huntington actually just six and eight which is the underhill id district which is carved out of portions of underhill and jericho now each one of these six communities has its own elementary school board and it ministers its own elementary school grades pre kindergarten through grade four now we also have a union school district which i think all of us are familiar with it's the mount mansfield union school district that provides governance for and supervises education for all our students in grades five through twelve over over two thirds of our student population is there but because we have this disconnect between the governance of the of the two do separate systems if you will we have a total of forty five elected school board among these seven school boards now to try to knit that together we have an entity called the chimney supervisor union and they have a total of twenty one members who are our there are a lot representatives there pointed by each of the local school boards and in turn they have an executive committee and so when you add it all up the way our schools work in this in this community is we have a school system but it's governed by eight separate schools with eight separately approved by churches and we do all that for a community of fifteen thousand people about twenty five hundred students and we do this even though we've had this mount mansfield union for most of our students for fifty years and if you want to understand why we're proposing a change in our governance this is really the place to start this is the organizational chart for this chick in the supervisor union it was been in place for years so it's nothing that we produce special for our work in today and if you're confused by it unfortunately that is the point it charts are our organizational authority and there are those six towns each of which elects their own school boards of directors they also elect the m m u board of directors somehow if you go all all the way over to the right we have a supervisory union with twenty one members various committees all this is flowing down to the superintendent who is our chief administrative officer and educational leader for the whole whole supervisory union and then down to principals who in turn are hired by the individual school boards and then some talent comes down to teachers support staff and students and the primary motivator for this is is to answer the following question is this organizational chart the best that we can do for serving our students in our tax payers and our community now this is what we're parade proposing to replace it with and it is simple we're proposing direct election by each of our five communities if this were adopted underhill id would would would probably cease to exist once the legislature recognize they had nothing left to do we would elect fifteen school board members same number that we have on the m m u board now they in turn would would hire and supervise the superintendent he in turn would directly work with the principals and down through the teachers and support staff so the basic goal and rationale of this is to replace that first organizational chart with this ch now the proposal we have before you is one that's governed by a state law that provides two options for how may if it is approved actually operate option number one is is if all of our separate six communit yes we will have that single board option number two is if one or two towns vote no they will retain their elementary school board however there will still be that single board that will oversee everything else retail through grade twelve and all of that and all the towns that join and grade five through grade twelve in the for everyone regardless of whether they join so if we all vote yes we'll all ha we'll have that single board if two of us or one of us vote no those communities voting no we'll still have your elementary school board but all of the rest will be governed by the single board and if  will fail in its entirety now these are the folks who studied this and i just want to point out to who we had here from richmond i was a member of the committee alaina jensen who who who i believe has chair a member of the school board where the richmond representatives now it you may have read that this committee was selected from proponents of this the fact is that there are only seven of these eighteen members who served on the previous the committee now i'm going over this because there has been some some discussion that perhaps this issue has been rushed to judgment and i just want people to understand the history of the discussion of this question it goes back to two thousand and ten we retained david ford a long time superintendent in principle in vermont to prepare a government study it recommended that we consider a merger of all our districts that was vetted and proposed by a voluntary merger committee in two thousand and ten to two thousand and eleven they held twelve public meetings seven community forums and was separated by seventeen majority voted in favor but despite the majority voting in favor in four towns approving of the law that it existed then the the merger completely failed and the legislature went back and they adopted a new law that allowed us to make a proposal under which if it least for towns approve it we would have merged governance and so that's the enterprise that i guess over the last year my wife was wondering where i've been all the time well this is a week we started work last november we had a total of fifteen public meetings and just to clarify the record at each of those public meetings we accepted public comment we held a public forum right here a camel's hump middle school before submission of our merger report to the state in which we accepted comments and and debate from everyone we submitted the plan to the state it was recommended by the secretary of education and approved by the state board of education if you have questions about that i think we have a copy of that approval level letter here on august nineteenth and so now we are in the process of going to the fourteen public community forums to try and present this viewpoint to you for consideration and then answer any questions or concerns that you have and it will all culminate in a  vote by australian barrow ballot on november fourth of course you can vote early like you can on any early voting issue so now let's get to the why behind us and the question we're trying to answer for you and ask you to consider is whether we would be better off together whether we should unite our governments and our committee tried