Petition seeks to restore state construction aid for schools - VTDigger

This story by Christina Dolan was first published in The Valley News on Oct. 23.

WOODSTOCK — More than 300 residents from towns in the Mountain Views Supervisory Union have signed a petition urging state legislators to restore state aid for school construction.

The petition continues to circulate on local listservs and to families throughout the supervisory union’s seven member towns of Woodstock, Killington, Barnard, Pomfret, Bridgewater, Reading and Plymouth. It asks legislators to support the reinstatement of Vermont’s school construction fund by making it a “top legislative priority” for the 2025 legislative session.

Vermont funded 30% of the cost of approved school construction projects until 2008, when budget pressures and the Great Recession prompted the Legislature to suspend that funding. The decades-long pause has resulted in a backlog of deferred maintenance and repairs to school buildings that are among the oldest in the country, with an average building age of 61 years, according to the Agency of Education.

In March, voters in Mountain Views School District’s member towns defeated a $99 million bond measure for the construction of a new middle and high school building in Woodstock. Some voters expressed concern about the expense and its impact on property taxes.

The petition was written by a group of parents and teachers who wish to remain anonymous “as they feel that getting signatures from our communities is most important,” Mountain Views Supervisory Union board chairwoman Keri Bristow said by email Tuesday.

The lack of construction funding assistance is particularly pressing in Woodstock because of the poor condition of the middle and high school buildings. A 2021 state inventory assessment found that the Mountain Views Supervisory Union (formerly Windsor Central Supervisory Union) had the second worst facility conditions in the state (after the Randolph-area Orange Southwest School District).

Woodstock’s two-building middle and high school complex serves 440 students. In 2021, six classrooms became unusable due to a failing heating system. The district spent $1.2 million in emergency funds to repair the system.

Classroom temperatures “swing between 65 and 85 degrees; calcified drain lines cause septic system backups; new roof leaks form each time it rains or snow melts; and the gym rafters groan alarmingly under snow loads they were not designed to carry,” the petition states.

The Mountain Views Supervisory Union board regrouped in the months following the bond’s defeat, surveying voters and commissioning cost studies for various construction and renovation options. In June, the board met to review the cost estimates and decide which option to put before voters in a planned September bond vote.

The board tabled the vote, though, and the project was put on indefinite hold by the Legislature’s passage of the annual yield bill in June.

That bill sets property tax rates, but this year it also reinstated a long-defunct penalty on “excess spending” on school construction. Essentially, any money a school spends over 118% of the state’s per-pupil spending average “will be taxed as if it were two dollars, including costs relating to construction,” Agency of Education spokesperson Lindsey Hedges said by email Tuesday.

Vermont has “effectively frozen the capacity of a community to pass a bond by counting capital construction spending toward the excess spending threshold,” the petition states. “Individual communities cannot address this problem on their own. Placing the burden of school construction solely on local communities is not only unattainable, but perpetuates unequal educational outcomes.”

The resurrection of the excess spending penalty for school construction “was a choice made by the General Assembly during broader discussion and deliberation regarding education funding and affordability,” Hedges said.

The petition writers fear that poor school conditions in Woodstock will lead to a loss of students to private schools and may cause people to leave the region altogether, “imperiling our community’s future and economic growth,” the text states.

Although signatures are still being collected, the petition was shown to state representatives Emilie Kornheiser, D-Brattleboro, and Peter Conlon, D-Cornwall, at an Oct. 17 public forum on education finance held in Woodstock.

Kornheiser chairs the Education Financing Subcommittee. Conlon heads the House Education Committee.

“Peter and I agree that we need to do something about school construction,” Kornheiser said at the forum. “This community is one of the first that would need to see the impacts of that.”

What that something might look like and how it would be funded remains unclear.

“How we do it is pretty hard to figure out because we’re going to need to find money for it,” Kornheiser said.

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The Valley News is the daily newspaper and website of the Upper Valley, online at www.vnews.com. More by Valley News