 everyone tonight. Welcome back. You may have been here many, many times. We have been here quite a few times over the past, it seems like five years or so. But we're here to talk to you about the work that the Bethel Royalton Merchant Committee has been doing. It's pretty exciting work. We're very, very kind of fired up about this plan and hope that you will be too. This version of the brief, you may have seen some of these, it's going to look very similar to you, but there's not a lot of the contextual stuff that you saw before. We tried to reduce that and really focus on the stuff that matters, kind of the core educational architecture and opportunity, kind of stuff. So that's what we're going to focus on. So this will be the basic flow. These are the topics. We'll give you a very brief Act 46 overview, talk about why merge, then go over the proposed structure in detail, breaking it down from high school, middle school, elementary school, and then the SEAL program, also very exciting. Get into financials and then entertain your questions after we're done. Sound good? Questions to this point? Great. Act 46, simple. The bottom line is to increase efficiency and equity by creating larger school districts, save money, opportunity goes up, outcomes improve. That's basically it. For this, the incentive deadline is November 27th. So the work that we're doing right now needs to be done, signed with a bow on it by November 27th and more confident that we can get there once we pass this during the vote. Talk about why merge. So there are a few different reasons why we would merge. First of all, there's Act 46, but more importantly than that, we've seen declining enrollment in both of our schools over the past 20 years or so. This graph shows that there was peak enrollment in the big 1990s. And since then, even though there have been years where things have spiked, the trend has continued downward. So it makes sense for us to bring our student populations together to be able to put some of the course offerings that our students are saying that they're interested in and that we believe they need in order to increase educational equity for all kids in our district. While student populations have declined, costs have gone up. You're still heating a building and running a school with fewer students in it. So if you do the math, you're spreading that cost around for fewer students. So our per pupil costs have continued to increase while our populations have been decreasing. And so those are the main drivers, educational quality for our students and then cost containment for our communities. So what's the plan? This is basically the plan. This is the new architecture. It's quite simple. It has four basic parts. So you have the Union High School, 9-12, which would exist, and Royalton, where the Royalton School currently exists. The Union Middle School would be here in this building in Bethel. You can see the numbers there. Bethel Elementary School, so our little ones would stay here. Likewise, the little ones would stay in Royalton where they are now. That's been a constant theme through all of our workers to keep our younger students at home, close to home, in their home communities. So our elementary schools would also see an increase in what they're able to do. There would be an ability to coordinate curriculum between the two schools. Teachers would be able to collaborate on grade level teams or even on teams as we look at looping so that teachers would understand what they're preparing students for and they could work together. Parents would have a little bit more flexibility. We've run some student scenarios to show what things might look like for families and if a family lives on the Bethel side of the North Road, I'm jumping ahead, they might be able to send their student to school here in Bethel if they're traveling past Bethel Elementary to go to work in Randolph or if that's more convenient for them. Likewise, somebody who lives in Bethel and travels through Royalton might send their elementary student to Royalton. If they worked in Royalton, they might want that small child close to where they are. It gives us an opportunity to expand our health curriculum. Right now we have an elementary health curriculum here and it's working pretty well and so we could collaborate and build on best practices in both buildings to the benefit of all of our kids. There's an opportunity to expand the foreign language curriculum at the elementary school level and that's exciting for our students and families. Right now there's an eco-educating children outdoors program that's been happening in Bethel for two years and I understand that over the summer some Royalton educators got together with Bethel educators and they began looking at partnerships that exist even within our supervisory union without the merger but if we were to merge then that collaboration could continue and grow in some really exciting ways I think for our students. Also it's easier to find full-time staff when you can offer a full-time position. Right now our schools are small enough that we have to offer part-time FTE or full-time equivalents to people often in order to make the budget work and with two schools we would be able to offer a full-time FTE for certain positions that there isn't necessarily room for full-time on one campus but on two campuses you can offer that person a full-time job and serve our students in both schools equally. So this is the scenario that I was talking about. Our communications group heard from the community that they'd like to hear what in practice things could look like for students. So we were thinking about a student who might live on the Royalton side of the North Road so technically they're supposed to go to school in Royalton but their family travels toward Randolph every day and sees a need to send their child to school in Bethel. It's a little closer if that little one gets sick and they need to come pick them up during the day and just makes life a little bit easier for them and that opportunity would exist in this current program. Middle school, pretty exciting capabilities and opportunities here with the dedicated facility and faculty again it would be here kind of partitioned off in this building. Interdisciplinary teams, very flexible schedules, student-teacher advisory so you'd have that contact between a student and an adult through the span of the child's experience. Expanded, great appropriate athletics so we would have kids that are at the middle school age not like fleeting up and playing soccer with 9, 10 and 11th graders which can be an issue. We've had that and that's just a function of having small