others in the audience but i'll start with those of us who are at the table to my right is you know bailey was also on the school board with me there's meg skier who is on the school board as well megs was also of the school board representative to the u last week there was actually an open discussion with no limits on time and we finished a half an hour to spare i'd like to respectfully request not look to three minute limits this discussion well quick sure hands who is interested in making in asking a question or sharing a comment to see if one two three four five six seven eight nine ten well we could tell it tell us a little bit more about how that works i guess i wasn't there enough and i with that it was just over think about four or five people had you folks but i do think having having some structure probably makes the conversation better starting out with the structure and then relaxing the rules later if there is more time might be a good compromise why don't we start with five minutes because it feels like we've got time everyone had five minutes and i do think it's important to acknowledge people in the order in which they've raised their hands so we've got that  mentioned i want to try and move through this little more quickly but still try and hit the salient points of why it is that the voluntary merger committee has prepared a report and articles and recommended that we merge the governance of our period schools and to start out to understand what the structure is were addressing and we have right now we have five towns that have a total of eight different school boards six elementary schools which are responsible in their own towns for grades pre k through four one union school district mt mansfield that's responsible board grades five through twelve and in fact has been in existence for fifty years and responsible for all those grades for most of that time and then we also have a supervisory union which is over which provides some efforts to try and tie this to all together however the supervisor unit ha limited authority it's not authorized to make budgetary decisions for any of the local school districts if you have legal questions about that i do happen to be a lawyer i'd have to be happy to discuss those with you blank but the one in the short of it is right now what we have is we have eight different school boards trying to govern a single school system and that results in this organization chart and many people told me it's confusing and said well why are you trying to confuse us well i'm trying to present to the existing organizational chart of chip in the supervisory union this wasn't something we prepared for this study it was our organizational chart and it is very complicated because you know you somehow have to get from the voters to six separate elementary boards to go to another union school board to a supervisor or union and then somehow meld all that together before you can take your policies your budget your direction from these governing bodies down through the superintendent to our our administrator is in our teaching stack and it's that complexity that really prompts us to look at this and say school board it would have fifteen members just like m m u does right now proportional representation just like and then view it would be one board responsible for everything and then they in turn would would set policy do budgeting and a point the superintendent and the school district would be governed through that simple model now there are two options that could evolve out of this vote if all of our districts  proof then then we will have that single unified school district if four or five of our school districts approve then we'd have what's called a modified union school district and a modified even school district would still have a single board that same board would also perform the functions of the supervisory union but the towns that vote no would maintain their local elementary boards they would not be allowed to vote on elementary matters involving the district as a whole they would not receive the tax incentives that are being provided by the state and they would not be part in my judgment of the unified governance that we recommend because we think it would recommend would serve best our students  towns voting no will still have their elementary schools and of course of three towns for the none of the school so these are committee members i think is already mentioned hairy legs and brecht for the who are the representatives of huntington and obviously if you want to find out any of anything about any of the others you can quite a few of them are in the room tonight could committee members all raise their hands so if any of you have questions afterwards you can always seek them out as well now this is a study process that has been going on for a long time you hear some people say gee we're rushing into this but the reality is we've been dealing with this as a school community for over forty years now there was there was a government study in two thousand and ten that led to a proposal to merge our school governance and that resulted in twelve public meetings and seven community forums and finally there was a vote on june seventh now the overall vote was was very close but it did pass by i think by about seventeen votes out of twenty five hundred four of the communities voted yes two of them voted no under the law it didn't matter that a majority had passed whether of the voters or the communities all had to an active for it to succeed and therefore the merger effort fam and we restarted this effort in the fall of two thousand and thirteen each of the elementary school districts approved a resolution  to to start a study committee each of the elementary school districts appointed their own representatives that committee started meeting in november of last year and we had a total of fifteen public meetings they included a community forum at which everybody was allowed to speak they included very extensive debate in addition to those public meetings all of the members of the committee spent a lot of time outside of the committee itself studying and researching and there was a lot of conversation debates among people in the in the committee and in the community and i know there's some disagreement that they did not do a thorough study but the majority  committee feels quite strongly that we did think