Letter to the editor: Ripton floodplain homeowner questions valuation

My wife and I have recently engaged the civic apparatus of Ripton, Vermont. Our concern is a townwide reappraisal of property values, including ours. The proposed reassessment of our property nearly doubles the previous assessment, which, if the new assessment stands, will raise our annual property tax substantially. Since our income in retirement is now rigidly fixed, it looks as though we are going to be financially straitened.

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)

Middlebury College and the town of Ripton have negotiated a new payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) agreement through which the institution will pay the municipality more than $218,000 during each of the next 10 years, in recognition of its nontaxable holdin … (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.

It was another year in the books for the almost four-decade-old Ripton Ridge Run.

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.

Snuggle in… it’s time for the second annual Snugfest in Ripton. After a successful first year, Snugfest 2024 will be held on Sunday, Sept. 29, from 12-7 p.m., at Silver Towers in Ripton.

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)