good afternoon everyone we're very very lucky to have a panel today to discuss some of the concerns about the proposed merger that's being presented throughout chittenden east in the last week and then next week or two before november fourth when everybody will be voting the panel today about these concerns consists of two wonderful people  moderator i live in huntington i resident of c e o if you land and the process today will be using will be to ask questions of each of the panelists there is an open call and if you'd like to do that we have some pre set questions and then we'll openly discuss those questions and end up in a summary so allison would you like to talk about why you were involved in a quick summary of your views thank you yes i am an educator a career educator a violinist i'm also an environmental planner and a business owner so i'm looking at th situation from a number of different points of view regarding my heritage i'm very proud to be an eighth generation native vermonter i have lived in richmond since one nine hundred sixty eight i'm especially proud of the vermont heritage of independent thinking and devotion to democratic ideals and part of why i'm here has to do with my interest in preserving that over the past thirty years as an educator in the public school system i have noticed a gradual increase in the number of responsibilities that the schools have had to assume and these responsibilities many of them used to be regarded as parenting and i see this not as negligent parents but as struggling families and it's symptomatic of the gap between the rich and the poor which is growing in our country i think what's happening in our education system can influence this problem one way or the other depending on how we handle it and that's why i'm involved in this thank you well yes i've enjoyed slightly over forty years of experience as a school person i was a math teacher high school principal superintendent my family moved here and ninety  four for me to be the superintendent shit an ace and in my years of experience in illinois nebraska georgia and tiny bit in maryland when my wife was teaching in suburban and baltimore area school system the uniqueness of vermont with our small communities and our boards that are tuned into each of those communities i believe of over the years done it excellent job for every one of our students and and so is this merger discussion started with actually with the commissioner kate some time ago and in zero five zero six combination of several of several schools and several communities and and i don't think the present merger proposal makes any improvements ok thank you i'm involved because i moved to huntington about seven years ago at the same time i entered graduate school who v m an educational leadership and i in my first class was education law and i took that class and then ended up volunteer ing to be a newspaper reporter and covering the huntington school board for the foreseeable appears in because it was there i felt like i could get to know my community and my kids went through twenty years ago all of the school system of the elementary the middle and the and  school high schools high school they both went through the whole system and i agree with you it's basically a really good system it's and however i was filling in not filming working with i was reporting on the events of that the school board in huntington as they struggled with the first merger attempt and i had just reviewed act one fifty three which was the base lot which is been amended to one fifty six and is now the second murder attempt so i got kind of hooked in there of having studied the law than being just by chance of a reporter and following the whole discussion and ending up in that last merger basically saying look there's a list of all the responsibilities for the supervisory union so what is this merger actually going to do that we couldn't already do under the law basically tapping off of what you just said so that sort of hooked me and i am also a planner i really am a community builder so i like that aspect and i felt like this was the second attempt was to resurrect resurrect the issue and bring it back to the voters but not do any consensus building or community building around why it didn't pass in richmond and huntington and almost in bolton before so i would have preferred to stay to say wait for a year do this kind of planning and then see what we come up with a plan but it didn't work that way so we have a series of questions here and i'm going to ask gail and allison to see to respond to the questions and then we'll move on after we have that discussion and if there's any outside calls great so alison do you feel comfortable that the voters have been given enough information to understand understand this merger and what are some of your reasons why you do not feel voters have been given enough information if that's how you feel thank you  i'm very concerned that the voter has not been given a fair chance in this election from three points of view first there is a state law which requires that a question on a voting ballot have there be a clear yes or no question this ballot does not meet that criterion because the ultimate outcome is not clear if you vote yes it's unclear because there's a default mechanism in which a merger becomes a modified merger if a majority of towns but not all towns vote yes which means that if somebody would like to have a merger but not like the idea of the modified merger they don't know how to vote and it unclear what would happen so i actually think that this is a very serious problem another problem is that there's a question on the ballot about the assumption of debts and ownership of school property i wonder how many people realise that if you vote yes for this merger or your town does that you're selling your school building to the merger for one dollar now of course that's just a token amount so that they can assume the responsibility of it but that you're you're not going to own your school building anymore you own a piece