Analysis: Act 46 impacts ‘mental exercise’ of shuffling schools between districts

By Shawn Cunningham
© 2023 Telegraph Publishing LLC

At the last Green Mountain Unified School District meeting on Oct. 19, member Scott Kendall of Andover asked for an analysis of whether it would be advantageous for Cavendish to “redistrict” to the Ludlow-Mount Holly District and if there would be an advantage or disadvantage to LMH or GMUSD.

Cavendish board member Kate Lamphere asked why they were only talking about Cavendish, since that seemed like board members were “trying to kick us out.” Members agreed that other scenarios should be explored as well as part of the restructuring committee’s work. With that amendment, the request to provide information and analysis passed unanimously.

Two Rivers Supervisory Union Business Manager Cheryl Hammond said she could work on that – despite this being budgeting season – but she would need to know what assumptions the board wanted used in the analysis. For example, what transportation would be expected and who would provide it?

Districts include assets like schools, teacher contracts

While this might be an interesting mental exercise, the actual process of moving a town from one district to another would be quite challenging because the Act 46 merger process was set up to create greater concentration of resources, not fragment them.

Only two of the current 11 GM board members (Jeff Hance and Deb Brown) participated in the Act 46 merger study committee, which worked from 2015 to 2017. Other members may not realize what the formation of the GM district means for its constituent towns.

Before the merger, each school was its own district and  its own elected board. The Chester-Andover Elementary School was a union district consisting of those two towns. Green Mountain Union High School brought students together from Andover, Baltimore, Cavendish and Chester for grades 7 through 12. There were even “town districts” for Chester and Andover for providing special education that the union district had not been set up for. And Cavendish Town Elementary was its own district, again, with its own board.

For those two years beginning in 2015, the study committee worked to create a single district from the schools of those four towns plus Ludlow and Mount Holly. As a single district, there could be only one high school. This became a sticking point and the four GM towns formed a single district out of their three schools while Ludlow and Mount Holly formed another district and later closed Black River High School.

When voters passed the Act 46 merger that created GMUSD, the four towns agreed that by June 30, 2018, they would hand over all of their school buildings and school property to the new district.  And by Dec. 31, 2018, the old districts would cease to exist.

It is GMUSD that owns the three school buildings and has contracts with the teachers and support staff. In reality, GMUSD and the LMH district are municipalities governed by elected board members and operating on budgets approved by each towns’ voters.

The impetus from some GMUSD Board members to look at “re-districting” seems to be to offer school choice for their towns’ students in high school (and/or middle school.) The Ludlow-Mount Holly district has school choice because it does not have its own high school. Under school choice, a district pays state-mandated amounts for tuition to send a student to a school outside the district. And a tuitioning district has no representation on the board of the receiving school.

Withdrawing from a district

Removing a jurisdiction from a district turns out to be pretty complicated but there is a process for it.

In short, that involves a petition by a town’s voters and formation of a study committee to look at the advantages and disadvantages (educational, financial, viability etc.) for the district and for the withdrawing town and whether the current district promotes or fails to promote the state policy. 

The committee would then write a report either for or against withdrawal and would then send it to school board to be discussed in a public meeting. The report also would be sent to the Agency of Education and the State Board of Education, which would evaluate the proposed withdrawal and determine whether to recommend it to the voters.

Voters in the petitioning town must vote in favor of withdrawal or the proposal dies. If it votes in favor, then the rest of the district’s towns vote on it. If a majority of the voters in any one town vote against it, the withdrawal dies.

Should a town withdraw to join another district, the receiving district’s voters would have to vote on whether to accept the withdrawing town.

The process is liable to be time consuming, require some amount of money and there is a fair chance that it would fail.

At the Nov. 9 restructuring meeting, Committee Chair Adrienne Williams of Baltimore asserted that the original charge for that panel was to find ways to make the best use of the assets of the GM district and not to look at issues of school choice or moving to other districts. That would seem to make any move toward a town withdrawing from the district a local effort and not a board project. It also raises the question of whether the TRSU business office should spend scarce resources on such a project.

If you’d like to learn more about Act 46 and the process that led to local mergers use the pull down menu from the Education Tab on the navigation bar at the top of each page and click on Act 46. Or click here.