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By Guy Page
Any school district closing a local school should involve affected communities in the decision-making process for one to 18 months prior, members of the Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont agreed at its August 18 meeting.
The Commission was created by the Legislature this year to develop a detailed plan for public school funding and district operation and organization, including possibly school closing and consolidation. The Legislature also created the School District Redistricting Task Force to recommend new school district boundaries.
According to published minutes, commission members at the August 18 virtual meeting included Jay Nichols, Chair; Jennifer Deck Samuelson, State Board of Education (SBE); Oliver Olsen, Vermont Independent Schools Association; JohnCastle, Vermont Rural Education Collaborative; Elizabeth Jennings, Vermont Association of School Business Officials; Colin Robinson, representing Jeff Fannon, VT-National Education Association; Chelsea Myers, Vermont Superintendents Association (VSA); Herbert Ogden, Vermont School Boards Association (VSBA); Education Secretary Zoie Saunders (joined at 9:05 a.m.): Suzanne Sprague, Rose Neddo, Toren Ballard, Jill Briggs Campbell, Maureen Gaidys.
Others present included Ken Fredette, Friends of Vermont Public Education; David S.; Rep. Elizabeth Burrows, a former school board chair from Windsor County; Bud Myers; Dr. Mary Gannon; and, Jeanne Albert.
The discussion reflected a consensus on the need to proactively involve communities one to eighteen months in advance of any potential closure decisions, rather than engaging after a board has already made up its mind.
One skeptic about small, rural school closures is John Castle, former Orleans County superintendent and head of the Vermont Rural Education Collaborative. He emphasized that school closure is “too big a decision to be left to a small group of people” and advocated for multiple community forums with diverse access points.
“We need to bring in community voice early, before there is a push. Too often, boards have made a decision and then enlisted the community,” Castle said.
Secretary Saunders outlined key principles for the process:
• Keeping decisions student-centered.
• Informing communities with early engagement.
• Ensuring a transparent process.
• Avoiding making these decisions in a state of emergency.
Several commission members echoed the sentiment against crisis-driven decisions, with Colin Robinson noting the importance of “prework of community outreach” to prevent the legislature from imposing a surprising process on impacted communities.
While Chair Nichols agreed on early public discourse, he cautioned against “tying the hands of a board going forward” for the final decision. However, Jennifer Deck Samuelson suggested considering a multi-layered vote at both town and district levels, potentially with different thresholds for closure.
The next meeting of the Commission is scheduled for September 8, at Folsom School in South Hero, where a presentation on equitable budgeting, focusing on the role of the electorate and school boards, is expected to inform future recommendations to the General Assembly.
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Categories: Education
More of the same….
If anyone thinks this ‘education reform’ committee is going to substantially change Vermont’s exorbitant and dysfunctional public education system by improving student outcomes and lowering costs, consider the positions held by its committee members. This group represents the epitome of a public education oligarchy. Not one member espouses universal School Choice or any semblance of an educational free-market. They are all akin to Vermont’s typical progressives, … socialist elitists who believe most parents don’t have the acumen to determine what’s best for their own children. They are the foxes guarding the chicken coop…. the wolves in sheep’s clothing.
“By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes.” ― C.S. Lewis,
Of specific concern, that should lead to questions our executive and legislative branches should be required to answer, is that the empirical evidence suggests there is significantly lower likelihood of education system failure, for costs and student outcomes, in a decentralized School Choice environment than there are in Vermont’s centralized system.
The evidence—spanning EdChoice, Cato, Urban Institute, NBER, Hoover, and Reason studies—confirms that choice systems are less prone to universal failure due to diversified choices and rapid parental feedback. And when failures do occur, they’re corrected faster through market accountability and innovation, unlike Vermont’s slow, costly monopoly reforms.
If our executive and legislative branches have data to the contrary, they should publish it, or step aside.
Of course, the final arbiters are Vermont’s voters. If they continue to elect unaccountable candidates, they will reap unaccountable results.
Well it seems we’re paying these committees to do nothing. How can they be anything else but a failure when the majority members are the people that has caused our education failures. Duh?
Why would it take 18 months to close an overly expensive underperforming school? No amount of time will fix that. Do they expect 10-15 families with kid will move to the towns non exiting housing?
Too many prople with fogs in the hunt.
We need to hire a logistics company with input, not control of, basic parameters and technical education standards.
Without a Mission statement that say we must lower education costs while improving outcome were lost.
I cringe at the idea of the state hiring any logistics or study consultants to give us more input. The state already spends too much on studies without providing any useful results.
I would be interested as to weather the meeting was warned. It certainly was not public.
The virtual meeting of the Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont, held on Monday, August 18, 2025, from 9:00–11:00 a.m., was accessible and warned to the public, as required by Vermont’s Open Meeting Law.
This is an advancing stage of the communistic approach to public education. It’s the state, by way of this committee, urging small community school closure decisions to involve a larger group of people who are not a part of that community. Every small school has its own unique needs and has a much better ability to provide the attention to small numbers of student. Instead they’re going to throw all these children into the big pond to get lost in the shuffle. I pine for the day where small communities can fully decide for themselves how they want to educate their children without the state or federal involvement. I know for certain local communities can do a much better job and send off well-rounded, well-educated children out into the world.
Unfortunately, local communities (i.e., school districts) can be, and often are, more totalitarian than even the State legislature and its Agency of Education. School boards, as often as not, are infested with conflicts of interest. There is only one way to ensure true freedom of thought and expression. It is the provision of an educational free-market in which parents have the primary authority to determine what educational programs best meet the needs of their children.