By members of the Waitsfield Elementary School Board
On June 7, all of the member districts of the Washington West Supervisory Union will be voting on the Act 46 governance merger. The five members of the Waitsfield Elementary School Board will all be voting in favor of this merger. Why? Put simply, we cannot afford the education system that we now have and we will not be able to sustain it going forward as enrollment continues to decline. An accelerated merger will afford us financial breathing room while we put into place a unified school board through which we can collaboratively approach the challenges that face all of our communities.
Under Act 46, we can either voluntarily merge boards and pick up tax incentives along the way or be forced to merge and be penalized further by paying for the mergers of other Vermont supervisory districts. Aside from the fiscal realities of the new law, we anticipate broader benefits that have not always received as much attention in this debate.
As parents, it is natural to feel connected to our small, local elementary schools. We accompany our children to their classrooms, volunteer on field trips and walk the halls with the same familiarity many of our students feel. Therefore, we are very invested in the PreK-6 experience and have lost sight of the PreK-12 continuum of education.
By having one board that works collaboratively on education quality and funding issues across the PreK-12 grade continuum, we can reenergize our school district to think more innovatively, efficiently and boldly about the education of our children from Waterbury to Warren. We have declining enrollment that will create declining opportunities for our youth. This is the landscape that we face if we do not take this first step on the path toward a more collaborative and holistic governance structure that is prepared to face these challenges.
Many of us who sit on our local school boards have also served on the Washington West Supervisory Union Executive Committee Board. The redundancies of meetings and communication challenges are increasingly taxing on board members, many of whom have families, work full time and have multiple other commitments. The work that the WWSU Executive Committee Board has undertaken for years has brought together representatives from Waterbury to Warren to work on supervisory-wide challenges.
The variety of opinions, areas of expertise and experiences have only enriched these meetings and advanced meaningful work throughout all of our schools. By officially merging our boards into one which echoes the similar structure of the WWSU Executive Committee Board, we will create greater transparency and efficiencies for the decision-making and budgeting process while providing one clear forum for wider community input.
We are confident that a unified board under Act 46 will not change the individual character of our elementary schools. Rather, it will create a nimble structure to better elevate the educational experience of all of our children from PreK-12. We encourage Waitsfield voters and those in other member districts, to vote yes on the proposed accelerated merger of the Washington West school boards on June 7.
Waitsfield School Board: Eve Frankel, Jonathon Goldhammer, Jeremy Gulley, Barclay Rappeport and Christine Sullivan
