There have been many earnest state-led attempts to push consolidation and centralization of Vermont schools and school districts over the past 100 years.
All have failed.
That's mostly because of the opposition of towns loyal to the history and civic value of the small schools that have served their communities by educating small groups of students for generations.
But this year, as state government faces massive revenue shortfalls and local officials in Windham County pare budgets to the bone, small schools and the role of local control are undergoing a fundamental change as communities and state officials are looking hard at the costs and practicalities of funding public education.
According to Vermont Education Commissioner Armando Vilaseca, the state has a student-to-staff ratio of 4.55-to-1.
“We can't maintain that,” he says. “Nationally, the ratio's about 8 to 1. Our public school staff have increased probably about 3,000 over the same time period that we've lost about 15,000 students. Those are unsustainable numbers.”
It's a problem that Jack Rizzo, superintendent of Windham Southwest Supervisory Union, predicts is “coming to a boil in the state of Vermont” within the next four to five years.
“This is a historic problem,” says Stephan Morse, a member of the state Board of Education and chair of the state's school consolidation commission.
“Since 1997, the student enrollment has gone down 14 percent, and the full-time employees have gone up 23 percent,” Morse says.
“We simply can't afford to have all these schools in our small state,” Morse says. “It's impossible to maintain.”
A patchwork system
Like other institutions, most public schools in Vermont have been built out, over the years, from their original structures. Some have been renovated, razed, and rebuilt, and some have been left unaltered.
In the early 1800s, Vermont had nearly 2,500 small schools and up to eight school districts in a town. The boundaries of these districts were established according to historical settlements, and each small school was largely governed by that settlement's values and concerns.
In 1892, the state government established school districts according, more or less, to town boundaries, decreasing the number of districts to fewer than 300.
In 1896, the state allowed towns to join larger school supervisory unions, while maintaining their local schools and boards.
By most appearances, Vermont's schools still function under the system established in 1896. Today, there are 278 school districts. A town-elected school board of three or more members oversees each school in each district. There are currently about 1,300 school board members in the state.
Each supervisory union is served by a superintendent whom all the boards hire together. Town boards are tasked with hiring the principal and setting policy for their respective schools, and with approving or amending their schools' budgets, among other duties. The school boards and supervisory unions are collectively known as “governance.”
And yet, the actual system that decides who gets what, to quote everyone acquainted with it, is very complex.
Act 60 and Act 68, passed in 1997 and 2003, respectively, allow the state to collect taxes from every resident and property owner, and to distribute that pool of money to schools on a more-or-less per-pupil basis.
One problem for small and shrinking schools is that, below a certain enrollment level, costs don't function on a per-pupil basis.
For example, whether five students are in a class or 15, the cost is nearly the same. That's because students don't cost much. The staff and the building account for nearly all the cost of the classroom.
So, small schools are often trying to do the same work with much less money.
Part of a 2010 bill by the Legislature, “Challenges for Change,” requested that all schools in Vermont cut roughly 2 percent of their budgets, for a statewide total of $23 million.
But there was such resistance from already-squeezed small and shrinking schools that the request was never made more than optional, and the cuts ending up totaling only $4 million.
This year, Gov. Peter Shumlin said that the federal government will cover the remaining $19 million.
And now comes Act 153, the Voluntary School District Merger Act. The request asks schools to consider consolidating with other schools, districts with other districts, and boards with other boards, while providing incentives for them to do so.
Schools and districts have until 2017 to take advantage of its provisions. So far, only about 10 districts have indicated interest.
For small and shrinking schools, declining enrollments and the complexities of state funding make these tentative forays into state education reform challenging, especially during the yearly budget season.
The heart of a town
It's recess at West Halifax Elementary, and kids are sledding down the hillside above a modest, snow-covered playground.
The school shares a building with the town office; an older woman shuffles up the steps to get a license for her dog. This building, along with a post office, comprises downtown Halifax. There's no store or gas station, and almost half the houses in town are second homes.
Halifax educates about 56 students, from kindergarten through eighth grade.
“You really don't wind up coming through Halifax just coincidentally. It's really not on your way to anywhere else,” says Stephanie Aldrich, principal and kindergarten teacher. She's eating lunch in her tidy office, her laptop open behind her.
“I've worked at the school for seven years and taught various grades,” says Aldrich, who has the patient grace particular to kindergarten teachers. “Our enrollment has been slowly declining since I got here. At one point, it was much bigger.”