schools. We want to give the kids as many opportunities as we can but we don't have teams that we can build at every grade level. With this consolidation, more higher likelihood that we can do that, sort of right size and align age to participation. And then the ability to incorporate this SEAL idea, the SEAL program into the middle school level. Lisa talked about the Eco Educating Children Outdoors program that we are already running, have been running for a couple of years. Royalton has it for the first year this year so we have some good positive momentum there and the SEAL program is something that we can build on to the middle school and high school levels. So one of the things that we began to work on is creating interdisciplinary teams at the middle school level. So there would be grade level teams with teachers representing the core classes. So social studies, English, math, science and they're planning and working together so that perhaps students are studying something driven by their interests, perhaps solar energy. And so they are reading text in English class about solar energy in Vermont and some of the positive benefits of that but also some of the things that people are concerned about like pasture land being filled with solar panels. And then in science class they're looking at the benefits of sustainable energy and the potential downsides of solar energy. In math they could be thinking about angles and how you have to put those panels in order to make them work. And in social studies there are clearly social implications of all the things that we've been talking about for our society and communities and global citizenship in terms of managing energy. So those grade level teams could actually all have a piece of that work and supporting students in understanding and solving problems and doing this project-based learning that is a part of our SEAL coordinators work. We'll get more into that. But that coordinator could help support teachers to make community connections and those grade level teams are preparing instruction that's designed for the developmental needs of middle school learners. Sometimes it's a little more hands-on than it is for high school kids. It involves more movement than it sometimes does for high school kids. Those developmental needs are different and we have heard from parents that they would like for their middle school students in some ways to be separate from high school students to preserve sort of being young for as long as you possibly can. So those interdisciplinary pieces are exciting for us. We've sent people to the Middle Grades Institute this past summer and they're doing collaborative work already. Art, physical education, music, foreign language and technology curriculum would be available and would support the interdisciplinary curriculum. It's been challenging here in Bethel to get a full foreign language program going at the middle school level. It's hard to say that when you have such a small population they have to take foreign language or figure out where to put that in the schedule. But with more students it creates more opportunity. Also, more challenging math curriculum when students are ready for a challenge earlier it makes it possible to offer those things if we have a larger student pool. So the schedule would be flexible instead of being linked to a high school schedule which most middle school schedules when they're in the same building as a high school end up unfortunately linked to the high school schedule. It just makes sense that when the cafeteria is available for middle school lunch that's when you have middle school lunch because you're trying to juggle other grade level meals and things like that. So the schedule can be more responsive to the needs of middle schoolers and those grade level teams can structure their days in flexible ways. For example, if a grade level team is the only group of people being affected if you don't have teachers teaching out of the grade level team you could choose to show a film in the cafeteria in the afternoon and then have the whole eighth grade team in here so that a teacher is not spending two days of class time showing that film instead that can then trickle into all the classrooms you've shown the film once the whole eighth grade sees it it does take four days of instructional time it takes whatever it takes to run the film. So those sorts of flexible schedule pieces will be available at our middle school level. There could be whole school drama productions community based learning with our middle school students small groups of students pursuing interests beyond what's in the curriculum looking at again that project based learning piece student interest is allowed to drive the work that they're doing and teachers are facilitating their learning. So the middle school student scenario here as you can see they access their daily programming from their grade level team and it's developed specifically with the early adolescent brain and mind and one interesting thing about this work that went into the design of the middle school piece is that our team that worked the concept of operations which was from both current districts worked with the Taren Institute at UVM which is essentially an educational think tank that focuses specifically and specializes in this age range and grade range and our folks have been working real hard with them to put this together and this is where the concept came from but the flexible schedule that Lisa talked about it allows them to tailor their learning to their interests very aligned with the whole philosophy of the PLP the Personalized Learning Plan is perfectly aligned with that and the student might be able to pursue science by pursuing interest in robotics we might be able to have access for her to go and do those things and then advance math in Spanish while still having time to do other courses that are non-core courses like jazz bands. So again the focus here is kind of isolated and flexibility. Offerings in both sides would so again, if we're in the high school we're in Royalton, that's the site that we intend to put the high school grades 9 through 12 there would be more of course offerings the exciting thing that I heard when we first looked at this and Dean and Owen shared some of the work that they've been doing just with our two schools merging the number of courses that they're able to put in the schedule and still make the schedule run would constitute an 80% increase in offerings for students at Wickham and a 30% increase for students in Royalton so either way it's an increase in student opportunity excluding the fact, which is reality that they