MIDDLEBURY — The Addison Central School District board on Monday endorsed — by an 8-4 margin — a revised, minimum class-size policy of 10 students, drawn from no more than two grades.

Officials acknowledged tiny Ripton Elementary School (RES) faces a major hurdle with the new policy, which is intended “to ensure the district maintains equitable access for all ACSD students to learning environments that are appropriate for academic success, social and emotional wellbeing, and are sufficient to support the district’s educational programming,” according to its preamble.

Ripton Elementary’s K/1 this fall is projected to have only three students — far fewer than the 10-student minimum, noted ACSD Superintendent Wendy Baker.

“Unfortunately, this enrollment level does not allow for our educational program to be fully implemented,” she stated in Tuesday email to Ripton families.

The revised ACSD policy (known as D6) allows the superintendent to reassign students in underenrolled classes, as a group, to a different ACSD school. In Ripton’s case, Salisbury Community School has often been cited.

But there’s still hope of preserving K/1 schooling at RES for the 2025-2026 academic year. The revised D6 policy also allows the superintendent to invite families throughout the ACSD to consider enrolling a child in an underenrolled class to make it viable — assuming the transfer of those children doesn’t put the sending school at risk of running afoul of D6 or other district policies.

Baker on Tuesday made the pitch to ACSD parents to see if the ranks of Ripton Elementary’s K/1 class could be pushed to the minimum 10 by this fall.

“We would be happy to talk about support that might make this opportunity possible if you feel it might be a good fit for your child,” Baker stated in her email.

Parents are being asked to declare interest by March 3, to allow district officials to target RES’s 2025-26 enrollment by March 24.

Transportation will be among the issues that potential sending families to RES will need to confront. It’s listed under several D6 “policy contingencies.”

“The district will make every effort to ensure that volunteer families can be provided transportation to the new school under existing bus routes,” reads the policy. “Given the broad geographic spread of our district, however, under certain circumstances, transportation may not be guaranteed.”

Other policy contingencies include:

• Students who transfer from one ACSD school to another will be expected to remain enrolled there for the balance of their elementary career (through grade 5), according to the policy.
• A family that volunteers to send their student to the receiving ACSD school can also choose to send the sibling(s) of that student to the same new school, if the superintendent determines all aspects of the policy continue to be met.

Prior to being revised on Monday, Policy D6 included guidelines calling for a minimum of 10, and a maximum of 19 for kindergarten; a minimum of 10, and a maximum of 20 for grades 1-3: a minimum of 10, and maximum of 24 for grades 4-5.

Board member Jamie McCallum chairs the district’s Policy Committee. After the board vote on D6, he noted the long, sometimes tumultuous road in drafting a policy that all committee members could live with.

“I think it was a much bigger challenge than we all thought,” he said, adding, “I have a lot of faith (the policy) will attend to the problem we started dealing with many months ago.”

In other action on Monday, the ACSD board:

• Received word that an appeal of course material used in Mary Hogan Elementary’s “Who We Are” kindergarten unit has been dropped. The Independent reported in December that two parents had taken issue with educators’ use of seven children’s with gender identity themes, and that acknowledge those who might be transgender.

Two parents appealed the use of those books in the “Who We Are” unit.

A committee that included Mary Hogan Principal Jen Kravitz, teacher Elizabeth Thacker, Mary Hogan School Nurse Becky Harrell, ACSD Literacy Coordinator Heather Gebo, former Addison County universal PreK coordinator Meg Baker and parent Emily Lambert heard the appeal and later issued a report affirming use of the books.

One of the parents appealed the committee’s decision to district Superintendent Wendy Baker. She said she recently met with the parent, who ultimately decided to drop the appeal.

“I think it’s fair to say that what we talked about most was the process a school goes through when there might be course materials that come into conflict with a sincerely held religious belief, or something of that nature, that’s important for us to be able to work through together,” she told the board on Monday. “We’ve learned something as a school system through this experience. People were heard, I think, during the process.”

• Aired multiple concerns about Gov. Phil Scott’s proposed plan to transform public education in Vermont. The governor’s proposal, among other things, seeks to group the state’s 287 schools into five regional districts, while funding education through a foundation formula and giving the Vermont Agency of Education control over key public-school decisions.

Each of the regional districts would be served by one central office and governed by one school board, filled by elected, part-time board members. Communities could choose to raise “limited additional funds,” with the “state guarantee” that each district “could raise similar revenue for each cent on their local tax rate.”

Plans would call for Addison County to be blended with Chittenden and Franklin Counties in a “Champlain Valley Region” serving 34,105 students.

It remains unclear how much of Gov. Scott’s plan will find its way into law. The Democrat-majority Legislature has made an education system revamp a top priority.

But it’s clear the governor’s plan doesn’t have many fans on the ACSD board. Members criticized multiple aspects of the plan, including its two-year timeline, a perceived lack of transparency in its crafting, and the loss in local control it would bring to school decisions.

“It’s like designing your own trainwreck,” board member Ellen Whelan-Wuest said.

John Flowers is at [email protected].