Small elementary schools in Calais and Worcester could close at the end of the school year amid concerns from district leaders that maintaining five K-6 schools could hamper the district’s ability to provide adequate services and programs to its approximately 1,400 students.
Washington Central School Board members will decide at a meeting on Wednesday whether to hold votes next month in Worcester and Calais to allow community members to determine the fate of their elementary schools. Voting in January would give the district enough time to finalize a budget for Town Meeting Day that accounts for the closure of the two schools.
Superintendent Steven Dellinger-Pate and school board chair Flor Diaz Smith maintain that going from five to three elementary schools — located in East Montpelier, Middlesex and Berlin — will allow Washington Central to preserve most programs and services for students and meet the district’s financial and strategic goals.
But some residents of Worcester and Calais believe the district hasn’t fully explored alternative solutions or provided enough information about how the closures would affect students.
“There are hundreds of outstanding questions about how this actually impacts programming,” said Sophia Emigh, whose children attend Doty Memorial School in Worcester. “Has there been a single community impact study or viability study? Has there been a single study on what this does to the COVID generation of students who will be most impacted? … The data has not been provided.”
Diaz Smith acknowledged that the closure of Doty and Calais — which last school year served 72 and 93 students, respectively — is a “hard” and “emotional” prospect for families. But, she said, “we are being asked right now to bring our heart and our brain together.” She believes the best way to uphold the district’s commitment to “consistency, quality, sustainability and equity” is to close Doty and Calais Elementary.
If the community is willing to collaborate to close the schools thoughtfully, Flor Diaz said, she believes it can be a “rebirth” for the district.
This isn’t the first time that Washington Central has contemplated school closures. Last school year, Worcester residents fought twice to protect Doty after the district first discussed closing it, then proposed moving several grades to another school. This year, the school board began discussing the closures again as it worked to craft a budget that would both meet the district’s goals and stay under the state’s excess spending threshold, which penalizes districts that spend more than a set amount per student.
In memos released in recent days, Dellinger-Pate provided two budget proposals to illustrate what district operations would look like if the district kept five elementary schools compared with scaling back to three.
Maintaining five elementary schools would “cause erosion of core educational services, create systemic inconsistencies, and lead to potential non-compliance with state mandates, negatively affecting both individual school operations and the overall quality of education district-wide,” Dellinger-Pate wrote. That would include the reduction of academic interventionists and school counselors and cuts to field trips and library resources.
Going to three elementary schools would allow each to have full-time nurses, counselors and librarians, as well as an appropriate number of academic interventionists, according to Dellinger-Pate’s memo. Cuts to social work positions at U-32, the district’s school for students in grades 7 to 12, would still be necessary under the plan in order for the budget to stay below the excess spending threshold.
Washington Central’s budget woes illustrate the headwinds that schools across the state are up against. Like most districts, Washington Central has seen a steady decline in overall student enrollment in recent years. Negotiated teacher salaries rose 6.8 percent from fiscal year 2024 to fiscal year 2025, and health insurance costs for personnel have shot up by double digits several years in a row. Maintaining aging facilities, inflation and possible reductions in federal funding are also challenges.
Gov. Phil Scott and Education Secretary Zoie Saunders maintain that large-scale school consolidation and a change in the funding formula — both proposed in last year’s sweeping education overhaul bill, Act 73 — will alleviate some of the pressure on districts. But detractors argue that consolidation will bring more disruption to already struggling schools and will not address the true cost drivers such as health insurance.
Diaz Smith said Washington Central’s decisions are not being spurred by Act 73 but are about meeting the needs of students now.
“Hopefully, we will all have strength and clarity to … stay focused on what the needs of our students are,” she said.
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