of everybody's school building but maybe what you really want is your own school building the assets and the committee issued it's forty four pages of statistics and tables and what i think is probably the most important table in the whole thing about the assets and liabilities is not they are and they were finally this list was put on the c e o s who website after the request of a number of concerned citizens but it's kind of obscure information that you can't find and a person who hasn't had the time to study something like this merger is going to go to the polls on november fourth and not have a clue of what's really going to happen the it's really i think more about closing schools or  unifying the district in a way that just consolidate schools than it is about improving schools so that's that's one concern that i also have and the other concern that i have is  about the temporary tax advantage that's given to towns who vote yes if the legislature believes that mergers are good public policy which some of us do not it might be appropriate to help fund conversions to the different system but to influence voters with a financial bribe is clearly inappropriate and possibly illegal illegal in this this is my opinion so i'm really in a stew about this tax advantage thing i think it's it's not right but i think one of the things that worries me is that people i hope not but i hope people we need this report really think about it before jumping for the tack people are so stressed out about their property taxes that it's definitely a concern yes so gail knew that anything you want to add to that or w f these twice there's a lot of jargon it's very complicated there's a list of potential savings and that list of those old all the way up to three hundred thousand but many of those savings a cost money to do and they never never listed what what it's going to cost to acquire some of these savings the easiest example is there's a plan to potentially to move the central office  richmond building it into a school well that's true they would be saving we would be saving that rent and so there would be income that richmond won't get any longer if we don't pay rent to richmond but but more important any school that would house the central office would have to be remodeled a substantial amount of the phones would be computers the parking parking spaces have to be created so it be quite expensive to try to do that one of the other easy one is it is in the area of jargon but one of our schools gets a penalty because of their high spending so they have on the list of savings that  they're getting a grant of forty eight thousand dollars so that grad obviously takes care of the penalty so it simply means the state gives you money with one hand and takes it away from the other and that's that's not or rare but but that does mean this is not a real savings and in fact under a merger this community would lose both so it's extremely confusing and there are three hundred thousand dollars savings be more likely that it would come in in the hundred thousand dollar range and that's very very temporary and would in fact not go grow to tax savings the other part of the reason for murder is  improve quality education for all students so that there's more one size fits all and that in fact will cost more money but that's a future question i think you have ready so you you see that this plan is not  not going to reduce taxes and that in the long run like most things unfortunately that we see and there are our costs will continue to go up well actually i really agree i think it's a i think it's a m and i think it's one of the several myth that are there bothersome because the funding situation is so complicated that a real review and taking enough time to look at it and analyze the education funding formula and its sources of funds it will be much more important to do than having a temporary tax incentive property tax incentives so that funding in fact i looked i also double check something this morning on our little website about i knew i had a piece of information from i think it was one of the education committees and in the legislature where the department of education was testifying basically saying don't try to sell these things based on cost savings it's probably not likely so those notes came from the committee and i just want to insert that or yes or no in the final debate i watch much of the debate last year about per year but in the that from her point of view which she would not say that this would save one dollar anywhere you know well this in and and it didn't pass in the senate so it's dead for now anyway however it will be were something like that will be resurrected in this legislature because there are a anyway so ok so alison what are some of the results of mergers in other states well i think they started to look into this some time ago because i was interested i wanted to know  what what was the reason for everyone getting excited in montpelier about mergers the original law one fifty three that came in under governor douglas his administration and i asked him what he was looking for in this merger and he said the merger proposal it was voluntary and it still was he said that he learned that room on had more superintendents per child than any other state in the union and he thought maybe we could do with fewer superintendents and have more money to hire more teachers that let's make that w let's talk about the state of maine for example i think yes our he told me that he had had a number of conversations with the governor of maine and this would have been you know quite a few years ago around ten years ago  maybe and that governor thought that things were going well in maine but the two thousand and thirteen legislature in maine tried to reverse redistricting because there was a major outcry  about the loss of the small schools and the moving of students they were unable to make that reversal and one of the big obstacles was that the towns no longer owned their own school buildings so my understanding was that they actually