about this very carefully that resulted in a plan that was submitted to the elementary school boards the elementary school boards and by the comments that resulted in changes to the plan that plan was them then presented to the agency of education they made comments so there were more changes made to the plan and finally it was submitted to the state board of education by law the state board had to approve it they approved  august nineteenth and their approval level letter is after if you want to see it and that then puts us in this posture where it's submitted to the voters for approval and we are now in number nine of fourteen community forums to discuss so let me get to the heart of the matter why should we do this and we as a committee looked at this and we looked at it from three perspectives would it benefit students would have benefit taxpayers and would it benefit our community and our community control of our schools we came to the conclusion that it would benefit students the basic flaw in our current system is that you have different boards deciding educational priorities for stu's they either disagree with each other or if they agree with each other it comes after we have put a lot of time and energy into aligning their decisions think about what students learn in the second grade in the third grade important to how they perform in the seventh eighth and twelve great how students do how students perform in the twelfth grade provides us a lot of data on how they ought to be taught in their in their early grades there is an artificial division in the child's life it's a long evolutionary process where you have to think about about what they're learning and how you're going to teach them from the moment they enter the school system to the time they leave and what this proposal does for students is it says look we're going to think about students together throughout their educational career it also addresses a growing problem that we have of inequality as our elementary school enrollment shrink in many of our  districts many of our districts are forced to cut programs and we now see inequality among our very own are among our various elementary school programs and i know you'll hear from some people say aha you're planning to raise our taxes because you're going to have to spend more money in all those towns and i think that's a question that we can address to our superintendent when the time comes but we believe as a committee that we can bring those folks up to a quality by it by using the efficiencies that we will achieve from this process  it's also very important that our process right now prevents our educational leaders from truly focusing on students are we have very good administrators in this district but they have to spend a lot of their time simply trying to align school boards students don't benefit from this dunes would benefit if our educational leaders are focused on how we can make our schools better as their number one priority so when we looked at this from those perspectives we said we can do a better well respected and i think he really captured it i won't read it but in a nutshell what paul is trying to tell us is you can't be pulling in different directions and expending all that energy trying to get on the same page if you really wan serve your stories what you need to do is be on the same page if students are going to be well served so next that what a turn to the taxpayers perspective and i start with this because i want people to understand that we are responsible for a lot of money our schools in two thousand and fifteen fiscal year are responsible for here nearly forty four million dollars worth of expenditures but those are those were those are designed and districts and our mt mansfield district that each separately do their own appropriations so although we're we're where we are budgeting forty three million dollars plus we're budgeting that through different folks who have autonomy over the that really drives why we thought we could do better for taxpayers in a in a nutshell if you're trying to set priorities in hard economic times you want to be doing it on the basis of the entire system not just s parts of the system and so we thought we could gain again significant benefits for taxpayers if we did that now in our merger report we have identified specific savings we believe we can achieve there about three hundred thousand dollars but we've also emphasized that those are the ones that we can can't quantify at this time those savings that we can get simply by being on the same page and not having to line these eight separate decisions those are real savings we believe we can achieve them we just can't put a number to them at this time we have many of our small elementary school districts who either are paying are on the verge of paying an excess spending penalty simply because they are they are they are an isolated district the state assesses their taxes on the basis of their average spending per pupil and because of that bolton right now is paying at underhill ideas on the verge of it and it's simply money that goes out of our school district and goes to the state tax coffers we could avoid that if we were consolidated and of course we also are going to receive tax incentives from the state the state has made the policy decision that encouraging consolidation of governance is good policy because it will it will enable better results for students and more efficient governance of schools so they will provide us tax  incentives reducing our taxes for the first forty years after a merger but only for those communities who approved the merger and the savings are eight cents in the first year six in the second four in the third and two in the fourth now we've tried to calculate based just on this year what those would be for each of our communities and of course what they will actually be will depend upon what the tax rate is next year not only what our local budgetary decisions are but how much the state decides to include in the statewide property tax so these are the estimates if we if we were working from this year's numbers as you can see we're estimating a fifty dollar saving  one hundred thousand dollars house site for an infant residence so the final problem that we analyze is whether we could do better for our community and we've heard many people say gee we're going to lose local control