to look at this from three to six factors because we thought these were the most important what want the planning of education in the on mentoring schools to be focused on the expectations we're going to have for students when they get to middle school and when they get into high school and this was driven home to me in our m that all of our students and that's the primary benefit for students that i see from this second on the list is a quality oh you can hear me on the television it's people will be so disappointed they can't hear me on television right now it's ok from the top you couldn't bear that  i don't think there's any question but that students at camel's hump middle school have the same opportunities as students at browns river middle school and at our elementary schools we try to do it but we're not able to do that what's happened particularly in the last seven years since the since the recession that actually started in vermont two thousand and seven there has there has been growing pressure on the budgets of our small elementary schools in a nutshell they have to calculate their taxes based on on on a ratio that considers how many students they have and when their student in roman drops their taxes have to rise because their percentage of expenditure is rated by how many students they're teaching now if you're in a small elementary school there becomes a point where you can't cut more staff somebody has the first grade right up somebody has has to be there to provide lunch services and our small allam entry schools in particular bolton and underhill id are very stressed and i'm very pleased th chairs of both boards are here tonight if you want to talk with them about that you can find out about that and we're not at this point providing equal opportunities to all our elementary school students and primarily it's because each of them is located in this discrete silo where they budget on their own and have to somehow figure out a way to make things work within that tax system and that transitions to the next benefit for students of when you're budgeting on a holistic basis for your entire system at once you really can and have to make those hard decisions about what are your priorities what are the things that are most important for us and what's the best way to use a resources right now we have eight separate budgets and their silence and if there just isn't enough in your particular budget to deal with a problem you are stuck regardless if another school is spending something is spending on something that really shouldn't be as high a priority now next on the list is administrators focus on teaching and learning what we're trying to capture here is how our administrators spend their time our superintendent our all of our central office staff are talented dedicated people but we want them to be educational leaders and financial managers what our current system does is it puts them in a position where they have to spend so much time simply trying to align decisions among these eight separate boards and our sense is that when you let your educational leaders focus on their true mission that can have an impact right down to our children in terms of helping principals and helping teachers so that they can all improve next on the list a sharing of staff we have very limited sharing of staff and in the supervisory union i mean right here on this campus of course we have two schools very limited sharing and i think we only have seven staff members shared throughout the whole system isn't that right john and and and it's because it's such a challenge when you have different hiring entities if we had a single hiring and it we would have lots of possibilities and we believe those would benefit students as well next on the list is innovation it's very difficult when you've got to move move all of these boards to actually get innovation started and sometimes a conversation doesn't even start because the people who might think it a great idea say i would take too much energy i really can't get there i think about just one one question would would our fifth graders be better off in an elementary school environment or middle school environment maybe academically maybe in terms of cost they would be that's a conversation we can't even have because we have a different school boards which are a stiction over both of those so in a nutshell we think we can do better for students because we'll have one system that's focused on their continuous progress in the moment they enter to the moment they leave and i don't know how many of you know paul cora loathe us i know bob who drove for a long time a principal a camel's hump those and very well paul paul worked here camel's hump one of the founding administrators here and then spent a long time at browns river and he wrote this to me and i just thought it was so apt that i would include it in the presentation he said i often use the analogy of shipping vessels when comparing school district configurations i compare the present configuration to an ocean freighter difficult to navigate and very resistant to movement change also the freighter takes enormous energy to change course and direction as i understand the proposed model i would compare it to a frigate which is known for its speed and versatility i believe this is the appropriate model for the future of education and in the east i think paul has really captured the sentiment  felt as a as a committee in terms of whether this would benefit students well let's turn to taxpayers all of us know that property taxes are an enormous burden for many of us and many of our neighbors and so i'd like to start with an overview of what financially really is at stake here we we do spend a lot of money on our schools our budget for this year is approaching forty four million dollars but if you notice it is spent in those eight separate silos each of the elementary schools has their own separate budget and then you of course is spending a twenty seven million dollars roughly two thirds of the amount and notice the next line roughly six point nine million dollars comes from for things like transportation central office special education and that budget is appropriated by that appointed ward and simply assessed to all the school districts so why do we think that we could do better for taxpayers well from the from the start we said to yourself there's obviously a benefit with having one budget instead of eight you not only save that cost i don't think it's it's that you've got one eighth of the cost it's you certainly have to build on terms of what are the costs in