recalled this that law the consolidation law in maine that it became such the big issue but maybe i'm not correct on well they the information that i saw was that they so anyway it ended up making a real mess in philadelphia right now the public school system is eighty one million dollars in debt and it's bankrupt to the point that the mayor is thinking about canceling the teachers contract because of the union contract because they they can't afford it only thirty six cents out of every dollar that comes in the education fund in philadelphia goes to the public schools the rest of it goes to debt service charter schools and retirement obligations and other things and what's happened in that case is like it's happened in a lot of places actually  that the consolidation of schools has caused a rise in private for profit charter schools which charge tuition for students to enter and students have to apply now this is even down  elementary schools and this means that the the people who are wealthy enough to afford these schools can afford can go there and the children who can't go to the public schools which really have deficient resources right now it's a pretty desperate situation there have been i have a list here diane ravitch who wrote this book called the reign of error i think it's quite a play on words there was on bill moyers public television show about a year ago and she speaks of the good the hopes of the privatization movement and the danger to america's public schools and she's very particularly concerned about north  carolina maryland has had problems with public outcry in baltimore in crofton you can read things from people who live in these places de kalb county georgia somebody called the experience gut wrenching because of all the traveling that her had to do wisconsin has seen school districts arranged in manners similar to the gerrymandering of congregational districts and it's hard for me to understand why this realignment of districts has been embrace such a panacea of hope well actually i think one of the things that might have made sense to me for a while would have been at the supervisory union level itself of  doing more exchanges consolidation among the supervisory union saying to county that might have an interesting impact especially for older kids and for administration but in terms of the  younger children and the elementary schools i just i'm going to bring it back a little bit to that that in my career i look at a lot of my administered a lot of early childhood and family support services and  early intervention services and i do look later about what happens to kids in the alienation that happens and the high risk some of the we're so lucky to have the good schools that we have let me say that number one and i am like just not thinking that it's a good plan to transfer the responsibilities of providing input and debating policies about our three year olds three and four year olds and transportation policies and i just don't see with this merger plan that it has actually identified the pros for that population so and i'm mostly familiar with the maine in some of the studies that were done out of the i think it's the national center for educational policy out of colorado that has done a lot of small state reviews on consolidation of governance structures and school systems and they're very very cautious about doing this in world states so you know what do long distance years away sort of way it might but but in general all of our elementary schools feed into our to middle schools and go to high school and when you look at it at that level across the board we 've done next session well for a long long time there are some variations among the schools some schools provide more extra services than others but the reality is you know they turn out by the time the child is merger that will it will address that you know in other words is within an individual school or there are issues and there are teachers addresses as best they can with the resources they have and there's nothing particularly in this merger that will address that all the students and for the for the best thing they can do and what this merger would do would be eliminate those the attention that small communities and the boards get to their faculty and student body thank  you a couple things pop up for me big ones and taking a look at the cost benefit analysis and really trying to you know it's sort of a mix of well where's the data but then again also you know where's the heart of it where the kids w re the the real the outcomes the improved educational opportunities for kids it's not really clear and i and i it's kind of like not taking the old cost benefit analysis from two thousand and eleven and basically putting it in as the two thousand and fourteen one without a whole lot of discussion because the words are basically the same for your three years later but i i did want to say that it was very interesting to me that we haven't taken the time to do that part which if we had planned first we would have that part down and then i might be in a different place around how i might well i don't know but the main thing i wanted to say is about the that the preschool that you mentioned because  it's really important to have the offering it's not mandated there every thirty three year old gets it it's it's just like kenya guard you have to offer it and you can luckily have it in really good places that are in the community you don't have to set up a program in your school you can have a big community based as long as the program is qualified but this was the number one strategic plan priority for c s u pre k and isn't even in mentioned it's not that i can find it in the report so it's a wait a minute if there were some needed here about what it is that this new what the plan but it would be and you're kind of voting in a plan and a board to help that happen but instead that seems to be give us the board and then we'll that's right and if that's exactly what this is that this decision about whether or not what we'll do with