over our elementary schools why would we want to support this and our observation was that having an eight eight different school boards is really something that gets in the way of local control because for first of all who is accountable and second of all if they're colliding on issues how can the school board that you have elected to run your schools really really be under your control when it's really competing with other schools on many decisions and the thing that struck us was that we're not like a lot of other communities in vermont who wrestled with this issue we have a fifty year history of working with the mouth manf it now mansfield you school district we've all been a part of that for fifty years so we've been in community we do work together and we know that that works well and so in essence what we're saying is look let's make a single board fully accountable in the same community that we've been a part of for fifty years to represent all of our taxpayers and educate all of our students we think that will enhance community control so that's the new board representation that we're proposing against fifteen members just like new model and these are the recommendations that have been made so far by the various stakeholders in this process the the committee voted by fourteen to one to support this and i do think it's important that that we get all points of view but i also think it's important to understand which point if you have so far been most persuasive to the folks who've been engaged in this debate in the school boards of jericho richmond underhill i volm and mount mansfield have all recommended approval of this to the voters and they have all done it either unanimously or by very large market to date no school board has recommended that their voters reject this and we ha not as of yet had a recommendation made by the school boards for underhill center in huntington underhill center and specifically said gee we don't want to make a recommendation we're not going to just let our voters decide and you'll have to speak with this board about what their viewpoints are   i was at every meeting and participated in the process i came to different conclusions than the other members of the committee and for those of you who haven't had a chance you can read my eight page minority report which is sort of imbedded in the middle of the report and i won't repeat that here but i would like to make a few points sort of in response to some of the things i've been hearing  first of all as someone who represents a minority view i want to make it perfectly clear that the goals that are prescribed that are hoped for here in terms of efficiency of governance addressing the inequities between some of the schools in terms of what they can afford to provide in materials  and basically doing a better job for our kids our elementary kids i agree with i have nothing to say against that my biggest concern is that we are voting on this merger and it's the only kind of merger we talked about and there are reasons that i would think that there could be better mergers if we stepped back and started over can i want to say that first of all we are currently united in our five towns as michael has pointed out we have worked together very well for fifty years as a five town middle and high school  union and that m m u the you stands for union united so we are united already the question is if we feel like we don't have a structure in which we can level out and work together on our elementary then let's start with that problem rather than starting with a solution that came from peel year yes or no we are m m u board functions very well they meet twice a month they're very busy and yes they've done a great job with our fists through twelfth graders one thing our committee did not explore was is there a different way than the modified merger that we could work together as elementary with our elementary schools the state did provide for something called a unified elementary district i'm sorry that that isn't one of the choices on the ballot because i think there's a lot of things in terms of efficiencies and sharing materials and sharing staff  getting rid of the penalty that some of the schools are having in their taxes because say their per pupil spending is too high because they still have to pay the heat on the building even though they have fewer students so those are a couple points i want to make another point is that i've heard people talk about well from fear that if huntington votes no we're going to be charged more we're going to be charged for services well hold hold back ok the supervisory union the superintendent's office has certain things that they have to provide likes special add another and transportation that will not change their mandated by law to offer that at the same rate for all  us the other services that are being talked about being charged more for we won't be getting more services we're talking about how much time central office spends in doing our payroll  doing our budget work if we remain as we are now our own school district that amount of work won't be more than it was before for all the other districts that join for each one of them proportionally it will be less so they may they may see changes that's what their hope is but we will be seeing more we'll be seeing the same in terms of that so hold off on being worried that we're going to get charged exorbitant rates for what we're being charged for now part of our budget if you look very carefully in the budget there's a line for paying central office for their services so that should remain about the same and if it's drastically different then we would have to say wait a minute you're doing the same thing you've always done why would you be charging us more some people have talked about while will be an independent school well we will be no more or less independent than we are now we are we have we are our own school district but we are tied in with the supervisory union brewster pierce count on the central office to do many things for us that will remain if the entire five towns don't vote yes then the supervisory union cannot be completely disbanded those service will say we'll still be there and we will be independent in the same way we are now it won't be like bennington that they're totally their own school district it won't be like that  savings the budget will probably