Halifax has just put the year's budget together, and Aldrich says it's always a challenging time.
“We're pretty bare bones as far as our budget goes. When we do our budget, we're really looking at how is this going to affect the tax rate. If we raise the budget, it's obviously going to raise the tax rate, and we know it's not a town with a lot of money,” she says.
The school board takes the budget “very seriously, and they do everything they can to cut everything out of the budget that they possibly think we could do without,” Aldrich adds.
“So far, that's just been recognized, and we haven't had problems,” she notes. “But you always walk into Town Meeting on pins and needles, knowing that anything cut from the budget would be significant. I can't imagine what else we would cut.”
With this Spartan budget, the staff is forced to be creative and to work long hours with some of the lowest salaries in the state, Aldrich says.
“One of the ways we keep things high quality is everyone does multiple jobs,” she says. “So all of the teachers teach two grades.”
Almost all of the school's staff, including the maintenance team and the school cook, run after-school programs. “We don't get to go on fancy field trips and, instead of buying a new science curriculum, sometimes the teachers have to spend time on the Internet pulling up updated lesson plans,” Aldrich says.
“It definitely provides challenges,” she says. “We have to figure out how can we get to the same end, and not have all the whistles and bells.”
Aldrich's boss, Rizzo, has called West Halifax, with its polite and smiling students, a “blessed learning community.”
“I think we really are functioning well in one sense - our kids are performing really highly,” Aldrich says. “We had crazy-high test scores, we have 90-percent enrollment in our after-school program, and we have kids that are just happy.”
The educational success of the school, along with its greater meaning to the town, make it difficult to consider moving the students and giving up the environment of the tiny school, Aldrich says.
“The question that comes up every year at Town Meeting is, 'Would it be cheaper to tuition the kids to another school?' But at what point does it being cheaper make it worth it? I don't think there's anyone in the town who would say, well, if we can save a couple thousand bucks, it's worth giving up our school.”
Aldrich, who describes herself as “someone that lives in the town and wants to see the town going in 20 years,” poses the question: “Would younger people move to the town if there was no school? I would hate to see the town start to dwindle even more because of that.”
This sentiment seems to be the basic idea that keeps Vermonters operating their small schools - they serve kids well, and they're essential to a small town's identity.
“The Department of Education said the majority of Vermonters would be behind the consolidation movement, and I'm thinking, 'Well, the majority of Vermonters live in places that wouldn't be affected by the consolidation movement,'” Aldrich says. “This might not be a question of the majority. It's what do the small towns think, too.”
Smaller and smaller
Declining enrollments put small schools in a bind: The statewide funding pool has created a nexus of interconnected towns paying for and getting paid by one another.
Acts 60 and 68 created a system in which property- and income-tax payers from everywhere in the state pay into one pool of money. Some towns pay more into the fund than they get from it, and some receive more than they give.
Any one school's budget thus becomes a statewide concern. The money that comes to a school like Halifax might come from Wilmington taxpayers, and those same funds might also be needed in St. Johnsbury.
The financial structure works in opposition to the small, locally controlled school model.
As one might expect, the situation gets complicated.
Twin Valley High School in Wilmington is a sprawling building that looks like an 1800s inn from the front and that, around back, has the heavy brick and steel construction of any postwar high school.
This building has been through numerous transformations and renovations over the years, and could well be in for more. There are roughly 170 students in grades 9-12, down from a peak of about 240.
Principal Frank Spencer sits at his desk in the school's upper office. He started working here right out of college, and he will retire at the end of this year. His resume reveals a series of school consolidations and changes.
“I've been in this same building for 40 years, but I've had at least five different jobs,” says Spencer, who “started as a teacher, then became half-time teacher/half-time assistant principal and athletic director, became the principal of the Wilmington Junior Senior High in '87, became the principal of the Wilmington Middle/High School in '91, and then became the principal of Twin Valley High in 2004.”
Spencer has been through a consolidation before and, because of low enrollment, his school might be on the verge of another.
“Seven years ago, the decision was made to consolidate the middle and high school for Wilmington and Whitingham,” Spencer says. “Now, the Twin Valley Middle School is located in Whitingham, Twin Valley High is located here, and now we're talking about consolidation of K-12.”