each of the individual buildings but you will save money there but perhaps more important you now have a single central focus for budgeting decisions so we can make hard decisions there on a consolidated basis in terms of where taxpayers really are getting their value the second saving that we thought was  the time effort and money to align decisions now nobody can quantify what it's worth to taxpayers to get your educational leaders in a position where instead of working on aligning adults on a board they can online and work on the decisions that might save us money but if you think about how any good business organization would be structured one of things you would want to do is make sure its leaders had the ability to do that and you might not be able to quantify that off the bat we don't even attempt to but it is something that will produce savings for us in the future next a sharing of resources and the same thing that i thought would benefit students will benefit taxpayers if you've got two buildings on the same campus isn't it more cost effective for them to be seamlessly sharing some of their services it's pretty simple and straightforward next is feature of the state taxation system of voiding excess spending penalties are we right now many of our small elementary districts are they're either in or about to approach paying a penalty that's calculated by the state of vermont simply because they're and roland has dropped and there isn't the ability on their part to to actually cut the people to match that that enrollment drop and if we're consolidated we can avoid that penalty and of course i've already talked about focusing administrator is on why spending we've also in our report i'm going to take questions but let me get through this if i may we also we also focused in our report on whether there were identifiable savings for us to achieve and if you look at our reports on the c s u website there are efficient sees we've identified we've identified roughly three hundred thousand dollars of of savings that we think we can achieve but we've also been quite clear those are the ones we can quantify there are others out there that we believe are available we can't quantify tax rate stability one of the problems that small elementary schools face is as they're enrollments fluctuate their tax rates can go like that when a consolidated basis that just isn't an issue and leslie but i think  importantly the state will provide us tax incentives if we unify and those incentives are that they will reduce our homestead property tax rate each of the first four years that we're unified by a rate of eight cents six cents four cents and two cents this is also cap so so that you can have your taxes increase by more than five percent a year or decrease by more than five percent a year so we prepared this chart just to help people understand what the estimated impact of this is and i'll state from the outset that we don't know what our budgets going to be next year and perhaps more importantly we don't know what the state y property tax to be next year we're only going to get some preliminary information in that december so we simply used our current your figures and if you work this through you'll see for example for the richmond column that the tax  in the first year would amount to a savings of seventy five dollars for each one hundred thousand dollars of homestead leslie let's talk about whether this is something that can serve our community we've heard a lot of talk at least i have that this is this is a raises a real question of local control and that's something we wrestled with as a committee we came to the conclusion that unifying our governance within our existing m m u community would in reality enhance local control right now we have a system where there are eight separate boards that may or may not be accountable for any particular question so sometimes citizens when they say gee i want to get an answer on this and get routed from board to board perhaps more important is that we have a model the m model that shows we as a community and i don't mean richmond i mean all of us within m m m you can and do work well together we're only fifteen thousand people but we've got a fifty year history of working together and if we have a single board elected on a proportionate basis we believe that can provide taxpayers and the parents with meaningful local control over their students and their and their schools and more important it can build that sense of community that you really have to have if you're going to address some of the hard problems we have to address in education so just  recap this is what we want to replace and this is another version of what we want to replace it with those slashes show the individual ords and board members that we would lose in the pie chart there shows you what we would have would have a fifteen person board and they would be responsible for the whole school system i think it's also important to understand the reaction this proposal has received by school boards in those those who are most interested i would say in terms of following this question it was supported by a committee vote of fourteen to one the following school boards have taken formal action on this and  expressed their support for this jericho richmond underhill id bolton and mt mansfield no school board has taken an action to oppose it and underhill center in huntington have yet to weigh in on this so in conclusion let me just say the following i i obviously strongly believe that this is an idea whose time is common is worth your consideration  i don't want to however leave you with the impression that this is a magical a lexer that's going to solve all our problems it won't we're still going to have big challenges to meet the needs of students and taxpayers going forward but what this does do is it puts us in a governance structure we are we are capable to the extent you can on a local level of addressing them we're working together instead of fragmented and that's really what i'm hoping will think hard about between now and election day so i appreciate your patience jon i guess i'll turn it back to you and i'd be happy to answer questions or respond to any comments that people want to myself are we better position that's the question i'm trying to answer i can't tell you with a straight face that you and i are going to be five years from now and your tax bill is going to be lower i can tell you with firm conviction that if we do this it gives us a better opportunity as a local community to address those things we can address will still be part of a state