not change it might change it just you know a teeny tiny bit the projected savings which won't happen in the first year because the things they're talking about to save money really won't happen that first year but they're talking about three hundred three hundred twenty five thousand dollars out of a budget of fourteen fifteen million it's less than one percent you have heard that taxes will go down well the only reason the property taxes will go down a little bit is because the state of vermont is willing to subsidize township yes for a few years guess where the money comes from from the state of vermont it comes from all of us when we're at a school board meeting and we're talking about property taxes we go home and we also gosh we pay other taxes to the state as well property taxes aren't the only tax we pay so be careful you don't get wood into thinking oh i'm going to save money on my property taxes because the state's going to pay for that well they're going to charge for it so those are some of the points i wanted to make that weren't necessarily addressed in the minority report and as the evening on rolls i hope to answer other questions thank you and would like just the the part about the savings which we talk about three hundred thousand dollars and again i brought this up on my front porch one post last night where we're not saying opportunity to study this more closely ourselves because we don't even know that's the case but if it's a case that's common than three hundred thousand dollars savings for the entire district i think perceived as weak when it is  the quality piece in terms of the ultimate board representation at this point my understanding is that we would have to vote on a fifteen member board it appeared to me from your slide with  i agree with you about the student molly are things i really wish that the proposal would have been something more like you might see in the senate versus the house majority where smaller for years and some of us are so sure that this is you know this is the way to go and i feel like it would be nice to take advantage of the option of really studying it for years find out what it means to really you know if you to explore the option of independence we had a discussion in which we talked about being fully committed to an independent school i'm fully committed to studying the option of that so i know what that means it's a it is a big membership that we have on the m m u board the judgement we made was that proportional representation to population was not only fair but also if you look at the way mt mansfield has work never of volved voting blocks based on communities i've been on that board for seven years and it took me a while until i actually went to the website to look it up to see who was coming from what town because you just don't see those kinds of discussions at m m u in terms of money we have identified three hundred thousand dollars in our report and that is less than one percent of the budget but we've also been clear that we think because we will be more efficient that we can capture additional savings it's just three hundred thousand are the ones we can quantify the others you can't quantify till you actually experience it but i thank you for your comments brett i want to be i m a little clearer in the response but my recollection is that we were constitutionally obligated to have the representation on the board the represent be determined by the per capita representation of each town i'm not sure about that but that was my i remember spending a fair amount of time thinking about who meant how many members from each town are going to be on the board and i remember being boxed in by the statu that there was a conversation but i couldn't tell you with that i know for sure it would be unlawful to do it in the other way and i don't want to mislead you and i just don't know the answer so i just i was lying on i think my recollection was that the reason we went this direction seemed to be the most sensible one to the majority of the committee next week we don't know the board the board will organize after the election and the board itself has to make those decisions if it follows the m m u model it will have twice m that we're going from basically fifteen volunteers we're starting with forty five volunteers thirty elementary board members and fifteen middle and high school members and we're eliminating all the elementary or eliminating all those positions and replacing it with just what we have now and m m u board  yes i am concerned about that i'm concerned that the the scope and sequence of the developmental years pre k to four is huge much more than budgetary and if if i could have encouraged the committee to consider some other forms of representation other than one fifteen member board have two boards an elementary board and a high school board  under the umbrella of a supervisory union these are the kinds of things we could talk about if we threw this thing out and started over and really talked about what's the best way to oversee all our schools together and share your concerns  news south burlington milton and culture yesterday most of those have a five member board the largest of them has a fourteen member board my experience on em and  you things that really motivated me to deal with this was i was frustrated as a board member that when we're dealing with issues we couldn't consider how the elementary education impacts what's happening with our with our students we couldn't make decisions based on their on priorities that would help them and my sense is that if you have a board that instead of trying to divide in a fragmented structure is unified structure it has the ability to focus on those student needs and taxpayer needs so much better and you don't keep running into other boards to to do this and so when i look at how other boards govern serves the southern part of the district you just don't see those kinds of divisions in the m m u board where you'll see somebody saying gee we want to do this because it will benefit browns river we want to do that because it will benefit camels  and secondly one of the great things i think about a unified board is it gets rid of the fiction that these elementary schools are really separate from us you know they're all our children and they're all our taxpayers  because x rayed five they will be in a unified system and