Putting both schools in one building would require renovations, and it's difficult to justify the spending to the town, says Spencer.
Wilmington pays more into the education pool than it receives - primarily because of its high property values, many second homes, and a relatively small school.
Spencer says that Act 60 created a “huge challenge and problem” for Wilmington, Dover, and other towns with similar financial pictures.
“In the original Act 60, for every dollar we spent on our education, we had to ship a dollar to Montpelier to be sent around to other towns,” he says.
Wilmington voters, he adds, defeated a bond vote to renovate the Middle/High School “in large part because, at the informational meeting, someone stood up who had a sign that said $8 million, which was the cost of doing it, equals $16 million.”
That 1:1 ratio of dollars spent to dollars contributed to the state education fund was modified over the years, but the reality remains that Wilmington pays for other towns' schools and doesn't have a say in how the money is spent.
“If they need that money to maintain essential education, I can understand that, but there's a school up north that renovated their gymnasium three years ago, and I talked to the administrator there, and he said when they did the presentation for the bond vote they essentially said, 'Wilmington's going to pay for it,'” Spencer says.
“Renovating our gym is something we'd love to be able to do,” he adds.
School budgeting was also easier to explain to the town before Acts 60 and 68, Spencer says. The actual property tax rate residents pay is now decided after the budget is approved, in part by the state's appraisal of property values.
“You can still talk about the budget and how you're spending the money, but people get frustrated because there's no way to tell them definitively,” he says.
“It's as though you went to Shaw's and said, 'I'd like to buy this,'” and they said, 'OK, we'll send you the bill.' 'Well, how much is it going to cost?' 'Well, we can't tell you how much it's going to cost. If you want it, take it.'”
Ongoing confusion from the days when a town funded its own school remains as well, Spencer says. The fact that households making less than $90,000 are probably paying education taxes based on their incomes, and not on their property values, isn't clear to a lot of people.
Spencer says that he hears people at town meeting who argue against education spending because of property-tax increases that won't affect them. “It's so difficult to explain to people what the impact will be, that there are still people who will treat it like the old days.”
Maintaining educational opportunities in this economic environment is a delicate balance, Spencer says, but it's essential to sustain some costly programs.
“An example is funding extracurricular activities. Students who are engaged in athletics, drama, things like that, are the ones who will normally excel in academics,” he says. “So, if you can provide students with a reasonable variety of extracurricular activities, you're likely to have greater performance in the classrooms.”
The other factor for Twin Valley, Spencer says, is that roughly 25 percent of students are tuition students.
“Our snowboarding team is relatively expensive, but we have tuition students who come here so they can be on the snowboarding team,” he explains. “If we don't have it, there's a good chance they might go somewhere else. If you cut $10,000 on the snowboarding, then you've lost $20,000 because two of the tuition students left. You can go downhill very quickly if you start making those cuts.”
Spencer says that even in his 40th year at the school, he has no idea what the future holds financially and educationally.
“But to me, the immediate solution a lot of schools or districts should look at is a fair and reasonable consolidation,” he says. “It seems highly unlikely Vermont is going to mandate it, but somewhere along the way, if they really want to make these cuts, closing down schools is about the only way.”
A balancing act
Leland & Gray is a middle and high school in downtown Townshend. A side wall of the building is spray painted with what would be graffiti, were it not that it spells out a quote from As You Like It.
“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” the wall says.
Leland & Gray, which has been around in various incarnations since 1833, stands as an example of a relatively stable consolidated school district for 400 students from five member towns. It offers innovative programs and community support. The school is very close, geographically and otherwise, to the supervisory union.
Dorinne Dorfman started as principal in July. She's energetic, young, and carries a walkie-talkie as she moves through the halls.
Dorfman first met students from Leland & Gray in the capital of Inner Mongolia, Hohhot. She was on an exchange fellowship through the University of Vermont.
“There I was, in this city where no one spoke English, at this arts school, and Leland & Gray showed up and gave a production on the history of jazz in America,” she says. “There were hundreds and hundreds of people in the audience.”
Dorfman's introduction came through Journey East, one of Leland & Gray's most popular programs. Every other year, 28 students apply for an intensive course of Chinese language, culture, and theater arts. They create a production that they perform throughout China for the month of April.