pre k is up to the board and not not something that this board is set up to provide then and another very simple kind example you can imagine if we had that in one school what about the other five scarcely oh we have to and again it would be nice and cost money that it would be helping and again it was helping teachers do their job but the reality is when will it result into student changes it'll be down the road quite a bit the other one thing i just wasn't there will go on to the next question but i you know i wish i had we done the planning process first and not rush to judgment on november fourth  i think that that that there would have been a real push to survey teachers and other staff at the schools and parents in particular as well as community people but but to do a survey and asked people anonymously so they don't feel like well geez maybe they're principles for this or i shouldn't say anything or maybe they're superintendent is for it or i shouldn't say anything but i think a big missing piece in here is asking teachers and people who work with the kids directly what they think about the kind of educational opportunities and how do we reach hard to reach kids and and how do we better integrate human services and education not raising the cost of education but attaching integrating human services into the support system for kids and families and schools i think that's a great point oh well thank you  allison you mentioned that the new chair of the federal reserve said that the gap between the rich and the poor in america is the worse it has been in a hundred years yes she and she says this is not consistent with american values do you think the merger will improve this gap in our community i don't think this merger will end proof the gap in this community and one of the reasons is has already been touched upon by gail and we're talking about the advantages that they're speaking about in these meetings of the about the merger some of the shared services that they think they can do a better job with ones that were listed the other night in richmond were custodial training professional development nursing guidance these things can be improved without this up he will of the whole system and i also think that the divisiveness of the of the system if we're we're not reducing the number of superintendents  making a real efficiency here we're just dividing the district a particularly if it ends up being a modified merger and and i'm i'm seeing that  basically as you do that there hasn't been enough research about what this type of system does around the country there was a really scathing article in the chicago sun times recently  by timothy meagan and he titled his article america's schools are being starved into failure in order to justify a mast privatization and he explains that after mass privatisation the next plan on the part of some of the wealthy is to eliminate free public education through charter schools one vehicle for disassembling public education is redistricting or school consolidation now i don't think that we're in that much danger right here right now but what i do see is that this style of merger where we consolidate the school boards and have less yes personal involvement in the small communities is kind of step one you get you get a smaller group of people in control of more public assets and then as time passes it's easier for them to make an impassioned decisions about this community or that community school i want to be so transparent that's really available that's that's right i'm worried about your hill id and i'm worried about bolton in particular if you look at bolton if you look at the assets table if you can find it bolton has the most assets per child how tempting is that to firm out fifty eight children to different schools and assume those assets as a benefit for the  kind of thing frankly scares me so i'm not i'm not seeing a great emphasis on the real values of education i love the fact that some towns have their of their town library in the school building  there's a great deal of community activity that goes on that's not even really about education per se that happens at rooster peer school i know some of the children that have come out of that school are very devoted to keeping that in their town so i know i'm i'm not convinced that that enough work at all has been done on this and in fact neither is the lieutenant governor and neither is the legislature they're working on trying to come up with a better system one that keeps the school boards one that allows perhaps towns to keep their own schools they're working on this system they know that the one that's there right now needs improvement in several ways and i see no reason to jump over this cliff on november fourth that's good to hear because i also hear in that in that particular race both the car and scott race anyway that both are not necessarily into this kind of murder yes so ok let's see we have about ten minutes left and i'm thinking you know what do you think will times that vote no be at a disadvantage no they will not but let me follow up with your last last comment and that is no one as is given any serious consideration to this kind of i think there's no disadvantage i think there's an event each when the town votes no on this article they maintain their elementary school board they made their maintain their responsibility in their seats on the mount mansfield board or be a different board but they'll be  still there in terms of supervising them in the middle school and high school and they'll have all the routine things we've had for the last fifty thirty forty fifty years and so the quality of education and what you have now and what we are you know those folks that have been here their children enjoy will continue as this so from that point of view i think there's absolutely and no disadvantage at all on the other hand i think that as a vote yes they're out there at some risk number one please read the forty four page report if you read that you will not be able to figure out what yes vote means