and we are all as taxpayers in the same both together because if we haven't had a fully preparing our children for grade five we're all going to pay for the remediation so from my perspective i i don't see us having that kind of division and i would encourage you to talk to m m u board members and see if that not mansell union and the two middle schools and so on and then you board you can have one hundred thousand rep which actually overseeing the education of students from non huntington towns richmond jericho un i would just like to agree with paul in the case of m m u the five towns got together and built the m m u building and they built the two middle schools there architecturally identical if you were in one building you went the other you would be in exactly the same place so they were built under the umbrella of already unified group i don't think that's the same as the smiley school in the underhill central school the huntington school the richmond elementary those are all different buildings in different neighborhoods yes we all care about all our kids but the issues the buildings architecturally different they're different ages so it's not the same there may be ways we can work together and that would be great to equalize opportunity but to say it's the same as what we have now it's different and we need to recognise the differences and build that into our planning so would you like me to respond i can't take a shot if you're going to have brought so if i may part i think to start it's important to make the distinction between providing financial information and saying that the finances are the primary reason for which we're doing this we as a committee have been asked to quantify savings we've done so i don't think the committee is saying therefore the financial savings are that part of the review by the agency of education the state board of education was done with the legal team and the legal team spent a fair amount of time looking cost of shared services is roughly five percent that's two hours per week on average that central office staff are charged to the taxpayers one hundred ten as i think about what the situation would be if we were to be a non merged elementary district i think central office would spend more on average than two hours per week on supporting proof appears and so while the amount of services may stay the same i see the cost of those services increasing because i don't think we're actually being billed the actual us this year instead i think we're being billed based on a per pupil equalize rate so that's that's one response that i or one point that i make and the other one that i think is important is to give a little bit of the background a context that the committee to shed light into the conversation the committee had when they were talking and if there are towns out there that decide that they want to merge because they feel that there are fish and seas then it's not the position of a non merging town to take away those potential efficiencies from the towns to do decide to merge and so as we enter this we need to look at it from our perspective and i'd also encourage all of us to look at it from the perspective of those towns who do make the decision that they do want to merge so that's part of the philosophy behind that article so i hope that helps there's a response to that great the rationale for merging is largely the efficiencies that will happen in central office the people who actually do number crunching work in central office have said ok we're going to go from having six elementary schools to having and one high school board we're going to reduce that to just one budget maybe two or even three if a couple towns don't join asked if that would cut their work in a like by you know if you go from five to one is it just going to be a fifth of the work know what the people who are crunching the numbers have said is it might once we figure out everything out which is going to take a little while it might cut our work in half so to make some easy easy numbers let's say right now it costs them about one hundred thousand dollars you know that's not the number but let's say one hundred thousand dollars to do that all that accounting and if we are paying five percent by per pupil then that's five thousand dollars that huntington's paying if in the new system it costs them fifty thousand dollars which is half of the hundred thousand but we pay more of that fifty it's doubtful that we would still pay more than what we're paying now everybody else who repaying last for the services they were getting before but it doesn't make sense that we would be paying any more than we were paid before and if we are we have to ask where are the savings that are supposed to be happening in central  will have the responsibility i don't think we need to be giving that board that responsibility and frankly i don't think the border of border that small will be able to  allocate the resources necessary to maximize our elementary school children in the case of the people who make up a small local to on the board thank you i don't see that i'm representing richmond and i don't see that i'm taking care of richmond students or richmond taxpayers i see as has being one community i think it's just as important to me how children perform in huntington as in underhill i think it's just as important to me how taxpayers fare in baldness in jericho i really see us as part of a community and my greatest hope for this process will be at some point that all of us will come to that sense and vision and we have public schools for a reason we don't say to parents educate your kids you're on your own it's our job as a community to do that because all of our students are important to us and i'd like to see us get to the point as a community in m m u where we all have that sense instead of having the division and my passion about this in part comes because i see this divided governance structure is getting in the way of that we really should all be committing to that community and that's my perspective and how it may differ from yours but disappear and there would be a fifteen member board serving twenty six hundred students so if they include pre k twenty six hundred next points out that that doesn't count pre k will be at it now just as a point of comparison the assumption of your question is something that i have a different viewpoint