In another two-year program called “Hands on, Minds Engaged,” 12 students, some with special needs, who struggle in traditional classrooms, work together with two teachers to build boats. There is also a grade 9-11 independent study project, which introduces students to internships, volunteer activities, scouting, and exploration of post-high-school career opportunities.
These programs end up both saving and making money, Dorfman says, because placing kids with physical or learning disabilities or behavioral problems at other schools is very expensive - upwards of $60,000 a year per student for special education.
“We have three full-time professionals working with students in a way that's different from anything else,” she says. “At a skeleton-staffed school, they have nobody and have big-time behavioral problems, and they'd just have external placements or expel kids. We may save the taxpayers a lot of money, because we have very few off-site placements.”
The programs also help attract kids from other schools who pay tuition to Leland & Gray, she says. “Even within our own supervisory union, there are students we still need to attract to Leland & Gray. That would prevent us from ever really having a skeleton staff, because then we can't compete with Burr and Burton, or Brattleboro.”
Still, enrollment is declining, and the school has cut French this year to level-fund its budget.
“It just doesn't look good. There's a chart in the annual report that shows incredible drop-off,” says Dorfman. “So, if we look at the fourth-grade classes, there may be 25 percent fewer students in our towns like Jamaica, Townshend, and Newfane.
“When I talk to people who graduated from here 30 years ago, there were 30 or 40 kids in their class. So we are returning to what once was.”
The school has remained successful, she says, “because there's a community here that believes Leland & Gray means something. It's not about money, but it is about community investment. There's very open communication and strong dialogue, and a shared vision that all the students are our students.”
This shared vision makes establishing the budget with the board and superintendent easier, she notes.
“Any major concern I have, particularly financially, I call them right away,” she says.
Dorfman says that a strong relationship between the school, the board, and the superintendent can make all the difference.
“There are certainly school board members in other districts who would like to see how every penny is spent, or who would love to see particular people fired, or who don't believe in unions,” she says. “I remember attending a board meeting at a town and a board member said, 'Well, can't we just fire that whole department?'
“So, it can be very contentious, and for the school board chair and the principal and the superintendent to work against each other is a very poor prognosis for the district,” Dorfman says.
Making it work
David V. Dunn chairs the middle school, high school, and career center boards in Brattleboro - roles he's held for seven years. Dunn has seen significant changes in governance over his tenure.
Dunn says that the Brattleboro high school board has overcome some of the challenges of governance in the recent past.
“The way governance is set up invites dysfunction,” he says. “Back in early 2000, the board had 17 members. There were members of the board who had children in private school. There were members who had specific agendas they were there to move through.
“We made the decision that the board was not functioning as it should, because of its size, so the board was decreased by a legislative act to nine,” Dunn says. “Since that time, the board has been very stable.”
Brattleboro has one of the largest high schools in the state. Enrollment is steady, and it is projected to increase a small amount over the next five years, Dunn says. But still, setting the budget is difficult, in part because the school board is forced to gauge community sentiment informally.
“The board's role is to balance the needs of the school with the taxpayers' ability to pay for it,” Dunn says. “It's a constant balancing act, in part because the board doesn't see a lot of public participation and, if we do, it's in a private forum - people speaking to me or calling me.”
Dunn says that “it's hard for the public to come out and say, 'Cut education.' I think that most people acknowledge that the school system is a crucial element in a successful community.
“So on one hand, people want to support it, but on the other hand, the ability to pay for it is constantly being challenged in the current economy.”
The board needs to be very clear on its role, Dunn says.
“You need a decisive board that does government and not management,” he says. “If the objectives aren't being achieved, you need to make changes. That's a difficult action for some board members, because you may end up terminating people. Some of these people are your neighbors.
“It's also inexperienced board members who perceive that their role is to manage rather than to govern,” Dunn observes. “Once you get into management, you usurp your management's power.”
Rizzo, the Windham Southwest Supervisory Union superintendent, was just hired this past summer, and he still likes to visit every school three times a week. His educational philosophy is “students first,” he says.
“I'll get to know every kid, write every child a birthday card, go to their games, their plays. But we have seven schools, which, geographically, is challenging.”
Rizzo is charged with managing seven principals, including Aldrich in West Halifax. He works for seven school boards. He attends about 14 board meetings a month in seven towns.
Rizzo, who started as a principal in western Massachusetts 24 years ago, says that adjusting to Vermont's particular governance system has involved a learning curve.
