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View ProfilesPublished March 27, 2024 at 10:00 a.m.
Jackie Frazier was a student in the first kindergarten class at Roxbury Village School in the early 1980s. She left Vermont to attend college, then lived and worked in Los Angeles and Africa.
In 2021, she decided to move back to Vermont with her two young children. She set her sights on Montpelier but couldn't find an affordable home there. So, reluctantly, she ended up buying property in rural Roxbury, where her parents still run a greenhouse business. Frazier was pleasantly surprised by the small but vibrant community of fellow fortysomethings with kids who had also recently settled in the town of 700 residents. One of the biggest draws, Frazier said, was the elementary school.
Now the school's days are likely numbered. Last week, the Montpelier Roxbury Public Schools board voted to close the Roxbury building and bus its 42 students to the Capital City. That, along with other modest cuts, could save an estimated $1.5 million. The board has been searching for ways to reduce its budget since voters rejected its first $32 million spending proposal on Town Meeting Day.
In recent weeks, many Montpelier residents, who had been bracing for a 24 percent property tax increase, spoke in favor of the plan to close Roxbury. A revised budget with a 14 percent tax hike goes to voters on April 30.
The board's close vote on March 20 capped an emotional few weeks, during which Roxbury parents and residents made heartfelt pleas to keep the school open for at least one more year. Even board members who voted for the closure expressed discomfort and sadness at the haste with which they were making a decision that would have a lasting effect on the community.
"No one likes the choices before us," school board chair Jim Murphy said.
Montpelier Roxbury is not the only district in the state making tough choices on a condensed timeline. Huge property tax hikes, prompted by rising education costs and tweaks to the state's education funding formula, led voters around the state to reject dozens of school budgets on Town Meeting Day. That has forced districts to look for major cuts to get their spending plans approved.
Some are choosing to lay off teachers, paraprofessionals and academic coaches who help educators hone their skills. Others are eliminating innovative programs or dipping into reserve funds.
Montpelier Roxbury's decision to close a school is the most drastic cut, but it could be a harbinger of things to come. Many education costs are outside school boards' control, meaning they have few options when contemplating what to eliminate. In the coming years, districts with small schools — there are 50 in Vermont with fewer than 100 students — could consider closures to save money.
If Montpelier Roxbury is any indication, the discussions about such decisions will be wrenching and deeply personal.
"We are a canary in the coal mine," said Hannah Bryant, who moved her family to Roxbury in 2021 from Oregon because it had the "small-town magic" that reminded her of Starksboro, her hometown. Her older child spends as much as 90 minutes on the bus every morning to get to Montpelier's Main Street Middle School, and Bryant is worried about that commute for Roxbury's younger children.
Montpelier and Roxbury, located 17 miles apart, only merged their school districts in 2018 as part of Act 46, a controversial state law that encouraged, and in some cases required, school districts to combine to increase efficiency, rein in costs and better serve students.
The "larger, more cosmopolitan community" of Montpelier and the "small and extremely rural" town of Roxbury made unlikely bedfellows, a study committee wrote in 2017 about a potential merger. But combining the two would be mutually beneficial: If Roxbury students attended Montpelier's middle and high school, per-pupil costs would go down, the report said, while Roxbury's elementary school would be more likely to "survive and thrive."
The merger agreement made clear, even back then, that an eventual closure was a distinct possibility. It only required the current school buildings to stay open through June 30, 2022, unless a majority of residents voted for closure before then.
Still, the abrupt decision to actually close Roxbury's school felt jarring to many.
"Now you feel like you don't need us, so you can just cast us aside," Tom Frazier, Jackie's father and a Roxbury resident since the 1970s, told school board members last week. He said he had come to "look deep in the eyes of the people that are going to vote to kill our community."
Many in Roxbury feel similarly: that the school closure will be an insurmountable obstacle for a rural town that needs to attract new residents to remain vibrant. Surrounded by Randolph, Northfield and the Mad River Valley, Roxbury has long been considered a "pass-through" town, with no shops and restaurants to speak of save for a small country store. But that has begun to change in recent years. In 2022, the town obtained a village center designation from the state Agency of Commerce and Community Development, which made it eligible for funding to attract new businesses. And a volunteer committee recently secured a grant to develop an empty lot into a park, with picnic tables, a gazebo, and Ping-Pong and chess tables.
