T. Hunter Wilson is a former member of the Marlboro School Board and for 47 years a teacher of writing and literature at Marlboro College.
MARLBORO-On Town Meeting Day of this year, the citizens of Marlboro will decide whether to close our school and to become a nonoperating school district, distributing our schoolchildren among neighboring towns.
From the way this question has been posed to the town and from some of the arguments that have been presented from people whose knowledge and experience of the school I respect, I expect the vote to go against our school. I am not alone in this expectation.
Some school staff are already leaving, and teachers are already applying for different jobs. Families are planning to move away from a town with no school, with only buses to take their children elsewhere, to schools in which those families will have no voice.
I am deeply opposed to closing our school, not because I do not see and understand the issues that make its continuation difficult, but because I see in our situation decades of anti-democratic policy and hostility to public education and a profound misunderstanding of its importance in our country. I see a long-standing impatience with the values of small rural schools embedded in their communities.
It is our duty to resist such policy, such hostility, such misunderstanding, and such impatience, because our country is under attack from the top, and if we lose our local institutions, we lose the foundation from which we must rebuild.
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In some respects, Marlboro may seem a special case, having just lost Marlboro College, itself an extraordinary educational institution which was a cultural and economic base not just for the town but for this corner of the state. However, the forces that have been brought to bear on Marlboro are there for every small-town school in the state and, to some extent, in the country. We are a canary in the coal mine.
So what are the forces that I see at work here? They are not hidden, but they often come with a pretense of benevolence and a promise for funding that turns out not to be kept.
At the federal level, Congress, beginning in 1975, laudably passed what eventually became the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), which required that every school provide free and appropriate public education for children with disabilities and proposed “a permanent, broad-scale federal assistance program” to do so.
In fact, Congress has never covered the full cost of this mandate and has covered less and less of the costs of such education year by year. In Vermont those costs are now covered at the supervisory union level, which now prevents any student from outside our supervisory union from tuitioning into Marlboro Elementary even if they want to, as they have in the past.
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 provided educational funds while imposing a measurement of student outcomes by standardized testing that presumed a national agreement on what constitutes a good education and how to recognize it. No such agreement exists, and in 2015, the Every Child Succeeds Act dumped the responsibility for administering standards back to the states, but with sharply reduced funding.
The current administration in Washington has cut the funding at the supervisory union level still further, by some $700,000, requiring an additional tax contribution from Marlboro just this year of just under $107,000.
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At the state level, consider Act 46, which in 2015 consolidated educational funding, supposedly to save money and to improve funding for small schools in towns with an inadequate tax base.
The policy was sold to us mostly on the strength of the issue of fairness for those small towns, and we supported it for that reason, despite doubts about the loss of control over our own spending.
The state imposed a funding formula for which it had no data, promising to gather the data to make the tax rates equitable. It did not gather that data for years, and when it did, it found that the formula had imposed disproportionate costs on small districts. It did nothing to compensate the disadvantaged towns.
Act 46 also encouraged, rather forcefully, the consolidation of school districts, cutting the number of districts (the number of school boards) by more than half. The touted savings did not appear. Rather, both the cost per pupil and the overall cost of public elementary education in Vermont rose substantially, with around 10% of that rise contributing nothing to actual education; it went to increased student transportation.
Here in Marlboro we chose not to consolidate with neighboring districts and chose, rather, to maintain autonomy and control of our local school.
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Through the height of the Covid pandemic, Gov. Scott was probably the best governor in the country, listening to expert advice, explaining both what he knew and what he did not, while publicly answering questions from all comers.
Unfortunately, he seems determined not to do any of that for education. His concern about education seems to arise almost entirely over its cost.
Gov. Scott selected a secretary of education with no experience in public schools, whose appointment was rejected overwhelmingly by the Vermont Senate, whereupon he appointed her anyway.
Which brings us to the current legislative folly of Act 73, through which Gov. Scott is trying once again to impose district consolidation, an idea so bad that the very people the governor appointed to propose its implementation told him it was unworkable.
When he learned that small schools are not generally more expensive on a per-pupil basis, he abandoned the argument for consolidation as money-saving in favor of an unsupported and vague claim that it would be more equitable.
Vermont’s families need and deserve better.
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Nearly every discussion I have had about the problems with education has had almost nothing to say about actual education. We talk about state and federal requirements, population forecasts, tax rates, and deficits, and I have tried to address some of these concerns here.
As others have pointed out, the long-term tax consequences of closing a school are by no means certain, and it seems likely that without a school, the value of property in Marlboro will only diminish.
I believe that, without arbitrary requirements from the state, our school board and our teachers can figure out how to run an excellent small school. The issues we’re facing are not new, and Marlboro and its school board have a long and strong history of advocating for what’s right for our children, in this small rural community.
Of course there will be things that a very small school does not do but, by the same token, there are also things that only small schools can do well.
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