would have more peers to work with there would be fewer under enrolled classes so right now there's a large number of classes in both schools with fewer than 10 students and some of the more challenging AP classes in Royalton from what I understand have under five and so those are the sorts of things that we'd like to see improve there's potential to add engineering, medical science, computer science, tracks one of the things that they're starting in 2018-19 at the Hartford Technical Career Center that we'll see show up on a future slide is a computer security program at the Hartford Technical Career Center so if we were offering computer science at the high school then that would dovetail really nicely with working at the Hartford Technical Career Center larger departments also provide more opportunity for teachers to collaborate it's invaluable for professionals to be able to have time together and start to look at alignment have conversations about what's happening in their classrooms and to get ideas from each other it can be challenging to do that work day in and day out if you don't have peers to have those conversations with so we're excited for people to be able to collaborate more I'd like to call out one thing and Lisa hit on it too but what to take away from this little graph here Lisa mentioned Royalton increased by 80% Bethlehem increased by 30% in terms of course offerings and you see that here think about that in terms of building capacity building capacity to teach and you can do that in a couple of different ways one, you can create new courses you have the flexibility now to create and that's where the potential to add engineering, medical science, computer science comes from but you also have the ability as we talked about here to repeat other courses, mostly core courses so right now we have kids that can only take algebra to say because it's only offered at one block during the day during the week if you give them some flexibility there they can still take algebra but take band perhaps they otherwise would not have been able to take because only one section of math was offered before so that's a significant jump and a significant take away for this program for the high school level and some of what we've heard from community members is that students can't access classes because of the schedule that the schedule gets in the way of students being able to access classes one of the reasons why the schedule gets in the way is because as enrollment decreases the need for a class to run more than once also decreases so when you have that class one time on a schedule it makes it much more challenging for students to have that match with their interests, their desires and the other courses that they need to meet so by having more students come together bumping up the number of times that those courses can run you put more flexibility back into the schedule so again Todd mentioned earlier athletics and having developmentally appropriate teams for our kids the state of Vermont on average is seeing a decrease in JV teams not because kids don't want to play JV games but because our small school systems struggle to field teams kids either play up on varsity or play down on middle school and it doesn't leave a lot of room in the middle even though many students are developmentally advanced beyond middle school and are still just a little too young or small for varsity so we anticipate having soccer, baseball, softball basketball all of the things that we typically have things we've heard that students want and that we're interested in having and we think we have numbers to have our winter track, lacrosse golf, ultimate frisbee, hockey volleyball and potentially fencing so that would be really exciting for some of our students who have shared that those are things they're interested in yeah it's just kind of another interesting point on lacrosse specifically it was a conversation that we had probably about a month ago, it seems like about a month ago and the reason we're looking at bringing in lacrosse is because right now, Chelsea girls have a lacrosse team and they participate so lacrosse we're thinking might be an enticement to make this system something that they might want to look to to come and play for this team so this particular one lacrosse I think is something we're looking at as maybe a quick turnaround for the next district to look at so high school extracurriculars again I think these things came out of our student congress that feels like happened a long, long time ago but we heard from students that they were interested in expanded drama programs, musicals and some potential editions so Jazz Band, Bleak Club Robotics and Outing Club A Chest Club and Junior ROTC I know that in Bethel we've had some of these things at various times but the ability to run them sort of has end and flowed as students and teachers have time and interest I'm sure the same thing happens in Royalton as well so the SEAL program we've alluded to that a couple of different times and it's a pretty new and innovative concept and it's a key part of our vision for this merger so to break it down for you as simply as we possibly can essentially the learning in a classroom with a sage on the stage, with a chalk board or a white board and just up there and talking and expecting people to memorize and pair everything back, that's not the only way to learn it's a valid way to learn, classroom education is fantastic I learned very well that way and that's not the only way to learn so the SEAL program was developed to bring in and it's utterly focused on tailored education to the kid, to the student to bring in not only classroom education, as I just talked about but other modes of education that the child might use to the classroom we talked about that community integration actually getting resources from the community that either we can send a child to learn or bring in to the school to teach courses there's so much expertise out there in our communities, we have engineers that are working engineers right now we have math teachers we have physics teachers we have all sorts of people out there we have farmers, we have all sorts that we can bring in to help the kids learn that way, trades as well work based learning, sending kids out in a formalized way to do an internship with a professional that's out in the community in fact, one of our graduates from Bethel last year Taylor Washburn went and did an internship with a plumber and Taylor is on a trajectory I think, correct me if I'm wrong but to get his license within the next year takes some time to do this and it will be a licensed plumber which is a challenging thing