so you know and this is what happened the last time when we difference between that merger study and this one is this merger study is putting a lot of general statements out there without any data to support it things will improve we will save money all of those things are so general that there's no way of knowing what's going to happen take another really simple example one of our elementary schools has a huge bonded indebtedness more than all the other schools  combined happens to be rich when you look at the report you'll find out richmond as over three and a half million dollars a bonded indebtedness the all of the elementary schools combined have only just only seventeen so those folks to join this merger are going to share that debt so it's true that all the all of them will share the debt but the fact that one is so much larger than the others that means those citizens will help pay off that debt however from all the towns however the new budget you will not be able to find out because when you have a merged budget just like them in your budget now it's mers for those three schools but it's all towns where if you have when you have emerged budget that's going to it's going to be less  everybody you know you won't have a budget to vote on by yourself you'll be voting on a total budget your budget will be buried inside the larger budget so you'll never buy line item by line enemy you'll never be able to discover what that is well i am really hoping that they will be producing costs in our budgets that upload into the big super budget but who knows we may know who knows how the votes are going to go so i wanted to mention that i think i've noticed a lot of fear being expressed in a couple of meetings about what if you vote no and i really feel that that fear should be just put away because the supervisory union already has a relationship with us if we say huntington for example or each one of the elementary schools they're not going to build more they can't build more they can only bill what's what's appropriate and it's not you know this whole it nobody's going to go make money on it well let me be more specific on that because the question of are with the merger and if one or two towns vote no then should any supervisory and will continue to exist right state law mandates what those supervisor unions do write the mandate to provide special ed combined services are mandated to provide transportation or and they did to provide curriculum developed a quick and i just made a big development and they're in there they're mandated to do professional development so all of those kinds of items and that's right it's been shared with you and you'll have to pay more if you're not in the system that's not that that is true because it's mandated to be treated equally so i am just hoping that people will strip the anxiety and fear out of that part and look at this well as logically as possible well the facts will do that but the question is can you get the facts in front of those when it's difficult ok so we only have a few minutes  left and i'm wondering if allison you'd like to sum up for yourself about and gail and then i will kind of sum up and close it well i just hope that people will have the courage to vote no to this merger and wait for the system to be improved this this is my hope and i know that there are people who really believe in it and i think that everyone should vote their conscience but for people who are baby going to vote for it because there is scared of what will happen if they don't i hope that we've laid some fears here today that that's that those are really unreadable i also want to mention that in new york city after years of consolidation there's a new small schools movement they're now developing small neighborhood elementary schools with no more than two hundred students in each school because they studies have shown that her children do have that age group especially they do best in a small school environment so i if there are some situations in vermont where maybe it would really be beneficial for a couple of towns to join together and and merge a school without up heaving the whole thing  that that might make sense in individual cases and i hope that the legislature will provide a structure in which that kind of thing could happen reasonably and logically without having huge adverse complicated effects on lots of other people and on the system in general thank you yeah about two weeks ago i sent a letter out to all the citizens of  recessions please read this report carefully it's very complicated read it carefully perhaps you can read it twice and end it once you understand it i'm open you vote no like i will vote no thank you  i guess my summation is that i really do consider this a myth about the taxes and the cost containment until the larger structure the education funding formula and its sources such as readjusting property taxes we have a lot of unintended social policy that's bad coming out of using property taxes for it's me a major piece of the education fund but that part needs to be looked at as well as how do we get how do we get these children to engage them with the kids who are hard to reach  and i do want to close with there are lots of different opinions and i want to really support the above  discussion of these varying opinions and hopefully there are pros and there are cons and there are in between and we need to be able to have these discussions and then if they need to be facilitated they should be facilitated but i don't want to see damage in the community by by people rushing to judgment but i also understand that there are a lot of people who wanted to push for the second attempt at merger because they felt they had the votes before and i just i support of a diversity of opinions and respecting those opinions and hopefully people will do what gayle said which is read the report twice think about it before you vote and if it's too confusing don't vote yes vote so that's that's my sum up thank you so much for agreeing to come and discuss the concerns thank you