all of the wonderful memories we have made together and will hold those memories close as I make this change.”

Parental pushback on the K-1-2 class has been simmering since this past spring, when district officials began considering 2024-25 grade configurations. Opposition has been particularly fierce among grade 2 parents concerned their children’s learning progress might be hampered in a class combined with two younger age groups.

But district officials pointed to Ripton enrollment numbers that they said can’t justify individual K, 1 and 2 classes, nor even a combination of just two of those grades. The current, combined K-1-2 enrollment in Ripton is 13, including just two kindergartners, three first-graders and eight second graders.

The overall K-5 enrollment at RES currently is 39.

Ripton resident and parent John Wetzel was among those who weighed in on the subject at Monday’s ACSD board meeting. He said he fears that reassigning two grades of RES students to other schools could spell the beginning of the end of public education based in Ripton.

“We care about our school. We care about our community. The school is a pillar of the community and an important piece of who we are,” he said. “We want to support this school; we want to make it work.”

Steve Cash is a former Ripton School District board member and parent of a current RES second grader.

“Today’s been a whirlwind… It’s been a lot to sort out what’s been going on,” he said of the two resignations and talk of sending some students to other schools. “I’m pretty frustrated with the community. The treatment of some of the educators has not been up to the level that it should be.”

He urged the board to safeguard RES’s viability.

“If this is a quiet kind of attempt to get grades out of Ripton and close the school, that’s going to be really hard,” Cash said.

Meredith Dunsmore-Pratt described herself as a lifelong Ripton resident and the parent of an RES student.

“RES has changed (my son’s) life. It’s changed my life as his mother. I can’t tell you how supported I have felt,” she said of her RES experiences.

“I have always understood we might be on borrowed time at RES, in terms of school consolidation and how long a school like ours might be able to stay afloat, but I do share the sadness and devastation about the animus that has risen up within the profession and the conflict,” she added.

Baker, during an earlier, Sept. 9 ACSD board meeting at which RES’s grade K-1-2 issue was also discussed at length, explained the K-1-2 solution was chosen because having a K-1 classroom with only five students wouldn’t be “best practice” for students at that stage of developmental. When Giroux departs and if her job remains unfilled, it’d leave RES with just two teachers for six grade levels, according to Baker.

“I need the board’s guidance about that,” she said.

Baker has met with RES educators and parents during the past two weeks to gather feedback and come up with potential solutions. On Sept. 5, she attended a Ripton PTO meeting, at which parents advocated blending RES’s second and third graders or removing the second graders from the K-1-2 classroom. Baker reiterated that creating a subset of the already small K-1-2 class wasn’t advisable from an educational standpoint.

Board member Jamie McCallum on Monday asked about potentially adding a second educator to the K-1-2 class to create more learning opportunities for the older students. Baker countered that pulling a teacher from another ACSD school — at a time when the district still has teaching vacancies — would create short staffing elsewhere in the district.

And Baker also noted the financial implications of adding a new educator to the ACSD’s smallest school.

Residents in the ACSD-member towns of Bridport, Cornwall, Middlebury, Ripton, Salisbury, Shoreham and Weybridge will already see hefty education property tax increases stemming from the fiscal year 2025 preK-12 budget of $50.6 million they passed in March. In Middlebury, the homestead education property tax rate will rise by almost 27 cents, from $1,6760 to $1.9459 per $100 in property value. The non-residential rate is going up by 12.12 cents.

Many Ripton residents are lamenting the current RES turmoil and are hoping to restore stability to a community asset that’s received good local backing through the years. Ripton residents in 2021 voted to exit the ACSD and form an independent preK-12 school district, over concerns the district might close RES due to its small enrollment. Ripton officials explored the prospect of hiring a modest central-office staff, while sorting out busing and other issues to put their Ripton School District plan into motion. But the transition proved so problematic that townspeople voted to rejoin the ACSD in August of 2022.

Thirty-one Ripton residents endorsed a Sept. 12 letter to Baker and the ACSD board declaring their support for RES staff and the school. That letter captured the tenor of a Ripton community forum that had been held that same day at which almost 40 participants discussed the K-1-2 dilemma.

“The primary goal for the Ripton community with regards to the school is to ensure its health and vibrancy both now and into the future,” reads the letter, whose supporters include nationally renowned environmentalist/author Bill McKibben, longtime Ripton Selectperson Laurie Cox, current ACSD board member and Ripton resident Joanna Doria, and Cash.

Signers of the letter said they could support the current grade configuration at RES, seeing it as a way to keep the community’s youngest students in the school.

“We feel that any change in approach which ensures that our students can remain in the RES community is a positive one, and we are glad that we have teachers and administrators that are flexible and experienced enough to find creative solutions to the challenges that a small school such as ours will inevitably face,” the letter states.

Board members on Monday were evenly split on whether to postpone, for one week, action on RES’s K-1-2 situation, or vote on a gameplan that evening.

Board member Mary Heather Noble proposed the panel direct Baker to “transfer RES’s kindergarten and grade 1 students — in consultation with their families — to another adequate learning environment for the 2024-2025 academic year.” But before that proposal could come to a final vote, the board fielded (and eventually approved, 6-5) a separate request to postpone action until its Sept. 23 meeting.

Joanna Doria — the parent of an RES second grader — had originally abstained from voting on the issue, having been advised to recuse herself. But board member Ellen Whelan-Wuest argued Doria shouldn’t have to abstain, asserting the board’s conflict-of-interest policy relates to matters involving potential financial gain.

“This means that parents can’t vote on things related to schools?” Whelan-Wuest said. “I assume this board is going to be talking about closing schools within maybe a year. I have a child at Cornwall school and I’m not going to vote on that? I think this is a very dangerous precedent made on a real, back-of-the-napkin interpretation of conflict of interest.”

Doria then voted for postponement.

Board members aren’t likely to postpone their RES decision beyond Sept. 23. Noble and ACSD board Chair Barb Wilson said the district needs to ensure all district students have the best public education they can be given, and they argued that’s not likely to transpire in a single K-1-2 class that might soon be teacher-less in a school without a principal.

“Are (the students) really going to get what they need — especially if they can’t find (a new teacher) and then have to move anyway?” Wilson said. “Their peers are going to be so much further ahead of them, and they’ll have to catch up.

“I feel for these kids and it’s a no-win situation,” she added.

John Flowers is at [email protected].