about part of our problem right now as an m m u board is we can't think about people pre k through gr four absolutely i mean if you think about if you think about the way a good school board is supposed to function and we have harry frank here tonight from from the community who might be able to help us walk through that at some point a good school board is supposed is supposed to set policy set budget appoint a super superintendent and provide overall direction for a school system it's not supposed to micromanage the my new show within each and every school building and school boards get into trouble statewide when they do that if we add these elementary schools to m m u we will all of a sudden have an opportunity not a burden instead of thinking about our discrete separate group of grades and not thinking about an integrated system we can think about an integrated system and the same thing goes for folks who will join the sport from the elementary elementary board experience fact if you look at the candidates are running as a pretty good split between m m u board members and elementary school board members instead of stopping their thinking at fourth grade they integrated and i see that as an enormous opportunity it's not a burden we can constantly run into the obstacle when we're trying to figure out what would be best for students or taxpayers but we just can't have that conversation so that's what i'm looking but i don't want to vote here so let me say a couple things to answer bad number one no this is the first time this kind of merger has happened so no there's not another example in the state as far as what happens to a town the votes no by statute by vermont law the supervisory union that helps us now cannot run away from us we are still within the supervisory union even if it only ends up being two districts us and everybody else so the unified district would be a modified unified district with all those who well yes and then for any who vote no there are other districts in the in the bigger district right now or we have six elementary districts and one m m u district so if say four towns vote for school districts vote yes and to vote no there will be three districts in the supervisor union and we will still have the same services so we won't be shoved out the door and it's very important you understand that we are talking about our elementary school we as a town are part of the m m u district our students will remain equally part of the middle schools in the high school we will still be taxed for the middle and high schools i don't know how they're going to divvy that out that's something that's interesting but we are only talking about whether or not we take our elementary school and throw it into one big district with everybody else or whether we keep it as it is now  well we would we would retain ownership of our building if we remain independent and yet where we'd be eliminating the school board and we would retain ownership this the school board of huntington would retain ownership of the school here in huntington so that's what i meant by that is that h i'm hoping that people will vote on this with their hope not the fears i didn't i haven't spent a good chunk of the last year of my life on this because i have miserable visions of tortur i've spent a good chunk of the last year my life on this because i really care about how our students are going to be educated and i know that to really achieve that today we've got to be as cost effective as possible we have to be a community we have to come together and my hope my dream is that the same kind of community that you see it and  today were choose caring people caring teachers caring students all working together and nobody cares if you're from richmond or honey you know under health it just doesn't matter they pull together and i really think that that's the hope for this that if we can get on the same page and say once and for all that we're all responsible for this every child every taxpayer and it's my hope that we can come together as a community that's why i've asked people to think hard and support  hundred almost fifteen hundred members there's a wide range of opinion on this issue as well as every other issue of public education i know in a few of you attended the series one of the series of regional meeting we them that way but i'll give you what we said to work members around the state because we felt this association it was our job put troubling trends in front of people and then ask me and you know i i don't necessarily stand here thinking this is the answer to all our aspirations because these systems are way too complex to think you tweet one it's going to resolve all these it's going to bend the curve on the other hand i do know as an educator that we have come to realize over time and i think actually as a family you know this about her own  many of the minutes of the meetings i have the following observations and concerns from what i've seen there hasn't been any serious discussion or discussion or reporting on digits fifty percent of the population have serious concerns the consolidated control these concerns have been repeatedly presented to the committee at their meetings and i've seen th costs and concerns why didn't this committee better represents the concerns of fifty percent of the population allocating their time at these meetings where are the the fear of loss going to local control i believe this is a complete distortion public concern the solution to this distortion might be t this committee from what they learned were on the road experience should have been very sensitive and responsive to this concern but the committee did hurtfully nothing with it where was the l page thirty five is the minority report this report does represent most of my concerns and the concerns i've heard from the public this is a must read the first paragraph the cost benefit analysis is inadequate i completely agree when i look through the majority report the articles and the attachments i see no costs just  or the costs the public is concerned with the minority report does do an excellent job of raising the questions i have and raising the questions and concerns the public has raised what did the committee do with these real and well documented public concerns and issues members of this committee chose to dismiss this minority report of the public concerns i had