everyone i'm an o'brien and here again with ask the experts tonight we're talking about the voluntary school merger and my guest is michael marks who is the chair of voluntary merger planning committee thank you for coming to talk about the work that you've been doing well thank you so much for having me and giving me the chance to talk about the subject reshape your being here and i should start by thanking you for all the work school boards work is really important and challenging work and in addition doing the merger planning committee i think is a big lift so thanks for doing that well thank you it's been it's been enjoyable working with everybody on the on the on the topic so we decided to do this program because some of the people won't make the public forums and we want to be sure that everyone in our listening area particularly richmond but certainly the whole c s u district gets the information because we're going to be voting on november fourth on the voluntary merger decision  so perhaps you could start with what the voluntary merger committee is and has been doing just as a high level and then a little later in the program we'll be taking phone calls if you have a question for michael marks th phone number is four three four to five five zero well great well let me let me start with why we are approaching this we have one school system for  serves about twenty six hundred students by all measures it is a very good school system but not perfect by many measures it is a cost effective system but again very expensive and we know that many of our tax payers are facing a lot of stresses now even though we have this one school system we have a governing process which requires that there are literally eight separate governing boards there are six boards for six different elementary schools and they govern grades kindergarten through grade four there is one board the mount mansfield board that governs grades five through twelve and has governed them for all our communities for fifty years because we have this fragmentation we also have a supervisory union the tries to patch all this together and as we on school boards have seen some of the stresses this places on our ability to serve the interests of both students and taxpayers it's fair to say that most of us not all of us but most of us have become dissatisfied and we're looking for a better way to govern our schools so we have gone through this merger process to try and develop a plan that would provide a unified governance process for our one school system and what we truly believe is our one community the mount mansfield community that has been working together for fifty years so we've developed articles of merger and now we must submit them to the voters for their approval and we're going through a process of public forums in all our communities so that we can listen to the public answer their questions and help them to understand why we think this is such an important development poorer schools so on november fourth or for people that choose to vote early but not often the early voting has started i'll just put in a pitch for early voting as well but on the ballot there are going to be two articles and could you talk about what what they will say sure the first article although you will see it is in legal ease and we apologize but state statutes do impose those obligations on us is whether or not we should form this unified school district and a yes vote approves it and if it is approved in at least four of our communities it will be adopted the second article is one in which each of our communities will elect school board members for this new board state law requires us to do both on the same day we didn't have any option in that regard and there will be candidates running for each of the seats here in richmond and i believe in all the communities and engine east so one of the things that interests me a lot about this question what we have at the state level the big problem of a decreasing student population over the past fifteen years i think the school population statewide has decreased by twenty thousand students and we are also seeing increasing costs and many people talk about the challenge on the state level about how to really have how to really tackle this so that we have to continue to have excellent high quality schools but also schools that we can afford and many people contact me about their property taxes in this town and as we know the education is tied to property tax so i wonder about first of all if you could just explain the tax benefits to voting as for the merger and not to just focus on the money but i think that this is an important factor that a lot of people might not know well i'm as i've worked in us i've come to the conclusion that you can't have a high quality education system unless you're focusing on being efficient and cost effective for taxpayers and by the same token the you can't really be cost effective for taxpayers unless what you're delivering for them is a high quality educational system i think the two go hand in hand i don't think they're their opponents to each other there are two real financial benefits that one can see from proceeding with with the merger first and this is only temporary but it's significant the state will provide tax benefits to any community that participates in this merger and it's an eight cent reduction up to a maximum of five percent on your tax bill in the first year six cents in the second year four cents in the third year and two cents in the fo year now if we were to use the budget projections based on our current budget for a richmond resident that would translate in year one to roughly seventy five dollars in relief for each one hundred thousand  s of homestead that is taxed and that's probably quite significant to folks in these times but i'd emphasize it is temporary the long term benefit that we see is that by creating a unified governance system for what is already one school system but has a fragmented school system we're in a position to achieve efficiencies that we simply can't do right now we can't share staff between different school districts we have facilities that are sitting side by side like here in richmond we have the elementary school in the camel's hump middle school and and sharing sharing some of their functions and their staff is just just not possible under the current structure and we see this also though primarily and as being tied to the quality of education if you think about how you want to educate your students you want to start thinking about how they progress from