to do probably within the next year or so that all started here with this work based learning opportunity service learning, dual enrollment you know about dual enrollment it's the ability for our kids to take high school courses but also to take college courses at the same time that's all there project based learning is when kids get together they collaborate, they create I have to tell you on this I'm lucky enough to have been an advisor and mentor, student advisor student mentor for Randolph's project based learning program for the last three years and so I have been in their classrooms and I've talked to them and what amazes me about it is not just the substantive stuff they do for example one of the projects was documentary filmmaking so actually going out and making a film and putting that film on YouTube etc Radio Free Randolph which was setting up and operating a radio station doing interviews, playing music setting up all of that so it's substantive stuff that they learn but I also noticed that they learn metascales they learn about leadership they learn about project management they learn about planning because it's a semester long and when I go back and talk to a class I just see growth from the first time I talk to them to the end of it and it's just bewildering not bewildering but it's enlightening and it's hardening to see that happen RGCC so that doesn't go away that still exists and then as we talked about before we already have a core educating children outdoors program and this is something that is very tied to Vermont as green space we have a lot of forest out in the back Royalton has a lot of great facilities and great territory that the kids can explore in Rome and the intent here is to build upon what we already have and incorporate kind of more focused environmental science environmental project learning into that system so environmental pieces is key to this this is how it would be man or how it would be a resource to seal coordinators who would actually coordinate the working with the community and takes a lot of work to do that kind of coordination and set kids up to do internships during work-based learning to set up project-based learning projects and to monitor that and to set guidelines and goals they would also be teaching as well a certain number of courses again, other resources both Bethel and South Royalton and we have explored and have seen a willingness on the part of Johnson State College and Castleton to work with us on the outdoor education piece of this as well so part of this would be something like a student might go in to a program and come out of it with Wilderness First Responder with lead no trace ethics certification things like this all very very available and these institutions, Castleton and Johnson are excited about the program they want to work with us no details really specifically about what that is but they want to be there, they want to be there with us to work with us so we want to do that so we have two high school scenarios just so that people can understand what this might look like for students so if we had a student who really felt too confined in the classroom and was ready for an opportunity beyond what's offered in your traditional curriculum that student could work with our seal coordinator take part in community based learning, find a local farm that they want to work with spend a couple days a week on a farm and then spend the other days in the classroom so they're taking part in hands on community based experience they're doing an internship but then we have a seal coordinator who can help that person to document the proficiencies that they need to meet in order to graduate on time of their class Act 77 tells us that students need to show proficiency in a variety of areas and I think that teachers in the state of Vermont have been trying to wrap their heads around that and to expect a 17 year old without guidance to be able to figure out I need to meet this proficiency and here's how I'm going to do it wouldn't be fair to our students so the seal coordinator would be there to help them go out, do the things that they're passionate about and excited about at the same time their meeting proficiency and their on track to graduate the diploma just like everybody else our other students scenario might be a student who has taken a lot of electives has taken a lot of the poor classes that have been offered against to be their senior year they don't really have a ton left to do but they're excited about other challenges within their school and their leadership is important to a school community at least I think that's important to a school community makes me really sad when I hear that more than half of the senior class went to vast and those kids aren't in the building for our younger students to look up to anymore and to work with them so this student makes a decision to spend half a day in Spanish I mean half a day in Royalton they take Spanish for because they've taken it for other years and they want that on their transcript they also are able to continue to be in band in high school in a leadership role because they've been in that band for quite some time they're in their community high school and then they're able to access program at the Hartford area career and technology center in the computer science program focused on internet security that they're excited about and is perhaps on the path that they hope to pursue after they leave high school so now we're going to move into talking a little bit about the financials the numbers before we move into that though I do want to Lisa and I both and in fact for our whole committee I think I can speak for is to thank the administrators and our educators so much for doing a lot of this work in a lot of ways we're up here just you know we're talking dogs they did the crunch work of putting these concepts of operations together they're the professionals and they're all the help going into this because I think we've created a little bit okay now on to the good news financial incentives you've probably seen this before right part of the incentive for act 46 is a decreased tax rate starting for the 1819 school year it's starts at 0.08 and then it goes down over four years by two cents the other piece of it that applies to us here is the transition facilitation grant which is to the tune of 150,000 one time first year of operation so that's on there what didn't come over was the small schools grant that's because Rochester is not part of this plan anymore and what was the other one the hold harmless which is protection against loss of too many kids affecting our cost of people there's a lot of math