tempting to p distorted facts out of the minority questions and concerns so they could claim this is not true i think this is a deliberate attempt to discredit my conservatives under the the guys and this is not true i'm very upset about the callous disregard given by this committee to the public and my concerns about the costs and disadvantages of local i only ask the public that they read this report and look at the majority report for costs and disadvantages i think it's likely you won't find any these concerns and issues the addressed again i don't think you'll find and finally read the dismissive response by the committee to the end of this document to the public concerns in the minority report follow the rules of several of those not true plain and see if you think these are anything other than a deflection of the public concern you coming to town before you vote read the plan i'm tempted to ask who paid for those signs but that's maybe but important part for me a couple thoughts i heard you really talking about the fact that you know if you're the committee was responsive i didn't hear you i heard you say that you didn't feel the committee was representative and i heard you say that the committee was dismissive of people concerns of the whole control  i disagree with you on every single one of your points so i'll aberrate just a little bit i think the committee made and its in the articles that there are opportunities and obligations for the new school board to hold meetings in every town and to find ways for non board members to participate in school culture  the committee was responsive to concerns and questions both in meetings as well as offline i can think of multiple examples that i personally followed up with individuals i can think of individuals who followed up with allison a gentleman who followed up a gentleman who asked a question of can the committee reconsider the clause in the articles that has that essentially eliminates town boundaries within the supervisory union that was followed up on and so i again i think it's important make the distinction of not getting the answers one wants versus not getting the answers and my impression is that people did get answers but they weren't always the interest they want and then on my on the last point of local control i actually think that it's largely a myth that there is such a thing as local control i think right now there's town based control on a very small percentage of school budgets when i think about actual policies and decisions that are made i think those are made in committees that are shared by our that are comprised of members from many different towns and to speak to an earlier point who's going to do all this work just to use me as an example because i think it's illustrated not because egocentric here  t over the last several years i go to a school board meeting a month i go to a chit in an east committee meeting once a month and i go to an executive committee one meeting once a month and so i find myself going to all these meetings thinking about school governance and if there's one board and not all these different conglomerates of boards it would be much more efficient and there won't be control that's given up opinion than brecht does about the response of the midst of the committee i you know people came in had that ten minutes before the committee meetings to say things  but regardless of what was said it wasn't worked into the agenda that night or the following month the agenda was basically unresponsive to the issues that people brought up now i know that we have a difference of opinion and i think that when you believe in something as many people do that this is the right thing you know you just maybe you can't articulate it but you think you're covering it  because i have i had specific concerns that i couldn't seem to get the committee to talk about and gather data on my sense was it was unresponsive it's a different of difference of opinion breck finks  that those of us who are on satisfy didn't get the answers we wanted i think the questions weren't ask that you knew that was occurring because i feel like that's what's going on here and this is a huge overreaction of a problem it should be about our children you know the money thing off the table nobody saving any money so it and i'm sorry you have to drive countless who'll go to all these recurring theme and it ought to be addressed our superintendent has never ever said do this because i don't want to go to meetings our superintendent has said to me many times passionately i'd like to be able to focus on my job of educating students and saving taxpayers money that's the problem we're trying to address and and  the issue is not that he's not going to be in the buildings because he's in the buildings all the time even even when there aren't school board meetings the issue is are we going to spend our administrators time coordinating sixty six different board members decisions and we're going to free the administrators up to focus their attention on students taxpayers that's what i would ask people to think   i think i want to respond on a practical level on a systemic level so to you if i could use you as an example if you're a parent who has a problem or series of problems that you think needs to be addressed the order in which one would address that would be you go to sally first and if you're that your needs aren't being responded to then you would go to john and not john's not helping you then you might bring it to the board so let's just say  switch to systemic let's just say for sick of the argument you you feel like the start of the school day is really problematic and you want that address and so you bring it to the bridge to peers board in our current system the brewster peers board we have to coordinate with all the other boards to address this transportation issue because we do transportation and a shared way but it's not you when it just has to convince the booster peers board you have to convince yes i agree let me just share a couple more continue my logic if i could for just a little bit under a merge system thirty one board so i think i'd be more responsive to the issue i also think that where a merge system and our current system overlap is around a local response to a parent who wants something addressed and i'll say that and of my time serving on the board i've had i put on the