The Valley Reporter and Mad River Valley Television have made a diligent and concerted effort to cover this community’s work on Act 46, a bill that calls for supervisory unions to consolidate their individual school boards into one board. Consolidation can happen voluntarily by 2017 or it will be forced on local communities by the Vermont Agency of Education in 2019.
Locally, an Act 46 Study Committee has been meeting monthly since last year and it is now in the process of holding public outreach forums to answer questions about Act 46 and to encourage voters to support the early merger.
Early mergers, we are told, offer the financial incentives of lower taxes for five years – and there has been no information forthcoming about what happens after those five years.
Mergers, we hear, will result in economies of scale, but we’re only provided with vague approximations and discussions about combined boards being able to have share resources such as staff and teaching equipment.
And here is where and why we feel the right information is not coming from the supervisory union and the study committee. Repeatedly, we are asked by the public for more information or more specifics or more details about what Act 46 means.
We are reporting the information that is provided and brought up for discussion at these public hearings, but there are many details missing.
There are options other than to merge or get forcibly merged that have been tenuously raised at public hearings and dismissed. There are no concrete details about what a merger will do specifically to local tax rates in our towns over the five years. That is a simple mathematical equation that we have requested since last fall and which we were told was dependent on how much of Warren’s debt would be brought into the newly merged district.
No one at the state or local level has answered the question about what happens to education tax rates after five years. How can voters be expected to make such a shortsighted decision without knowing what comes after five years?
The amount of Warren’s debt that will be allowed is now known. What remains unknown are specifics that can’t be quantified – educational quality, loss of local control, class size, etc. These types of things can’t be quantified. Voters need more information and there needs to be open dialogue on these issues in order for voters to make an informed decision when the merger comes to a vote on June 7.
There is still time for the Act 46 study committee and the Washington West Supervisory Union to explain their support for merging and to provide the missing details and there is still time for those opposed to the merger to clarify their positions.