behind it can go over it if you want don't think we need to right so here is what things will look like for Bethel with the two scenarios so no action which it says underneath that's not actually possible so no action we could vote to take no action but at the end of November the state board is going to start looking at how they want to move schools together so the that's the tax rate projected if we didn't take action and then the lower line is proposed with 36 extra tuition students in our high school so our 9 through 12 grades that number seems like it is within the realm of possibility right now in Royalton there's 25 tuition students so that would add only 11 and we're assuming that Chelsea is moving to choice there are other schools in the area that are looking seriously at becoming choice schools and so they hopefully would look favorably at our combined schools so we do think that 36 tuition students is a number that is reachable for us so there's significant savings there was more savings but we realized that the state of Vermont said you can't have a more than 5% decrease and so that was where the floor was for the savings for us so that's why you see that the rate is 1.73 and fiscal year 18 but then it drops the following year and it doesn't continue to go up again until fiscal year 2022 and at that point I have yet to see a year when my school tax bill actually goes down I will be shocked if this becomes reality because there's always that incremental increase I feel like so having those savings for a number of years and then seeing them start to climb again for dramatically increased opportunity I think it's exciting and I think that rate to we're all kind of hopeful but what we do though going up can be somewhat controlled by the number of kids that we have in our school and if we build a good system which we are building a good system that number of 36 which works for us now we think that's a good assumption now for this year, next year is that probably going to go up and if that goes up you're increasing your ADM the number of kids in the school and your tax rate it may not go down but it may not go down after 22 one of the things that I think it doesn't relate directly to the numbers but it does that I think is really exciting is that even when our town pass this plan then we get to hand over the things that the committee's been doing to the experts so the administrators, the teachers can then start to work with it and take ownership of it and put more details around what they'll actually be doing with students and it's really exciting for me to see what they'll do because I have a lot of faith in them so there's Bethel and Royalton a comparison of what each community stands to say for what the rates will look like for each community and again Bethel's savings are there but not quite as deep in fiscal year 19 as Royalton's because we can't go down more than 5% as dictated by the state of Vermont so that is as much as we could decrease in that year and then the following year and then by fiscal year 21 our rate would be the same so governance for this what's happening is you have two districts that are coming together to become one union district that union district needs to be governed that will happen with a union district school board that will be a six-member board three directors members, directors of board from each town and those will be voted on by members of both towns so you'll see on your ballot six names from Bethel, from Royalton and you in Royalton will vote for all six and we in Bethel will vote for all six so part of that is going to be talked about this a lot at our meetings is to kind of get the word out about the candidates and who they are and what they stand for to give you a little bit more information than we had last time we voted it was a challenge and we need to get those out the budget it's voted on Australian ballot and I think that was a change that we made and that's actually a mistake in the slide so I think in the report it's that they'd be voted on in both towns from the floor so that's a mistake one town meeting but it's a vote from the floor so we still have informational meetings because that was a concern the community members voiced was that they really value coming together discussing the budget and voting from the floor on the budget so that was something that we did put in the official plan the plan is up on our Facebook the Bethel Royalton merger Facebook page that the plan that went to the state of Vermont the state board is there so if you wanted to take a look and make sure to check that fact you absolutely could didn't it also show that the three members from each community have to be nominated by their respective community John Olsen would become the Bethel to get his signature the nomination paperwork and the requirements for the signatures and each of the candidates nominees on community and they're doing the 25th and there could potentially be more than three from each town but you would vote for three from each town right so there's a one year position two year position and three year position from each town and we're planning to hold meetings in early October and invite everybody who's declared their candidacy to speak at those two meetings so that we'll know who those people are after the last round that people were confused about who was on the ballot and in many cases had no idea who people were from the other community that they were voting for so those people will all be invited to those meetings early in October and we'll have an opportunity to meet them at that time, yes I think there was a meeting in South Royalton last evening you may have used the same presentation that last slide that was up was corrective commentary given to the audience last evening on that last bullet I think about the floor last night or the 17th I didn't pay attention to when you guys were doing that there was one last night last night the bullet said from the floor I just wanted to make sure that yeah we've been bouncing these back and forth and I think even if it didn't stand on it I think John would have applied it pretty well but it was going to be a district meeting yes sir does that mean both schools go to one meeting? yes so the meeting if the meeting is in South Royalton and Bethel people have to go to South Royalton to hear the thing but then they come back to Bethel to vote no we all vote together that's my understanding so what we discussed was that we would move back and forth so one year it would be in Bethel and one year it would be in Royalton and one year it would be in Bethel so the school meeting would be well warned and it would go