Ripton, Salisbury school transition advances

Addison Central School District officials continue to prepare the next school year that will see Ripton’s K-5 students attend classes at Salisbury Community School, which is currently recruiting a new principal.

It will be a bittersweet graduation this June for the handful of Ripton Elementary School 5th-graders who’ll have the poignant distinction of being perhaps the last class to move on from RES to Middlebury Union Middle School.

The Addison Central School District board on Monday voted unanimously to shutter tiny Ripton Elementary School for the 2025-26 academic year while it sizes up the future of an RES that’s been decimated by declining enrollment.

The Addison Central School District board will hold a special meeting on Monday, March 31, to discuss — and potentially decide on — the future of Ripton Elementary School. It’s a meeting that’ll be held in open session, beginning at 5:30 p.m. in the Middl … (read more)

For more than 200 years, Ripton schools have rated high marks among local citizens for the way they’ve nourished local children intellectually, emotionally and in intangible ways. But a simple case of math could be on the verge of forcing its undoing — ma … (read more)

Is it inevitable that the Ripton Elementary School will close in the near future? Yes. Why? This is due to policy, maneuvering, and circumstance.

An 11th-hour bid to preserve kindergarten and 1st-grade education at tiny Ripton Elementary School suffered a big setback when ACSD Superintendent Wendy Baker announced that not enough out-of-town families had accepted an invitation to join RES’s K/1 clas … (read more)

The Addison Central School Board has decided to hold off on polling ACSD parents on their potential interest in sending their children to enrollment-challenged Ripton Elementary School (RES), until the panel completes revisions to district policies govern … (read more)

Ripton residents are joining forces to reimagine how public education might be delivered in their small town, in light of declining enrollment that’s placed the future of their local school in jeopardy.

After the half-time principal of Ripton Elementary resigned, Salisbury Principal Bjarki Sears will become acting principal in Ripton and Roxanne Greene will be the on-site, part-time associate principal there.

A successful reconciliation effort between Ripton parents and their local educators will allow the community’s elementary school to continue as a K-5 learning hub — at least for now.

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 resignation … (read more)

Like many who attended Monday night’s ACSD meeting, I left feeling incredibly disappointed with the board’s actions in the meeting. The discussion centered around immediately removing the K-2 students at Ripton elementary and placing them into other area … (read more)

Since January the 4/5 class at Ripton Elementary School has been providing lunches once a month for the homeless people at the Charter House in Middlebury. 

Megan Cheresnick has taught at all levels (except grade 4) during her almost eight-year career at Bridport Central School.