the moment they start your school to the minute they last and you want to think about what we ought to be changing in the second grade so that in the twelfth grade they can emerge and be as successful as possible and we want to do that as cost effectively as we can if you have one system you can make those hard decisions together when you've got eight governing boards it's much more challenging and so we see this as a as an opportunity to address the costs on a long term basis not a promise that that it will drop the cost but an opportunity to create a structure we where we can responsibly address those costs so the quality of the schools the you know many people will say well we have quality schools we have a great school system we're fortunate in richmond with you know mentoring ca something that mansfield and the the conversation about the quality of the schools i think is interesting from my view because of that question of integrated curriculum so right now i was surprised to learn that the restart button sort of happens at fifth grade so each of these each of these schools sending schools to camel's hump and browns river has their own boards and their own curricular plan and when kids get to the fifth grade instead of it being an integrated k through twelve they kind of they may come with different competencies to the fifth grade that that seems to me to be a really big  concern integrating the curriculum is really a good thing to be doing so that kids do end up having it from k through twelve all the way through the system i think you're right i think it is a good thing although i don't want to overstate the problem we have now or the value of the solution we're offering right now what we try to do throughout our school system is we do try to coordinate curriculum and that's one of the functions of the supervisory union and historically i think it's fair to say and i've been on the m m u board now for seven years so so i have a little experience with this i think it's fair to say that that we have done a good job but not a perfect job i think it's also fair to say though that as we move into an era in which in romance are declining we need to be better at finding ways to both meet the needs of our students and control costs that having that disconnect between different elementary school governments and the high school government and of course the supervisory union which which makes its own budgetary decisions on its own is a problem in each of the last several by budget cycles i'm on the finance committee for m m u and one of our jobs is to prepare the budget we've wrestled with some very hard and challenging decisions and in large degree we did that in a vacuum we didn't really connect them with our elementary schools and some of our elementary schools particular our small particularly our smaller ones have had the same problem if we can budget on a unified basis we can make those hard choices among competing priorities and think in the budgetary context about where our dollars should be spent given the needs of students right now those budgetary decisions are made on a separate level and that's the challenge we face going forward that i think a voluntary merger gives us an opportunity to address the budgets now i know we vote as citizens on the right and i mean you budget but what if what happens at the supervisory district to the budget vote is done by the executive committee it's really a very complicated one yet and that's one of the reasons that i'm such an advocate for this because i think public accountability is enhanced when voters understand who is responsible and can go to them for answers now right now you have six different elementary schools boards who each build a budget that they submit to their voters for approval in some towns it's by australian ballot in others it's town meeting you have the m m u board that builds a budget that is submitted to all of our voters within m m u that governs grades five through twelve but buried within the m m u budget and buried within the elementary school budgets is an assessment from the chintan a supervisory union and that assessment covers critical things like transportation special education the costs of the administration collective bargaining all of these things are in there and they're simply assessments that are provided to the local school boards which then in turn passed in one of the voters now as many of you know last year the m m u budget was voted down the first go around and we had to figure out well how will we come up with a lower budget that would be acceptable to voters we had no control over the c s u assessments now fortunately the c s u board decided to make some cuts which helped us to present a revised lower budget but we simply had no control over that we we were at at at there at there are a control on that question  we did bring in the new system yes how would the budgeting process be different it would be different in that if all of the communities vote yes there are simply going to be one board it will prepare a budget it will hold public hearings on that it will take public comment and then submit it for australian ballot review by the voters now if one or two of our communities vote no there will there will there will still be a supervisory union but what we've come up with a in this merger is a device to stop that disconnect between the supervisory union and the new school board that's supervisory union is going to have the same people serving on it as would be elected to the mount mansfield board so in november when we vote all of our communities if four of us vote yes and two of us vote no or five of us vote yes and one of us votes no there's going to be a new board and that board is also going to do the function of being the supervisor you know so if you're a voter and you're concerned about something you go to that same board if if if there's a question that needs to be resolved it's not resolved by a separate board it's the same people and that we think allows us to create something where we do have it streamlined and we are going to provide for accountability and control have and and no school district has a specific projections that are really reliable beyond a year or two out others too many moving parts in terms of people moving in and out of districts and things like that but we do know nuff about the state why data and the regional data associated with the chipping county area to know that we're going to continue to see some declining enrollment in all likelihood and one we have to climbing in rome and it means that the dollars