back and forth between the two communities to make sure that we kept things as fair as possible so those are the next steps once the new board is installed they will craft with the administrators and finalize the budget just get into that budget cycle they have a lot of work to do just because of where it falls in the year late October to November new curriculum so there's going to be all of the schools and then we'd be operational for July of 2018 and this would start in the 1819 school year and that concludes these remarks any questions or comments yes Mr. Pudney a couple of times you mentioned Hartford vocational and just kind of gave in quick RCT as usual it sounds like you're moving the technical thing to Hartford is there a reason why you didn't say Hartford and Randolph so RTCC and it was up there a couple of times RTCC is what's more familiar for Bethel so Hartford is the new option both remain on the table and I think that articles that we've agreed to with RTCC indicate that if there's a program at Randolph that's also at Hartford our students have to go to Randolph but if there's a program like cosmetology for example or computer security down in Hartford that is not offered in Randolph then students can have that option as well there are six programs in Hartford currently that the kids could participate in not all there they've got like 18 of them down there but only six of them can they participate in because they're offered the others are also offered and that's not by the articles agreement that's by state law law dictates that so like culinary they have in both places so a student who wants to pursue culinary goes to Randolph yes one of the features with the tech education is that where as Randolph's a full day program at Hartford so that scenario where the student wants to stay and develop a core class but half a day and they go to say Hartford for the others so that option now becomes available to all right that option becomes available to high school students in Bethel and high school students in Royalton well it's already there for high school students yes I was just curious if the health sciences if that was one of the programs at Hartford I don't know I know there's health careers in Randolph I don't know if they're considered too similar they're different they're basically the same program they have different titles but they work under the same CIP code in the same curriculum so if you go to the new high school you'd have to go to Randolph other questions yes Mr. Child I'm sorry I'm sorry can you say something you can go now all right during the past year I've been to several of the meetings Mr. Sears constantly and Geo jumping on the thing of critical mass 950 critical mass and every time an alternative plan or a different concept came up it was always critical mass do you feel like this I'd like to personally ask if you feel like this program is really big enough is it really what your vision of size should be thank you for the question honestly I think that we are still two nano schools creating a small school so my answer is no I don't I wish it could have involved more schools and I wish that we could get a higher student count here but I am absolutely confident when I say that given the work that we've done this system this merger does a lot of good for our kids and it is better than what we have now in the documents they've kept the clause in there that would shoot for a bigger larger school do you foresee that if you could load the board with that kind of personality then you could have a larger school I'm unsure what you're referring to we haven't put anything about a bigger larger school we don't have what's that maybe referring to the clause that we left in about buildings my understanding what I looked at when I presented to the State Board of Education said there would be no new building specifically there's a line in the middle of the current plan that said that we are not looking at a new building and to clarify when you say that I'm talking about student numbers not facilities when I said bigger school I'm talking about student numbers in fact we talked about building there is no new construction as part of this at all that we discussed I mean being attractive to students and communities that offer choice I think that benefits us all of having more peers to work with and our communities in terms of tuition being positive financially Tom thinking back to what you said we're two nano schools the original proposal went through we'd have three nano schools still with one small school yes Mr. Putney has a question and I can come back okay as everybody probably knows I think Bethel should have choice although I think your proposal is 100% better than what we have presently my question is has anybody given any thought to should this get voted down in either Bethel or Royalton to other options is there any discussion going with maybe Rochester and Stockbridge about opportunity instead of just sitting here waiting for the state to come down and say okay this is a good program we're going to do this when it's been voted down a number of times although Bethel if Bethel votes for it again it's voted for it every time and for whatever reason it's got voted down we really haven't had an opportunity to vote on some other other thing that the Bethel school board would be remiss without looking into other options that might be available should this get voted down and I think maybe because I've been vocal about my Bethel being choice that a lot of people think I'm totally against this merger I'm not but a lot of people think I, the people that are against it have talked to me and I think this isn't a slam dunk I think there's a lot of people that have a whole lot of questions I think more in Royalton than in Bethel I think Royalton people don't want to have half of their decisions on their school be decided by Bethel people when they have more people they're not crazy about, they're younger kids being the ones that have to be transported so I just think that the Bethel schools should be looking at other options and have them there so that when the state comes down and says what do you think, well this is what might happen if we joined Rochester and Stockbridge and as far as the tuition things if your program works with 36 extra kids, hopefully the Bethel kids with choice will fill the numbers so we had plan B on the table which seemed like a pretty clear choice to designation or choice when that was on the table with Rochester looking at that path I don't know what the experience was like for Todd or other people in the room but I kept hearing from people at Bell Bains and at Shaw's