DUMMERSTON — I have attended study committee meetings since the beginning. The Act 46 Study Committee voted to accept the Articles of Agreement and to send them to the state Board of Education.
The committee had scheduled an all-towns vote on Nov. 8, but they have since decided to postpone it to next year.
I am upset about the comments that Dummerston's voting member made to the study committee. She said that the Dummerston residents are “stuck on adult issues” rather than thinking of the kids.
This is so untrue. Dummerston voters have always thought about the kids. The school board presents budgets they think meet the needs of the students and the town can support. Voters have always accepted those budgets because the town does care deeply about the education of its students. Because we all care about our kids, Dummerston is consistently a top elementary school in our supervisory union as well as in the state.
I am also upset that she voted to pass these articles when the Dummerston School Board had voted 3–1 against their passage. What kind of representation is this?
David Schoales of the Brattleboro Town School Board, a member of the study committee, is correct about the financial figures being presented. They are based on assumptions and questionable predictions. The percentage that each town “might” save is minuscule in the total $54 million dollar combined budget. David is correct that after the supposed incentives in the law, the tax rates will increase a lot.
At the August meeting, the superintendent informed the study committee that he had a conference call with Chris Leopold, their lawyer; Rebecca Holcombe, the state secretary of education; and Donna Russo Savage, lawyer and principal assistant to Holcombe.
He said they all recommended that we should not vote on all of the issues the same day. They advised that the ballot should not include the vote on releasing Vernon from the high school at the same time as the vote whether to merge and the vote for candidates running for the nine-member “super board.”
The superintendent said they were concerned that all of these votes, particularly on Election Day, would be too confusing, and they suggested that we just vote on releasing Vernon and postpone the merging issues until the public can have much more information.
Also confusing: the plan to vote on merging at the same time we choose our board representatives. The merger vote would have been tallied by town, but the vote for the board members would be “at large” and commingled.
This means that the votes were to be sent to one location, tallied and counted. This also meant that the voters in all of the districts will be voting for Dummerston's representative. Dummerston would not know how they voted, and we would not be the ones choosing our own representative.
The area town clerks expressed their concerns with having these votes on the day of the national election. They were concerned about the huge number of ballots they will have to count, probably by hand, in an election that is certain to have a heavy turnout.
Fortunately, their concerns were heard and acted upon by the study committee.
This whole Act 46 Study Committee process has been an extremely unhappy and frustrating one. This is a perfect example of what can easily happen if we merge into one district with one “super board” - especially if we end up having board members who listen only to the administration and pay no attention to different towns' respective wants and needs.
The only recourse we have now to keep our local identities, and all we value so much in our individual towns, is to vote no on the merging issue when it comes up on Town Meeting Day 2017, and to attend any upcoming Act 46 forums and ask questions of the people presenting the issues.