ANGELO LYNN

At Vermont’s Town Meetings last year, voters rejected over 30 school budgets, about one in three, because of budget increases that averaged close to 13%. This year, when the average property tax is expected to rise about 6% or half what it did last year, only nine district budgets (out of 100 reported by mid-day Wednesday) were defeated.

In Addison County, voters overwhelmingly passed school budgets at ACSD (Middlebury), ANWSD (Vergennes) and MAUSD (Bristol). The RNESU (Otter Valley) budget passed by just one vote, while the lone budget defeat was Slate Valley Union (Fair Haven), which includes Orwell.

Chelsea Myers, executive director of the Vermont Superintendents Association, expressed relief Wednesday morning to VtDigger that so many communities supported their school budgets, describing the results as “kind of (reverting) back to normal.”

“We would be having a very different conversation if the results resembled last year,” she said in an interview covered by Ethan Weinstein.

Which begs the question, are Vermont schools in such a state of crisis to warrant the draconian reforms touted by the Scott administration? And let’s define “draconian” here to mean the total loss of local control that consolidating 100 school districts into five regional mega-districts would entail.

No matter how much lipstick Gov. Scott and his team try to put on that consolidated pig, if passed local residents will have a greatly diminished voice in school affairs. What does that mean specifically? Here are two plausible examples:

• Class sizes will be determined at the state level and school districts will be mandated to comply. That means, while the “state” won’t officially force school closures, they are mandating that district administrations (and those boards) do it. That’s “big brother” government mandating its will, just via a “local” board — which in Addison County’s case would be a combined school district of 34,000 students representing Franklin, Chittenden and Addison counties. That’s not “local control” by any standard Vermonters have ever known.

• Team sports and extracurricular activities: While it’s unlikely teams or popular student activities would be cut at schools early on, such decisions per individual school would be based a program’s viability countered by its cost to the district. In a system where cost is the determining factor (lowering costs is reason Gov. Scott has championed his plan), cost in a larger district will likely have an upper hand over delivering auxiliary value to students.

Taxpayers should be careful what they wish for.

This is not to say that structural reform couldn’t improve Vermont’s educational system, and that there aren’t good aspects to several of the proposals, but if Vermonters want to maintain a semblance of local control, they better pay close attention to the proposals advancing in the legislature. So far, the solutions proposed by the Governor’s office are extreme, while those proposed by other legislators would still make significant changes to the status quo.

Considering the outcome of this week’s elections, perhaps legislators will find less favor for the more drastic recommendations.

Angelo Lynn