and in a variety of places well it's really a shame it's too bad we couldn't just work with Royalton and keep our schools in our communities that was part of the reason that we went to the state board and asked that that plan be revoked is because I was hearing so overwhelmingly and I think other members of the board and the community were as well there were some people, yourself included who emerged who said choice would be great for us to look at but I feel like we had a path to choice on the table and we were hearing from people who said this isn't really what we want we want a school in our community I don't think it's a slam dunk but I also think that time is sort of of the essence here I believe Chelsea and Tumbridge are going to the state board tomorrow and I think tomorrow's meeting is probably the last meeting that boards can actually bring a plan to the state board, get it approved have a vote and then the 30 day certification period after the vote occur and still meet that November 27th deadline without the state looking at imposing reconfigurations so I feel like we sort of danced up to that line and then stepped back from it and we're not exploring those other options at this point in time because it feels sort of unethical or disingenuous to be working on two things that are quite different at the same time I'm not suggesting it I am suggesting that you talk about it and maybe throw the numbers out there and we did say at our board meeting I think it was about a month ago that if this fell apart if Bethel said no this isn't what we're interested in and if the opportunity presented itself then we would feel bound to explore choice knowing that we would not be doing it and be able to meet the Act 46 lines actually I'm more concerned about Royalton voting it down than Bethel but should it get voted down it gets voted down regardless of who does it I'm sorry I lost my train of thought you were just about to say what's going to happen after it gets voted out and then then we all have a party oh my point is it's really hard to judge what the communities are doing look at this room and this is the biggest number of people I've seen in any of these meetings I didn't go to the early ones and shame on me but I think it's really hard to know what the community is thinking and I think there's a lot of misconceptions out there and for the life of me I don't understand I aren't here asking questions that I am or anybody else is I completely agree so I think understanding what these people are and we got a lot of older people who vote more than the young people who don't have kids in school like myself and I'll shut up I appreciate having you here Mr. Koutz this is a I don't know if it's well yeah it's perfect to the combining of the schools students with physical disabilities their ability to participate fully in SEAL and in the outdoor education are what if any adjustments or whatever do we provide for them so I think that's a question better suited to one of our administrators I appreciate that because we assume and we do that educators want to educate everybody so that's what we believe but we also have to by law we are accommodating some students already and we don't want anybody to see that or tell them as much as possible but we do it but if we ever ran into a situation where there was some sort of barrier we would reach out to experts at the next level the state probably or further so it's a great question thank you any other questions yes political I personally believe that apathy is the biggest enemy of public education and when you divide a town up and take away its school or take away its governments you're going to increase apathy and I was wondering if there has ever been a study there's been all kinds of studies but has there ever been a study on whether consolidation increases apathy seeing a study that speaks to whether consolidation increases apathy but I think in our last round of talks you brought that up and so I had an opportunity because I do some work with the Roland Foundation and that's a network with Vermont schools and so as a Roland Fellow I was able to network with other schools that they connect with and so I pointedly spoke to administrators and to community members who came to meetings that I was at and educators from those communities and they shared that after a short time it felt like one community specifically I took to heart the things that I learned about the Rivendell school district because they were even larger when we were working with Rochester their kids commute even further than our kids would have commuted with the Rochester kids there and still worked really hard to get to their kids games they do a thing where they do a community movie night so some of the movies that have been produced in Vermont about the opiate epidemic and some of the movies that have been produced in Vermont about a variety of other social issues they would show screenings at school much as we've done here in Bethel and I'm sure you've done in Royalton as well and they still saw people from every segment of the population and they were looking at that data who's coming which kids aren't getting parents to school are they from specific communities or is there something else at work and what they found is that their community became bigger and that after a little while you saw parents from one town sitting with parents from another town it didn't happen overnight but people are united in their love for their kids and it gets people out it's what I had heard so I don't have empirical evidence or study I can put my finger on but anecdotally that's what I know John? I was just thinking about Peter's comment about apathy and I can't speak to how it works in Bethel because I haven't been to your school meetings but as spending time on the Royalton School Board and going to this process I came in lately apathy is fine too just a consolidated district I see it in our own community at home I mean we have 1900 registered voters I mean if you read the list out there's maybe 1400 legitimate and 600 showed up for an election every nine years of going to school board meetings to vote on our budgets if I saw more than 250 people in the audience I was shocked I don't think that happened all that at all so to say that consolidation leads to apathy is very misleading that apathy takes place in communities regardless it's only hope that this may enlarge our community and have the same effect that you just talked about in ribbon day I think the way that you defeat apathy is with energy and what we're trying to do with this is build energy with the two communities so I reject the premise that consolidation