system we will still have all the pressures that come from the state wide property tax but at least we're in the position locally to deal with those things we can on an efficient basis that's that's my rationale  annual rate of increase and our elementary schools boltons the lowest it's one point three nine percent what that taught me is that the problem isn't that some of our local school boards are spendthrift problem is that they're isolated the problem is that they are isolated and because they are they are isolated they not only are limited in their budget choices but they get penalized within the state system the tax rate that you see for both what that reflects is a state calculation not a local spending decision if we are consolidating instead of folks having their taxes calibrated by that  we're going to have to get together and make the hard decisions about spending as a group so i can't as i said before promise you that this will produce actually because it's going to be up to us as a school board and a community to control the things we can but i can't tell you that thinking that we're going to be subsidizing another town it really is not bor there's a host of services that we could be sharing and i think when michael talked about some of the potential efficiency could be created through this those are some of those where we could maximize our optimize our resources and our staffing to save money as we as we move down the road saving over the next five years a total of twenty cents starting with eight six four and two on a homestead rate is something we should ignore a lot of our neighbors are having a hard time and that's something that's significant to them would i recommend that we do this if i didn't think the rest of this was was for a long term viable course but i also don't think we should minimize how valuable that will be to many of our time that we have offered for at risk students so in that way it isn't unified it is an equitable you would not i don't believe you would see that in a unified system doesn't happen it camel's hump it doesn't happen brown buildings because over the last several years there has had to be a lot of deferred maintenance schools have had to make choices around do we buy this math manipulative or do we buy this math book where you may have another school system literally three miles away that was carrying over a sixty thousand dollars surplus and is able to purchase those materials so in a bigger system you get an economy of scale over the last six years probably more m m u has had the good  fortune to have run some surpluses that they've been able to put either get back to the taxpayers or they put in over a capital reserve fund that has about seven hundred thousand dollars right now and what they've been able to do is use some of those funds to pay for capital improvements and then focus their budget on you know the things they need that make a difference for students on a day to day basis so you know even at richmond y there's this is a sixty percent enrichment position that crap mike jericho has one hundred percent and they have you know approximately you know thirty forty students last in this school so those are some of the differences that really they affect the experience for students and i think in emerge system because of the some of the economies of scale that you do get if you have two or three teachers that retire that can open up  money that you can use to fund you know a host of educational initiatives sources those differences calm surprise the fact that although the supervisory union can do a great job of setting goals and aspirations as ken was saying we can implement it takes dollars that takes decisions by the budgeters and right now we have we have seven different schools making those budgeting decisions it's a little harder not to be fifteen years ago i think we were really a leader in it but the curriculum is only as good as the resources that you have to support and so what we've found over the last few years is we've had  as school boards have been try to reduce the burden on the tax rate they've had to make some really good choices some very tough choices around what they're going to do within the system you know i'll give you one example that i think is pretty profound and that's when terry they were fortunate enough to have a few years of surpluses and they were able to to purchase a math coach that is there four days a week and the the results are pretty profound and they've made a significant difference in results for students so that you know those are just a few of the examples we do have a limited amount of professional development that goes through the su but you know that's really based on some federal dollars that we get through washington and so we maximize those the best we can but there are there are differences and the last thing i'll say is when i say differences i think differences in uniqueness are very good i mean when we're talking about the community and some of the traditions in the culture those are healthy but when you're talking about resources that's when you really in fact the experience for students and that's what we were i think in  here forever now there would have to be a collective bargaining agreement reached with the with the you know i said that would regulate regulate anything that that we bargain on right now we already have provisions in our yes yes and there's there's really been and i look back at this over the last fifteen years maybe ten times people have moved from school to school and it's usually because there is a  and so or their teacher has requested a change and i've talked to you know our local leadership and the system and you know it's worked well for a very long time we have some specific requirements in the contract that we have to follow that basically say you have to have some licensure and there are some other requirements you have to have the skills and the experience to do the job but it's worked very seamlessly for probably twenty five thirty years murder the law says you can can't close a school bus that district says it's ok that's great we parents that are in that school you know you you could you could think about this longer term and not make short term actions but there's a serious opportunity tonight i have more at home two of them are from richmond people bob lowe and allison anon and one is from me from huntington and i left the others at home trying to save them spread them out to the other districts i have two things to say other than take these read them these people have really good questions and