By Brett Yates
State Representative Jim Harrison, the Republican legislator serving the Rutland-11 district, visited the local select boards in Chittenden and Killington on Monday night, June 23, to discuss the end of the legislative session in Montpelier. Predictably, the conversation turned to H.454, the controversial education reform bill that passed on June 16.
“ I think legislative leaders and the governor were committed on the outset to make some changes that would hopefully make the education system more efficient in the future,” Harrison said while in Chittenden. “It’s hard to justify, in the state of Vermont, which has a little lower population than the city of Boston, to have 52 supervisory unions. That’s a lot of overhead.”
Harrison discussed some of the ways the planned consolidation of the state’s school districts may impact locals.
“Chittenden and Mendon are its own little school district. One of the attributes of that is we don’t have a high school. The residents of our towns have school choice,” Harrison observed. “With the new [yet-to-be-determined] district maps — let’s just say we’re part of a Greater Rutland County district, and you’re in with Rutland City — there’s a very real chance that [school] choice could go away.”
According to Harrison, some schools in the area will likely close due to new minimum class size requirements. He cited an elementary school in the Windsor County town of Reading as an example.
“I think they have an average class size, K through 4, of eight or nine students or less,” Harrison estimated. “They’re not going to make it.”
Some high schools may also have to shut down.
“We have a high school in Proctor that had a graduating class of, like, 23 this year,” Harrison said. “West Rutland was like 25 or 27. Yes, they had a rich history, but the busing is not an issue when you’re a couple of miles apart. If we don’t make those decisions, we’re going to, year after year, be paying it one way or another.”