“In Vermont, you have this ability for school boards to hire and fire, so you literally have passengers flying the airplane, and it's a recipe for disaster,” Rizzo says, predicting that most superintendents - 90 percent, he says - would identify governance as their biggest issue.
Local boards are charged primarily with setting policy, and the superintendents, principals, and teachers with carrying it out.
“How can that happen if the board has hiring and firing power?” Rizzo asks. “How do you leave emotion out? How do you not hold a grudge? I think Vermont could be one of the finest school systems in the country if we just corrected that.”
Any efforts to do so will be met with a mantra of “'We don't want to lose local control,'” Rizzo says.
“But what do you really want to control? It's set up to fail. It's set up to have problems,” he says. “If you're on a board, and your kid comes home and says 'Mr. Smith yelled at me,' when it comes time to sign Mr. Smith's contract, you're going to think twice about it.”
On a school board, “you really have a blank check,” Rizzo says. “It's a free ticket into crossing over into the operational realm.”
Rizzo's district includes some of the smaller schools in the state, and he's acutely aware of the challenges of providing quality education at many schools with declining enrollments.
“Something's got to give, because we cannot continue to sustain ourselves. You can't offer all these enhanced learning opportunities, because you can't afford them,” he says.
“How do we look kids in the eye, and give them a really solid and comprehensive education, and yet still maintain local control? You can't have your cake and eat it, too.”
Obligation of the state
Steven John has worked as superintendent of the Windham Central Supervisory Union for two years. He is grandfatherly, lean, and chuckles frequently.
The union covers 365 square miles and has 1,000 students, 11 towns, nine schools, and 11 school boards with a total of 51 members. It is trying, with moderate success, to get its member towns to agree to explore Act 153, or the Voluntary School District Merger, that would establish a Regional Education District (RED).
Essentially, this law would create one board to run all the schools, and to get the schools to share resources, staff, and, perhaps eventually, space.
It's been a tough sell.
In part, John says, that's because “the elementary school boards value their own schools, in their own communities, and it's the center of not only education but, in many ways, the life of the town. So, to study the possible formation of a RED is a very provocative, very formative adventure.
“The only reason to look at this is if you can increase the learning opportunities, not only in your community, but in your neighboring communities,” John observes, pointing out that the possibility of “some greater efficiency in terms of collaboration, in terms of education programs, sharing faculty, and other instructional resources is tempting.”
But John believes that efficiency isn't sufficient motivation “for a town to consider no longer having a locally elected board that has control over their particular school.”
Merging the governance of the schools and, in the future, perhaps the schools themselves, would provide efficiency in leadership, John says.
As it stands now, his union office works with nine different boards to manage nine separate budgets and nine separate contracts with teachers, with food service, and with other entities.
“The ability to sustain such programs, and the support it takes from the WCSU office to support those individual boards, is where the state is certainly providing an opportunity for the small boards to consider forming a more collaborative, cohesive group,” says John.
John says that school boards are increasingly holding superintendents more accountable “for getting the best opportunity for learning and performance outcomes for their students. That really should require the superintendent's presence in the buildings, and direct consultation and coaching of the principals. That's my responsibility.”
But the current system holds him back from those efforts.
“If a superintendent such as myself is spending three or four nights a week at board meetings until nine or later, it's an impossible workload to be able to cover the office and be present in the buildings to the extent that I aspire.”
This interplay of heavy workload and many bosses is one reason behind the high turnover rate for superintendents in Vermont. Historically - and currently - about 20 percent of the positions in the state sit vacant.
John says that the responsibilities of a union and superintendent were very few until federal money started funding schools in the late 1960s.”
“When the money started coming through for the Great Society - for Head Start and Title I - all that money had to come to the state. The states needed some way of holding accountable the individual districts and the boards regarding the use of funds. We became the local education agent.”
As a result, the more regionalized oversight of supervisory unions was imposed on a system largely governed by local tradition.
“There has been a tradition of autonomy, where the principal has been seen to be the chief employee of the board in a small town, and that can sometimes lead to more loyalty on the part of the principal to the local board than to the superintendent,” John says.
“I'm an obligation of the state, and not one, necessarily, that some of the small boards would choose to have,” he adds. “We're facing that statewide. It's not unique here.”
In that tradition of autonomy, getting everyone on the same page is uniquely challenging - perhaps even impossible.