and cents that we are getting from the state diminish because there is the equivalent of a block grant for each student it's called the base educational mount that's provided to every school district and i know some people believe very strongly that costs should go down proportionately as each student is lost from the system and i think that that argument may have more force in a consolidated district than it has right now but even there it's not perfect you still have to heat your building if you lose one student who would have been in your advanced math class you still have to provide your advanced math class you have to have a sufficient drop in students before you really get the economic benefits and the cost savings of it but in particular when you have smaller schools that have separate governance it's awfully hat it's awfully difficult to capture those those savings at all i've been talking with a lot of people about this upcoming vote and one of the questions that often comes up is the question about local control and how we we value and love our small  schools and the school board members who contribute and participate because their children are in those schools and the loss of that i think is the is the fear that i wonder on the murder committee if that was contemplated and what the thinking around local control of it was it was an issue that was hotly debated and thoughtfully considered i think i don't think there's a person on the merger committee who does you the principle of local control we recognize that one of the bedrocks of vermont is that communities make community decisions and that schools that are not controlled by their their communities are going to be schools that are less likely to succeed and more likely to be more expensive to but when we apply those principles to our particular circumstance we think that community control is enhanced by having a merger and let me explain that right now it is true that folks get to vote in their individual town or in the case of the under the whole idea district which many of our viewers might not understand but is in amalgam of parts of jericho and underhill and is a distinct voting and controlling district it is true that we get to vote on that and you won't get to do that right our if our proposals accepted but what's not true is that that gives you truly who control you're you're voting for us school board that has fragmented authority over over a piece of the education by virtue of that fragmentation true control is lost i mean think about it this way that your local school board doesn't even hire the superintendent that person the chief executive officer  important educational leader is hired at the supervisor union level now what we're proposing is that there be local control through the community that we truly have built over the last fifty years and i i call mansfield community a community i've been on that board now for seven years you couldn't tell when people address an issue whether they're representing underhill or bolton or richmond and you can't tell when the students come before you unless they reveal it or you happen to know them what town they're from we think of ourselves and we've become a single community and if we and if we adopt this i'm convinced that that community will grow together even greater because it will have this common bond of control and responsibility for its entire school system now if we were talking about folks who didn't have a history working together i feel differently but we've done it for fifty years if we were talking about population size that was so large and unmanageable that we were strangers i would agree with that but we're about fifteen thousand people that's a community that can work it's big enough to run to run a school system that's large enough to to really serve students but it's small enough for us to truly be a community and in my sense have local control i don't think local control means town control i mean i think it needs community control and that's why i advocate for the solution it's interesting in month hill here you know from that vantage statewide what's local  have had the opportunity to do some traveling around the state this summer to really look at how we are geographically where the small schools are located in the challenge that we really face and have struggled with at the state level that some of  feel that decisions should be made at the local level but what are we actually calling local so our local is our school district another person's local is is their town and i think that  there's also there's also a lot of question around how we've we've already done this for fifty years with the fifth through twelfth grade so how did actually happen that the k through four wasn't integrated to begin with well it's were an accident of history than anything else i mean think about it if we were starting from a blank slate and somebody said let's set up our school system would we really have six different school boards doing grades kindergarten through four and then another school board doing grades five through twelve and then some organization that was supposed to harmonize them together but didn't have any power over budget course we would what happened is historically  schools were operated on a town by town basis but the if you go back fifty years folks realize that they weren't able to deliver a quality education to students as they progress through through high school where at the time people thought was the focus where you really had to have more rigorous education and less there was a common school with enough students and enough teachers that you could build in a rich and diverse curriculum and they couldn't do that on a cost effective basis town by town i mean there's many people in our community who remember our local high school well part of the reason the folks who did this fifty years ago move forward was a new that could work but at the time of course it was a struggle it's always a struggle to think about change like this and at the time folks thought about elementary education differently they thought about it as simply a very rudimentary c s and learn to read and write and the really hard work occurred or at least the complicated work occurred later on and so the basic thought process is will build the schools that we need for our older children and there will pull our resources of our towns to have it's have it's elementary school board no need to change with that well we we now know that elementary education is very expensive in fact the average cost of each of our elementary