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.
Vermont Yankee, spreading across a half-mile bend in the Connecticut River, has been here for decades, and things have grown in around it. Corn and hayfields stand at its edges, and Vernon Elementary School is a long stone's throw from its gates. The plant has grown in around the...
In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a national War on Poverty. To set the parameters for the battle, the administration adopted a federal poverty threshold, developed by Mollie Orshansky, an economist for the Social Security Administration. Working with census data from 1955, she found that families of three...