Yet that's essentially what boards and unions have been asked to do with Act 153 and Challenges for Change - teach their historically independent, localized systems to collaborate.
“When I think about why should someone in Windham care about someone in Marlboro - well, why should they?” asks John.
“They should, but that's one of the challenges of leadership that I face, and that the board chairs face as they try to collaborate,” he says, pointing out the opportunity that comes in the face of crisis.
Declining enrollment and economic duress could “lead to more need to depend on each other, to lean on each other,” John says.
The tiniest school
Carolyn Partridge has the unique perspective of serving as a state representative from Windham County, as chair of the House Agriculture Committee, and as chair of the Windham School Board.
The Windham Elementary School now teaches 16 students in kindergarten through sixth grade. The enrollment is expected to rise to 30 in the next few years, Partridge says.
Even with such low enrollment, it's difficult to imagine kids having to travel to another town for school.
“The school is 13 miles from the nearest other elementary school, so what you end up doing is to take very small children, very far from home, very early in the morning,” she says.
“We would be glad to accept children from other schools if they wanted to join with us, but I don't know if people are going to want to travel 13 miles, despite the fact that we have very high test scores and our kids are doing very well,” Partridge adds.
Windham gives more money to the state education pool than it uses, Partridge says.
When Partridge heard Vermont Education Commissioner Armando Vilaseca “using our school as a poster child for a school that should really consolidate with another school,” she phoned him.
“He said, 'We can't afford to keep schools like Windham open. We just can't keep sending resources to you. You're too small.'
“I said, 'The people in the town of Windham send more to the state than we use at our school, by a big margin. We're a sending town. I know we're not supposed to talk that way, but it's true. We're already sending that money to the state, and then some.'”
This conversation details almost exactly the way in which the state is struggling to reconcile the need for consolidation with the standing tradition of local control.
In Acts 60 and 68, Vermont set up a funding system that assumes all for all - a truly complex, by most accounts flawed, but nonetheless remarkable attempt to get Vermont towns to pay for one another's schools.
This system was deployed within an existing governance model in which every board saw itself as a separate entity with control, at the very least, over the basic fact of paying for its school.
The perception of local control persists, despite the fact that no matter how much or how little a town puts into the education pool, it's technically not the town's money anymore. Financially, it belongs to everyone.
Vilaseca, who has served as commissioner for two years, started teaching in Vermont in 1979 and has become a vocal supporter of changes to the governance system, claiming that local control isn't much to stand on anymore.
“Look at what they don't control right now,” says Vilaseca. “Teacher licensing, special education, food service and cafeteria, graduation standards, the accountability system, 504 and Title I programs. All are mandates from the state or federal governments.
“Where school districts do have control is the hiring of people. They have control over extracurricular activities, and they may have control over some of the facilities, but most of the major things are really not within their purview.”
With “a statewide funding and statewide tax system for education, those are now statewide decisions we need to consider,” Vilaseca says. “There is a connection now that we didn't have before.”
This collectively accountable education system is too expensive and too fragmented to run through many autonomous boards, he says.
“There's no one the school board is accountable to, except the taxpayers, who then can vote them out of office next time they come up,” Vilaseca points out.
The economic outlook isn't rosy for the next three or four years for Vermont, nor are the enrollment numbers, Vilaseca says.
Vilaseca adds that Vermonters will “have to look beyond what's in the best interests of our individual communities, and look at what's in the best interests of our state.”
The commissioner says that increasing student-to-staff ratio by around 0.25 percent - to 4.75 students for every adults - would save the state about $23 million.
These statistics are where the state struggles in its presentation of this new educational world. These small numbers - 4.55 to 1 - are in actuality more than 90,000 kids, and more than 19,000 people with jobs, respectively.
They are all individuals with families. They all live in towns historically in charge of their schools, and many live in towns that have little else. Proponents of consolidation are essentially asking communities to give up, reinterpret, and relearn centuries-old values for the sake of the broader commons.
With such large questions, the numbers don't reflect the human element.
“I think each little town you could see as an individual, and I think they definitely see each other as very distinct,” says Stephanie Aldrich in West Halifax. “There's a lot of shared Vermont culture, but there's a lot of distinctions.”
For Vilaseca, the complex realities boil down to a simple truth.
“If we don't accept that there's going to be change, we have to accept that it's going to be fragmented and expensive, and people can't complain about taxes and the cost of education,” he says.