really good ideas but i have two other things to say so don't leave without getting something like that or i can get it to you if you are there is not enough we've lived in several towns there were anywhere from maybe sixteen thousand to twenty twenty four thousand in the state of i heard years ago that it was approaching eighteen thousand and the difference between those towns that we lived in and this district being fifteen it used to be bigger is that we're spread out over two hundred fifty to three hundred fifty square miles because we're forty miles up and down and we're six to ten across we're not a rectangle so it's can't do the math perfectly or maybe you could if you're a mathematician but at any rate so we are spread way out our elementary schools where the youngest kids go and that's a very different story and situation than when you're in a town mccomb was about twenty thousand and  one high school from home and it had at that time and then it finally became a middle school they go through eight and then we had i think five elementary schools one might have been kindergarten or preschool only i'm not sure but they were all within three miles one way and three miles another way and they are more one unit of course but in our districts here under hill is thirty five miles from my house and i live on the north side of huntington so we're very far apart it makes more sense to have schools and board members especially for our youngest kids that have plenty of time on the bus already going up and down the hills and icy weather and all that they don't need to be traveling any further and you were saying you didn't hear benefits for kids kids do better when their parents are very involved in the curriculum and i don't know why some people in the room here are thinking of the board members as an alien they're not a different species they are parents that live in the community they are the most active parents and they check the board changes i think that's good because you're most interested in your your own kid but you're interested in all the kids there and you have communic between what's happening in the school with the teachers and the principal and the superintendent right back to the community something happens that i would like about or i was puzzled about of procedure or something a child was treated or somebody else's child was treated i would go to the teacher first then the principal and if that didn't work i talked to the school board members i have five people and i'm very much likely to know at least a couple of them you know so i know that they have valid opinions that are you know we can talk and maybe we can work something out there are these sides have a better understanding but i could help my child you have a better communication when you have people right near your school and your and to say that we could councils and all those things that's fine except they don't have any power at all somebody can give you advice but you don't have to let it go in one ear not the other or be humming a tune in your head so it has to be people that have legal power and that's our board members and they've been terrific and i heard at the last meeting i think was the last meeting that they actually have our local boards go up to the high school committees and help you know it probably wouldn't work because i've got to all right ok i'll just just go to the last sentence here that really bothers me because i think there's still a lot of things we don't know about this merger and i don't think the committee knows all that they should know about this merger he says to the voters we have to be careful voting no exposes huntington taxpayers to a great risk we could be out on our own for the shared costs well the shared services we have we've had all along and they belong to all the towns we pay in our portion our share of that's not going to go away we're not going to lose those shared services the best way it started out with the merger committee but they found out they can't do that can't kick us out and they can't cut cut off services that we share right now and we will continue to share them  and i want to read you one one sentence from from well below he's worked as an administrator v m he teaches in medical school he's dealt with budgets that are far more complicated than our budget here in community because there's a lot of funding going around you know with the universities some things and he's been in education probably over forty five years and he said there's a misunderstanding about the word control maybe the word we should use is input you have more if you can speak to your board members on any time and you can solve the problems together they've been wonderful and back to all the towns have great people  it and i think that would be lost what are the needs of students in that elementary school students and how far they can be bussed to something that we're going to have to think about i would point out that nine of the seventeen or excuse me nine of the eighteen people including all the myths who served on the voluntary merger committee are elementary school were former elementary school board members so they're very sensitive to that i would also point out that that if you think about the geography of our district district it is helpful to actually look at the data in terms of how far apart our schools are the greatest separation there is between our schools as between brewster pearson huntington and underhill central school it's twenty one point eight miles my sense having served on the m m u board and knowing the people who would serve on a unified board is they can accommodate that kind of geographic disparity and still meet the needs of our elementary school students tough thing i suspect from having watched our school boards operate very my career here that the biggest fear that i'm hearing and i've attended two of these meetings is our ability to communicate with our school board members  them out mansfield board for years and i assume they're still doing it rotate here meeting them on their schools i don't know how frequently the board is going to like to meet but if they're meeting twice a month like the mansfield board did i think the board made the rounds to the communities on a pretty regular basis i would think that if communication is this a big  folks in fact it was just prior to my retirement you know they say well you got to have an email address she got to have a cell phone you're twenty four seven now i thought i was twenty four we're going to have opportunities that we haven't had before and how well we manage