I want to start by saying I appreciate all the time and effort that has gone into the elementary school reconfiguring work. I know some of the people working on it do actually care. I don’t mean to cause any more tension than is already present, so I’ll lay out the biases I bring to this.
I’m a Fayston Elementary School graduate, I’m still in college and don’t own property in Vermont, so I personally do not pay to keep our schools afloat. With that said, the following is in regards to only the elementary schools and I’ll be using the word we for ease of reading.
It seems like Fayston Elementary School has already been written off as the “obvious” choice to close first. It also seems like the board already plans to close down another Valley school after they shut down Fayston. But has an assessment of the buildings and grounds of all the schools been done? Which schools have the most to offer? Fayston School isn’t in a flood plain, it has the best location to promote outdoor learning with lots of trails, an outdoor classroom and three ski mountains minutes away. I could go on with all the things that I personally find sets Fayston School apart from others, but this idea of having to fight for your school to be saved inadvertently puts other schools at risk and ultimately is dividing our community.
Maybe I am mistaken but wasn’t this school board consolidation first sold to us as an opportunity to rethink the ways our schools have been structured? Wasn’t each school going to have a niche that they could offer to the community? How have we gone from creative ideas that could help students learn to closing down schools? When I look at this, I see a numbers game and the kids are the ones who are going to get the short end of the stick. So if it is a numbers game and we no longer care about the kids, where are the numbers with how much we are going to actually save? Because I don’t see how closing down Fayston or any other elementary school will save taxpayers money. Will this be saving us the same amount of money we saved by consolidating our school districts? If we have to close down schools we have to send those kids to other schools, increasing the bussing budget and also increasing the other schools’ budgets to accommodate these extra students, most likely having to spend money to build additions to the remaining schools. We’re fighting the wrong battles.
Education is expensive, especially if we want our kids coming out of it with at least some knowledge. I’m beyond confused why cutting education costs constantly comes up as the solution to lower taxes. Cutting education costs doesn’t make sense on so many fronts. Education costs will only ever rise because education is constantly becoming more and more evolved. Teachers are not simply teaching reading and math, they teach more subjects, they teach far more life lessons that you and I may think are being taught at home but no longer are, and material costs are increasing plus technology has to be integrated which is costly as well. This short-term thinking that somehow we can lower our taxes by reducing the cost to teach a child will get our state nowhere.
We need to be looking at the long term. The long term keeps our kids out of jail, the long term creates curious kids that come up with new company ideas and ways to bring money into their state. For those who are saying or even thinking cutting costs of education should happen, go to one of the elementary schools and spend a few days volunteering with a teacher. See where the money can be saved. Talk to those teachers because, if not all, almost every single one of those elementary teachers has paid out of their own pocket for books and materials because there wasn’t enough money in the budget to buy the kids what they needed. I’m not saying we need to be increasing the education budget, I’m saying we need to take an honest assessment of what this whole thing is about because from where I stand the kids and their lives have been missed.
If we really want to save money on taxes there is no short-term plan, there’s only a long-term one. We tried the short-term idea with the consolidation of school districts that only ended up consolidating power and giving it to a select few. I ask this consolidated board to think why they are on the board. My guess is you came on it for our kids, so before you go closing down schools I simply ask that you think about the benefits this will bring to the kids. And for those of us who are angry and upset at the amount we pay in taxes, I ask the state of Vermont if they have scaled down their budget to the same degree they’ve asked our schools to.
Chloe Emler lives in Fayston, Vermont.