schools is more than mount meehan's field if you do it on an equalizer people basis which is supposed to account for the differences in cost between these levels of grades and we know how important the early grades and kindergarten and pre kindergarten are to the success of children as they grow through the system so that model that made sense back then when we were trying to move from towns to another and more sophisticated system it just doesn't make sense as we approach things today so what are the benefits of the merger if you were to just sort of their budget benefits their curricular quality academic benefits the third kind of a a list of why would i vote yes on this first well let let me try and be careful here some people and i'm obviously an enthusiastic advocate for that i believe strongly and i think it's it's it would be a great policy decision for us but i don't want to oversell it i don't think it's that the merger will solve all our problems and i don't think it is that we have a bad school system that needs that needs complete replacement i mean we have a good school system and i don't think the merger will solve all our problems but i do think that without the merger what we have a governance system that prevents us from addressing problems particularly as we try to figure out how to meet the needs of students going forward and how to harmonize that with the with the needs of taxpayers who are frankly overtaxed now it's a burden on many people so in that context i look at it from three perspective students taxpayers and community student perspective doesn't it make sense for students to have their education planned from the moment they enter the school to the moment they leave doesn't it make sense for educational leaders like our superintendent our principals to be focused on developing them as students as opposed to harmonizing the decisions from think we add it up it's sixty six board members who may each have a different viewpoint board members in our district and shit in a supervisory and yes it's that many folks and and doesn't it make sense for students to have the ability to benefit from the sharing of resources and the equalization of resources among schools as opposed to simply having their educational future is determine a narrow focus school board that only has responsibility for a few grades so from student perspective i think we see it as a win from the taxpayers perspective we see it as a win i mean obviously the tax benefits that will be provided by the state are very significant and if i might pause in that concept for a moment and i've heard some people in public forums characterize those as as bribes from the state and i'm i'm troubled when i hear that rhetoric i know the people like you in the state legislature who have who have approved those and i know they've told me that the reason they've done that is this is important public policy that the state needs to promote and so i see those as as something there are a benefit that the state is offering to people that really have value but as i said long term i think taxpayers will benefit from us having that efficient and focused system and if you look at our m report we've identified some savings that we already see that we can achieve and the report is in our website but we've also said quite clearly that we think this is just the start we think that having an efficient government system does give us opportunities that we just don't have otherwise and then the third level that i look at it is community i know that p that many people think i'm going to lose my local community control if my town doesn't have its own school board but i think when you're controlling a fragmented governance structure that really is at the mercy of all these other players and really can't do its job you don't have effective community control i'd like to be in a position as a school board member believe it or not then if somebody comes up and complains to me i can't say that was another board responsibility i have to accept the responsibility and that's where i think the community control center so from all three perspectives i see this as valuable one of the things that i am also paying attention to and i was curious about was that the richmond elementary k through four school board did vote on whether to support this merger and they voted unanimously to support it and are all of the k through four boards voting in that way or well i can i can give you the summary at this point not all of them have taken action on it the richmond board voted unanimously to support it many of us know those people on the board and i think you can talk with them and get their viewpoints but that's obviously something that's important to me as a resident in richmond the mount mansfield school board voted to support this not all our members were at the meeting but of the members who were there there was one dissent and there was one abstention and i have to go the minutes to look at it but i think there are i think there were eight positive votes from the rest of the members and there were a couple of members who were absent the underhill id school board has voted in favor of this the jericho school board has voted in favor of this in the boat and school board has voted in favor of this at this point the underhill central school board has taken the position that they're not going to make a decision they're going to leave it to the voters and i don't have any knowledge of the huntington school board taking action on this as of yet as of this point i think it's fair to say that it's not unanimous but there is strong support from this for this proposal from the school board members not only in our community but throughout the chit in the supervisor union in mt mansfield union community great and we will all be voting on it on the ballot to agree or disagree with the you are i think we're on the list where the public forums are or the dates of the public forums on the program here if you have questions please go to the forums ask those questions and get all the information that you need to be voting on november fourth the for the on the voluntary school merger there is an article one which is whether or not to agree or disagree with the merger committee and article two is to vote for those in your town who would be the school board members of the new board in the event that it was approved yes that's it thank you so much appreciate thank you for your and there's this and thanks to everybody for their interest appreciate your time and we want to just really encourage everyone to vote goodnight