those opportunities this good term and whether it has a greater impact on kids you know i think of just the facilities that we try to manage in the district and if three schools have got to have routes for instance what's the economy of scale that we might be able to take advantage of it we're able to do that together as opposed to separately i'm not sure at the end of the day that there's going to be a lot there financially because this is an expensive business that we're in and it's not going to be getting cheaper and we're talking about three to five year olds coming to alimentary school that's not going to district or anything like the mt mansfield members that i worked with for over thirty years they're going to hear it i'll guarantee you if you can get this many people to show up at a fifteen school board is to be responsive to community to set budgeting priorities to set expectations for it ministr years to monitor the progress of those administrators towards meeting those expectations and to provide an environment in which we are prudent financially but are nurturing  educators so that they can provide what we want to our students stated more simplistically our job is to be a board of directors not to be a micromanage now if you are properly focused as a school board member you can achieve that i think better in a unified system than we have now to add the responsibilities that i have described exclude school board should be doing for additional buildings and additional age groups is not something that is going to be other than a transition a challenge we already amount mansfield deal with two thirds of the students two thirds of the budgets and if you look at it on a square footage basis most of the physical plant that we have to deal with what we lose if we go to a unified system is we will you lose the conflicts that we have in governance structure i'll give you one example i've served on the negotiations committee for the last seven years since i joined this surprise surprise they put me on the go she was just a shock i don't know how that and one of the challenges you face when you're on that committee is aligning the expectations of each of those separate ports so my sense is that if we do our job correctly there are some more things we're going to have to learn i'm not as familiar with elementary school as i am with middle school and high school but we're going to be an environment where for focusing on the real job of school board members and where we don't have the distraction of those conflicts quite confident we can do it well and the data supports me in the following sense even with this size of a school district our ratio of school board members to students  population is going to be much lower then you see elsewhere i mean even in a neighboring state like new hampshire i hope that answers your question you what i want to share with you is that in my seven year old school board i've served on the policy committee for years on the executive committee attended a bunch of other meetings finance committee meetings for the high and i'm also an environmental planner and a business owner i'd like to say to bob good row that when my children were in middle school and he was the principal in one thousand nine hundred nine camel's hump middle school was a nationally honored blue ribbon school so i just want to mention that about bob good role as he was the principal then i also want to ask bob i know that you were a principal in the chicken in south district during a time when that district looked at the possibility of a merger and rejected it i'm wondering if you could tell us a couple reasons why they made that choice so allison we're going to keep the i need the questions to come here you know you weren't here at the beginning but that's the format we had with ok here i when i'm going to get into a debate or anything like that all right i'm very concerned that there's a question on the voting ballot about assuming all the assets and liabilities of all the schools but there is not much information at all that's easily available about just what those assets and liabilities really are that we would be assuming for example bolton has the most assets per child now that's kind of tempting isn't it to acquire that big asset and have only a few children to farm out to other schools  richmond has more debt then all the other districts combined underhill id there i know that they're struggling but i don't think that they need to rely upon smaller unified school board to figure out what they'd like to do with the school so i i would like you to realize that if you vote yes for this merger you are selling your school building for a dollar to the merger you can't get it back unless you can comply with some rather strict requirements which are hidden in article seven and eight in the merger document here's an anecdote for you the state of maine did some redistricting maybe ten years ago perhaps and there was such an outcry about the number of children who  taking long bus rides over rural areas spending hours on buses being educated in different communities that where they did not live and the people in those communities felt that their community spirit was being disseminated because the children were not being educated at home or in in their homes town and so in two thousand and thirteen the legislature of maine tried to reverse redistricting because they thought it was such a disaster they couldn't do it one of the biggest reasons was the town's no longer own their school building so you might want to think about this i'm hoping that the legislature will come up with a better plan there are some good aspects to being more efficient with business but a lot of this i think kareena was mentioning that there seem to be a lot of things that could be done in a more efficient way without upheaving the whole district and i think that we should explore that i would like to see a structure where we can still keep our school boards maybe they might not have all the responsibilities that they have now maybe there might be a little different way to organize it but people are very fond of having their school boards and i've heard this over and over i went to the huntington meeting last night and a lot of what i heard there was not this is a great system you've really got a great idea here it was well i think i'm going to vote for it because i don't want to be hanging out there alone i think that there's been a lot of fear mongering and a lot of emphasis on how desperate the budgets are i know that's true but if you study school consolidation and what's