equals apathy just don't bite Rebecca for you I think there are so many creative ways that we can counter apathy I also agree that it's a shame there are more parents here and more community members here in this process and I think it may be partly a factor of apathy but also a real convenience issue I don't know that the word has gotten out to a lot of people it's really hard for parents to be here at this time of the week they're not necessarily circulating on social media or at least not in formats that catch people's eye when they're standing for the latest headline so I'm wondering what the boards are doing in particular in advance of the vote to get the story out and really tell people more broadly about the community about the benefits and I would hope that we can follow up with more of that in the future too well this came up last night John answered it very elegantly we do have a multi-prong communication plan and I can tell you Rebecca the only thing that I think that we are not planning on doing is going door to door and knocking in doors and giving out pamphlets but we have sent homes at school we're going to blast articles in the Herald and the Valley News we have a Facebook presence I think we might tweet don't know if we're going to Instagram we're going to have emails we're going to have a lot of that stuff and any help and suggestions that you would have and yeah you can help we would gladly accept it Lisa so send homes that means that little notes you're going to go into the backpacks of all the kids good because I think that could be really effective but when we talk about apathy you know one thing that I think if we ended up having to go to choice I think that that would create apathy and that's one of the reasons why I don't but I hope we don't go that direction that I hope that this passes in both towns because I really think that this could invigorate both towns and really build a strong relationship or strong relationships between towns so that we don't have that imaginary line in fact you know on the issue of community building that's one of the reasons one of the key arguments we decided to go with the governance model that we went to where folks voters from both communities need to learn and engage with the other community you know people's nominees on there to learn about them and learn about that community that was very very intentional to help to forge those start forging those bonds which we expect to grow Rachel I just wanted to comment on the social media Facebook specifically with their algorithms and all that stuff the more you all like and share the more it's going to show up because that's just the way Facebook works the more people like and share the more people see it because I can post on that Facebook page all I want but it's still seven people saw seven people saw seven people saw so you got to like you got to share or seven people are going to see it right and even if you don't necessarily agree having people come out and express their opinions regardless that civil discourse is so important so sharing and getting people to come out and getting people to engage really is important Owen just a reminder we've only just begun we're going to do this again on October 4th right here and October 5th in South Royalton and then again the 23rd in both but also I would assume and I know that any committee member would speak to anyone or any group shoot us emails ask questions Shannon I was just going to say I'm actually really to sort of bounce off a couple of points here really excited about the opportunity for community building here if you think about how our numbers have dwindled in our programs and our sports teams and not the schools all about sports but but that's where parents get really engaged is at the end of the day at whatever soccer game or whatever is going on and we don't have a lot of opportunity for that if we don't have enough kids on those teams and I grew up I grew up in Sharon so I grew up in a choice town if you want to see apathy about your your teenagers in town and what they're doing nobody knows anything we all sort of went to four different schools there's no community spirit there and this way we get to keep all of the kids from all the kids from Royalton all together and just build a bigger community where we're all involved in their lives and stay involved K-12 instead of just K-6 so it's one of the things I worry about with choice is that you just don't have a lot of community after 6th grade Are you doing something Saturday? You mean is our group doing something Saturday? You have a little corner in the middle of town? We'll be there I could wear a button You guys asked me about school consolidation I'll put a little tape on my table Yeah, that's a good point We shopped to learn something about our school that we were the last school that allowed their parents to walk their little kid down to the first grade and now that's been discontinued over like the rest of the people but to me it's sort of an indication that you know the school has identity bigger than the community, bigger than the people and I really think parents, grandparents uncles, aunts in the community make the community if they're denied access to their school it becomes you're more prone to the shootings and things like that if people are part of the thing there's a more of a chance that you're not going to avoid you're going to avoid some of that it's that it's that business of the school being so professional that it's out of reach of the people that don't come to the meetings like this they're all professionals well I understand what you're saying and I enjoy that community feel in schools but I also know that as we look at public safety unfortunately there are a lot of things that have shifted in our society and having been in a school where you're locked down because there's a parent that's said about a divorce or custody battle I think that's why schools have been pushed to make those sorts of hard decisions and it does feel like an intrusion and it feels like it separates community but to be a school looking at liability issues if you're not creating those boundaries could be a real challenge for our schools and our communities I think we get guidelines from the State of Vermont and the federal government and our schools have to comply I think we have school board meetings I don't want to cut anybody off please feel free to send me an e-mail but we do have both board meetings here in the building separate rooms 7 p.m. we're already going to start a little late what's that? at the end of the Wickham Hall thank you all for coming out bring your neighbors thank you