Doty Memorial School in Worcester. Photo courtesy of Christina Pollard/The Bridge
This story by Phil Dodd was first published in The Bridge on Oct. 23.
The Washington Central Unified Union School District will not be closing two of its elementary schools after all. During a contentious three-and-a-half hour meeting on Oct. 1, the district board voted 8 to 5 not to pursue a recommendation of its Finance Configuration Committee to close the Calais Elementary School and the Doty Memorial Elementary School in Worcester, a move that proponents of the change argued would be better for students and would save money.
Residents of the two affected towns turned out in force for the meeting, with almost all expressing opposition to the closures, which would have sent Calais students to the East Montpelier School and Doty students to the Rumney School in Middlesex. The Berlin Elementary School is also part of the district.
Under the articles of association governing the district adopted when Act 46 forced the towns to form a union district, closing the schools would have required affirmative votes from both towns if the board had embraced the configuration plan, approval that might have been hard to get.
Double digit tax increase?
With the closure decision behind it, at least for now, the school board will be focusing on next year’s budget, which looks to be a challenging one. According to Washington Central Superintendent Steven Dellinger-Pate, an initial draft shows that inflationary pressures in health care, wages and other expenses will push the local education spending baseline budget up by 12.5% next year, without any changes from last year.
The problem is this increase would subject the district to the state’s recently revived “excess spending penalty,” which Dellinger-Pate said subjects districts to double-taxation above a certain spending level per pupil. Washington Central will have to cut $2.4 million from its budget to avoid the penalty, reducing the budget increase to 5.4%, he said. By coincidence, the amount that administrators said could be saved by closing the two schools was about $2.4 million.
Even with budget cuts, school taxes could rise. The preliminary word from the state Tax Department is that school property taxes could be going up 10% to 15% next year, on average. Last March, Washington Central’s budget was defeated on Town Meeting Day, but passed a couple of months later after the board cut more than $2 million from the original budget proposal.
Student numbers dropping
The discussion in Washington Central was sparked in part by a decline in student numbers, which creates a challenge because the state funds education on a per-pupil basis, weighted for various factors. The pre-K to grade six student population in the Washington Central district dropped from 1,588 in fiscal year 2015 to 1,365 this school year.
Calais now has 87 elementary students in a building with a capacity of 134 to 186, while Doty has 68 students in a building with a capacity of 104 to 144, according to district statistics. The smallest grades this year include five students at the Rumney kindergarten, seven students in the Doty fifth grade, nine students in five other grades at Doty, and nine students in the Calais third grade.
Discussion about possibly closing some district elementary schools dates back over a decade. A bit over a year ago, the board created a committee to come up with a plan. The suggestion that the board took up was to close the two smallest schools — Calais and Doty — and send 83 sixth graders to U-32 high school, which has room for them because it has lost 100 students in the last three years.
Community uproar
School Board chair Flor Diaz Smith, who supported the proposed configuration plan, told The Bridge she thought larger classes would provide a better education. “I am for doing what is best for the kids,” she said. At the Oct. 1 meeting, Dellinger-Pate said that without the closures, “our resources will be stretched thin and staffers will be both underutilized and overburdened.”
Parents and other residents of Worcester and Calais made several arguments against the plan at the meeting: that the schools were the heart of the community and closing them would negatively affect the towns, that young people wouldn’t move to the two towns if there was no school, that not enough information was provided by the board and that other creative solutions should be explored.
The plan to move sixth graders to U-32 was criticized by one parent, who said his three sons were exposed to marijuana as soon as they got to U-32 as seventh graders, so he thought sending sixth graders there was inadvisable. One son, now an adult, told this father that “60% of U-32 students smoked pot by eighth grade and 80% smoked it by tenth grade,” he said.
Diaz Smith said at this point, with school closings off the table, any decision on whether to move the sixth graders to U-32 will be made by school administrators, not the school board. Dellinger-Pate said such a change was unlikely for next year.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Board votes against closing Calais and Worcester schools, as tough budget cuts loom.