happened in other states it's done a great deal of damage in many places because it's forced the sale of school buildings to private charter school for profit companies who are making lots of money charging high tuition to people who can afford it and they're sapping resources from the public school system and the public school taxes in and then the children in the public schools are relegated to situations where they don't have the same amount of resources qualify for reduced and free lunch are the ones that probably are having the most problem the consolidation of schools nationwide has only served to widen the gap between the rich and the poor which thomas piketty says will be the downfall of our society so before you vote yes for this merger even though there are some good points with it look at the total structure and see what we could do better be and if i could focus just directly on the question of ownership of schools and the assets and the debts as we sit here today we collectively own browns river middle school camel's hump dental school and mount mansfield union high school all of us on that together if this proposal were passed all of us together would also own all the six alimentary schools and also all of us would be jointly responsible for their debts and i have heard people talk about how richmond has more debt than any other school district that's half the story richmond also has more assets than other school districts so if you look at the data you will see that each of the elementary school districts has more assets than debt and if you break that down to one up per resident basis which is really the only rational way to do it you'll find that they are very close with the exception of bolton which is somewhat higher than the others but the others all cluster around the same this isn't anything other then a community that already works together joining its assets together and joining very similar assets together for a common effort and the question that really i think voters need to answer is whether we could be more effective for our students and be more effective for our taxpayers if we are working together and so i hope we'll think about this in a positive thing and not be driven by any fears or scenarios that candidly have nothing to do with what is on the table by countywide i mean for us to do a play about we got on the bus and drove for four ou we came from a different town some of those units here on the bus that i think it was like five a m in the morning to get elementary school and there were fourteen montana's jefferson county is about twenty times bigger than the six counties that we're talking about here our high school is the last high school in the state to have a resident dormitory our high schoolers came in there and stay monday through friday got to go home on the weekends but we were one community one town there is absolutely no justification to say that because we're separate towns we can't get together that's how i grew up and we were a very strong it bothers me to hear that it bothers me when people say well you know they've got to boss all this way while i'm not bust all the way i ended up going to college to be a great education have a wonderful time that's now that's a few years there we're going to hold up here you know we're going to bust all your students that's not what we're talking we're talking about improving the outcomes for years but the put that is a bad thing is horrible do it at the junior high schools we're one community although we're talking about is making it official for the little kids so that when they go in the preschool we can go our own structure i'd encourage you to take a look at our web site and to take a look at some of the studies look at school districts that did unify and some of the financial results and what happened to the districts massachusetts is a really good example of a school system that's pretty diverse economically ethnically racially that is outperforming vermont in almost every category and what you might find if you look at some of the minutes in those communities in new hampshire and massachusetts and new york is the conversations are occupied by high school and middle schools it's diverse it's balanced and i believe that mt mansfield time looking at middle school and high school and ignoring elementary school i pray you throw me out of office the moment that i really became convinced this was  board meeting a few years ago and what we're talking about was the achievement gap between students of low income and though and those who are of sufficient m and it's an enormous problem those students are not of low income are not performing well and arid ministration presented to us a series of options all sorts of interventions we could do at the middle and high school level to address them and we had a good spirited conversation like our board usually does i really enjoy serving on that board because people really care and in the midst of the conversation john  you know the research shows the most effective thing you can do for low income students to choke close that gap is to have a rigorous rich preschool program and fifteen school members myself included were silent now in some respects i'm still ashamed of that moment because it's wrong and i'm hoping we can do something by getting it consolidated governance so that we really do think about our students from the moment they enter to the time they leave so that we can really as best we can address their problems in the school board doesn't need to meet megs i'm going to let you go and then i know scott wants to speak up here and then  so i am the face of the person who wrote the minority report betsy i heard you ask you know what what's the what's the minority viewpoint as far as educational issues  first of all i share the goals of the merger i share the goal of equality of educational opportunities regardless of the town of residen e i share the goal of cost effective governance improved administrative efficiencies and an excellent twenty first century education my concerns for the educational aspect of the merger are that i don't feel we have thoroughly vetted how we best should merge or unify we have created articles which define a fifteen member school board and my concern is that we as a community including our teachers and our principals we haven't sat down and had these kinds of forums before writing those articles to talk about what's the best way we can guide our schools to do what they do best i'm concerned that a fifteen member board which we now have functioning very well at m m u they overlook