board i think five years or so i've had four parents who've come to me with the problem and each of those problems i felt like i was able to to talk to listen to send them to john and then the problem most addressed i think under a merge system you would still have local representatives who would have their finger on the pulse of the community and be able to be responsive so i'm not sure you'd have to go to a community of fifteen strangers i think the local represent representative would still have that responsibility to response to be responsive to individual community members instead of having five which in my time here no one's ever needed five you have two which has question just educated myself first time in history because you know just the level of discourse detail differing opinions out there will be overwhelming in that case but i have been falling for it i think since the  this proposal this is before us and all of our the majority the vast majority of our local leader like that school board members supported in other towns certainly you know of  gives a little bit more job security but i think especially for elementary teachers here they recognize that the education these days you know i don't want to sound tr salt anyone you know that's the last intention but it is incredibly complicated you know the issue around the bus thing i certainly don't like it my kids have a six o'clock in the morning however i also don't want to have high i'm very very deeply concerned about inequities like her as a result of this but governance that's set up for elementary schools that can carry high school this is an issue throughout the state it's also an issue here for us we one of the school districts that i work with they that their their delivery of science one of the schools that feeds into the same high school has half the amount of time that the others because they're in separate districts they have no ability even though they're on the same supervising and they don't have the ability to deal with that inequity here in this district we have in equities or in our elementary grades because we can't all of the budgeting that occurs is happening with any local board like we budget only for mr pierce budgets only and when it comes down to it and your school is pressed financially we're cutting back some school districts have had to cut to the point where they're really at a very minimum and that concerns me greatly that across the board elementary wise we're not providing the same opportunities for math literacy science instructional tools that the teachers need to carry out their their you know their their what's the word they need to be doing this is their purpose for being in the world i was there and i understand that it's really really difficult when things budget gets cut and i'm spending my own money to educate the kids in my classroom so that concerns me greatly and i part of the reason i'm pro merger has nothing to do with the chart you see i'm not feeling like it's going to be a great huge massive savings and  some teachers with their own passion but that equity really concerned i can give you something i can give you some example three schools that were not able to find the passionate about education i live it i breathe it i look up around the walls i get excited by this merger does not in my mind change the delivery of academics and all those other pieces that h at the school what it does allow the school district to work together i don't care how far underhill is the people in underhill are no different than the people in huntington the people in bolton my cousin was there too i think she's so far into me that she can't make a decision that makes sense for everybody no i believe that this is a community honey chittenden chittenden nice the community here that we all are looking out for best interests of our children that's why we're here to debate the finer points of legally or what happens to the school those are for the professionals our job is to look out for the best interests of arc are they going to get the best opportunity i still live in this town because of that one very small point it's tiny i made a call to sally the other day about the prepare announcement she's for that but that thing is that people are taking the time to be here and our superintendent and just for full disclosure i said on the m m u school board i was not voted in i was appointed because i saw that the position i wanted to serve my community every see how hard everybody on the board works i can say for seeing john facilities committee meeting talking about tennis courts a camel's hump middle school because he cares about the entire district doesn't please favor and i think anybody on to hire and all that and these things that we're going to suffer if we go out on a limb and be all by ourselves that can't happen there is no single elementary school district in the state they are all part of  supervisory union because they can't provide all the things that we have so there is not going to be any extra charge no su has the authority to make extra charges for mandated service huntington would have to hold a vote within huntington that agreed to the withdrawal the district outside of money would have to hold a vote that would agreed on eaton's withdrawal and the state board of education would have to approve all those steps would have to occur possible but it's very unlikely plus the building the ownership of the building would have switched over to the unified district so it would be pretty in which they can by a vote of their electorate join after that year however he would have to go through the following process the town would have to vote yes the school district would have to vote yes and the state board would have to a fantastic thing that we have  really cares because but that's not really the issue here it's great that we're a whole and everything but as amazing as it is all the people who are in charge o if we consolidate there by definition not going to be able to allocate as many and resources to our students i think we just have a great system in place and what you're saying about job is to i think your words were or were to facilitate and brain or supervise all those board members of all the different five years like i tell people will really notice it all that much i'm worried about when i come back to raise my kids here i'm worried that the