Heidi Albright and Ben Pincus live in town with their two sons and operate a flower farm started by Pincus' father. They are also members of the Roxbury Community Trust, a group that purchased a historic former church in 2022 to turn it into a community hub. Albright serves on Roxbury's planning commission, which recently received a $22,500 municipal planning grant from the state to help revitalize the village center.
Having a school in town "is what pulls a family to an area. It's what keeps families from moving out of Vermont," Albright said. "As soon as you pull that keystone out, everything else is going to start this crumbling spiral."
The three-member Roxbury Selectboard had a similar take. Losing the school, it wrote in a letter to the school board, would hurt property values and "cause long-term harm to our residents' most valuable asset and nest egg." If property values decline on the town's grand list, taxes would likely go up in order to fund Roxbury's municipal and highway budgets.
Michelle Acciavatti, a Montpelier resident who founded Vermont's first forest cemetery in Roxbury, directed her frustration at state government, noting that there are long-term costs that come with shuttering small-town schools.
"I have serious concerns about how the state is failing to invest in strong rural communities at a time when we are on the precipice of so many crises that can be solved by young families staying here and raising their kids to contribute to our community," she said.
The school closure discussion is coming just as Gov. Phil Scott has named Zoie Saunders as Vermont's new education secretary. In her current job, Saunders is leading an initiative to close or repurpose schools in Florida's Broward County, one of the biggest districts in the country.
Saunders demurred last Friday when asked about that work — and whether she'd pursue similar consolidations in Vermont.
"Districts and states across the country are facing very similar challenges of declining enrollment, aging facilities, having to do more with less and supporting children not only academically but in terms of their mental health," Saunders said at a press conference announcing her appointment. "We can look to other strategies that have been deployed across the country that have been effective as a way to begin the conversation and explore their potential value they could add here in the state of Vermont." Saunders added that conversations about closing schools need to be made "in coordination with all the stakeholders across the state and within local towns."
School consolidation is something that Mount Abraham Unified School District superintendent Patrick Reen has thought about a lot.
When he first started in his role eight years ago, Reen and Addison County's two other superintendents floated the idea of combining the three school districts to cut costs. But it became clear that it was a politically unpopular idea, and the plan was mothballed.
A few years later, Reen again met strong resistance after proposing to repurpose three of the district's five elementary schools for other educational uses. Lincoln Community School, one of the schools on Reen's list, ultimately withdrew from Mount Abraham and became its own school district last year.
This Town Meeting Day, voters rejected Mount Abraham's school budget, which would have led to an approximately 16 percent property tax increase. The school board has approved a new budget proposal, which will go to voters on April 16, that includes a property tax increase of just under 10 percent. To get there, the district will dip into its education reserve fund, a strategy that will lower tax rates in the short term but won't fix the longer-term funding issues.
Reen believes that if Vermont wants to have reasonable property taxes and a high-quality educational system, structural changes are necessary. He's learned from firsthand experience, though, how hard it is for districts to make those changes themselves. That's why he thinks more state leadership, in collaboration with superintendents, is needed if Vermont is going to transform its education system.
Cost is only one part of the equation, he said. The transformation should also be guided by the question "What do we want for our students?"
Some Roxbury families feel the best interests of their children weren't considered when the decision was made to close their school. Now they are left with a mixture of shock, sadness and anger as they try to wrap their heads around what comes next.
The school district has pledged to convene a committee to ensure a positive transition for Roxbury students, with special attention given to busing and afterschool care. Bryant, one of the parent organizers, said she plans to help. She said she hopes that other school districts can learn from Roxbury's experience and take proactive steps to avoid losing their schools.
Jackie Frazier said she's trying to remain hopeful that her hometown can maintain its positive momentum through social events, including monthly potluck suppers at the community hall.
Last Thursday, the day after the school board made its decision, Albright, the flower farmer, gathered up bunches of pussy willows and brought them to the Roxbury Village School.
It was "an attempt to bring a bright spot of spring" to an otherwise dark day, she wrote in an email. "I think there are a lot of broken hearts in Roxbury right now."
The original print version of this article was headlined "The Deepest Cut | Rising costs and property tax hikes again threaten the survival of small schools"
Tags: Education, Money & Retirement Issue, Roxbury, Roxbury Village School, Montpelier Roxbury Public Schools, school budgets, property tax
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