grades five c or twelve that's a that's a large bunch of students and a large amounts of responsibility and staff it's three well run buildings and three principals and other administrators they do a great job they have a lot of work to do they meet twice a month to do that work my concern is that by adding the six elementary schools and the vast range of developmental oversight that has to come from preschool to grade fo it's unrealistic to expect that same number of people to as thoroughly and carefully and with the same breath of knowledge be able to help their administrator facilitate being able to finance what the administrators need and say they need for instance the elementary schools as gail pointed out i'm a board member at an elementary school we meet with our principal every month we hear about not just the facility but we hear about what the teachers are working on as far as staff training and and issues at the school logistically for a new fifteen member board to hear the the reports of all the principals at each meeting would be impossible let alone responding to it yes board members are just administrator just to help the administration but they still have to have a working understanding of what what the age range is what the appropriate developmental concerns are what those buildings are doing what the concerns of the principal  staff of each building is it would be my hope that by turning this merger down now we could say yes we do want to unify our schools but we want to do it and a thoughtful way that creates a board governance that is best and i don't feel we've had the best conversation about that michael and i disagree but this is my viewpoint i also am concerned that the governance that we're creating in the articles is and charlie in one board  right now we have separate boards and then we have an executive board that coordinates it all if we have a unified governance as set up in these articles we will just have one board and that board is proportionally representative something like our house of representatives proportional representation to taishan i would like to think that we could have a conversation about whether that is going to make every community feel fairly represented maybe it will be fine but we haven't really had that conversation across the whole five towns could we talk about school council so that every school had a school council and that school council might have one vote in the union ok so those are some of my concerns that have to do with the education of whether this is go help or not i also want to point out that the fiscal savings which you can read the report and see what they're pointing to but for those who feel like just combining the budgets and tweaking it to make a cost savings there aren't many ways to say but one of the ways that i've heard is to make larger classes and with very young children the teacher to student ratio is very important and if we find budgetary savings by having twenty two kids in a classroom where eighteen is more appropriate that would affect our having agonized over those issues at the m m u board for seven years i'd be shocked if any fifteen citizens elected by our communities would ever agree to something like that but thanks michel so i'm i could probably count on one hand definitely on to the number of community members who have come to richmond school board meetings since i've been on the board which is not saying something critical about community it's saying thank you for putting your trust in your elected school board members to do the job that you've elected us to do and you know trusting us that we're getting it right so i guess from my perspective in having not been involved in the voluntary merger planning i really feel that the people who have been involved have been really dedicated to working on this from on all levels the pros and cons a number of them went through it the first time and brought that experience into this process and they really have truly you know gone through everything and vetted it and i feel that  if these people are telling us these are the advantages i'm pretty willing to trust them because i know as a school board member that you know we do we try hard to do our job and to do it right and we're not going to spend all this time meeting to put something out there that we don't truly believe so and i just i also want to echo the comment that we are one community all of these six towns five towns six school districts within c s u we all do feed into the same middle schools and high school and to me as a parent as a former educator i really think that the most important thing to come out of this is what would be gained by having the perspective of seeing every child through the district from pre k through grade twelve all under one board so it's not just about cost it's also about the efficiencies that would be built him with between our administrators being able to share resources among the school and for me personally i feel like the merger is the way to go  board members i've served with i was on the previous merger committee very involved at that last time and something i heard then that i am hearing now as well is  my town will have to vote my time at three four five votes whatever it is for florida between two and five points of contact and that really stood out in my mind if i was a unified board and you came to me from the town expressing an interest or concern about your child i would not sacrifice a child on the altar of self interest i would fight for your child with as much passion and conviction as i do in any other child as i look around the room here and see the faces of the people i've served with from other boards in the committees and all the meetings have had all the people i've met i can say with complete confidence the same is true with every single person who you are met who served on boards i would argue that your town will not have simply five four three two votes you have or should say points of contact you have fifteen people serving you i absolutely guarantee that these are all fantastic people who will look after your interests just as much as they would the interests of your own town you know in school so thank you thank you and we're going to wrap it up because they are yes board does have a meeting after this and that so behalf of the board in the restaurant community i want to thank all of you for coming out tonight there are other public forum still to go and camel's hump middle school on sunday november second it four pm cancel all your football points thank you everybody have a good night thank you