 Call the study committee meeting to order at 6.57 and we'll just take care of some of the formalities that we need to do, that we can get done before the forum. I doubt we have a lot of community members that are anxious to hear us discuss the minutes. So I'll call the meeting to order at 6.57. Okay. Are there any agenda revisions? Are there any public comments or correspondence that are not related to Act 46 forum? Possibly. And it was a town meeting comment I had from an interested citizen, an elderly citizen that commented that she didn't have access or a desire to use internet. Really when I was referencing a place to go to find out what Act 46 was doing, thinking how could we get this citizen who wants to know more about it, to know more about it, without giving her this binder? I guess it was the question and that was a little bit stuff. I know we had the handouts and stuff, but it's a very slight overview. I don't know if anybody has ideas. That was the comment that was brought to me from the person that they'd like to have paper copies of stuff. Okay. So I think it would be appropriate for us to refer that to the communications committee to begin to address. I think in general, as the study community begins, some concrete decisions and recommendations will really have to be mindful of what the community be aware of it. Okay. I could have a motion to approve the minutes of March 9th, 2016. Can I get a second? Second. That's okay. Second? Second. Discussion. Yeah, I have just a few little typos that you made and then also that I wasn't present. Okay. They're just typo type of things. We have a few thirty-three and thirty-two. Okay. Are people comfortable not knowing the specific typos that we're going to adjust? Yeah. Anything else? Yeah, they've been given to the click. Okay. Let's hear. Lisa, can you let us know what the typos are? She wasn't present, so I changed that. There was a misspelled word aligned. It was misspelled, so I changed that. You thirty-three. I changed to you thirty-two. And I think there was one more, but I can't remember. There was one more where it said in the birth page all of the effects and what type of model we choose. Okay. Page three, or page five. Page five. Under what Stephen A. Delcher-Pate said the principal is misspelled. The second to the last should be principal. The A. Del S. It seems small, but I truly appreciate those of you that picked up the mind of things. The more accurate our minutes can be, the better. All those in favor of approving the minutes of March 9th, 2016, signified by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstentions? Lisa. Here is abstaining. Okay. So thank you. That takes care of section one. And now it's 7-0-1 or 2. The act 46 form. Just say something. If I'm going around, I think I've got everybody that- I think I know most people by face and name, but if I haven't and you haven't signed in and you're not a member of the committee, we just like to ask you to sign in. Yes. Some of the slides will look at the same, but we'll go into more detail. But I wanted to welcome everyone here. Thank you for coming. As you heard earlier, we'll continue to be looking at multiple ways to reach the community and let them know what's going on. So for the next two slides. Maybe I can just sit here if everyone's consuming. Okay. I am Matthew DeGroote from Worcester and a member of the act 46 study committee. So Stephen has asked me to take you through the most riveting part of the evening, which is the introduction to act 46 and the legal language in it. I assume all of you are at least familiar with the idea of act 46, where you wouldn't be here. But just, you know, very briefly to give a kind of capsule overview. This is a law that was passed in May of last year. It affects education governments in the state of Vermont and some people have suggested that it makes some of the most- it suggests some of the most significant changes to education governance in Vermont in decades. The law specifically requires that school districts either adopt a quote unquote preferred governance model. And that word is in quotes for a reason because that's the language used by the law and presumably is preferred by the legislators. But anyway, to adopt a preferred governance model is defined in the law. Or to demonstrate that an alternative structure will meet all of the goals of act 46, either to the same degree or better. And there are five goals listed in the law and they are in bold text on this slide. So there are three of them that basically deal with student outcomes and student access to education and transparency and accountability. So the first is to provide substantial equity and the quality and variety of educational opportunities. I'm not going to read all of them off the slide. The second one deals with student outcomes, basically improving student outcomes. The fourth deals with transparency and accountability. And then the other two deal with cost issues. So the third to maximize operational efficiencies in other words to look through this change in governance for opportunities to be more flexible in our management and sharing and transferring resources and managing operation of the schools. And then the last one is to deliver education at a cost that parents, voters, and taxpayers value. Which can be interpreted many different ways, but that's the language in the bill. So the study committee represents all five member towns of Washington Central Supervisory Union. So the board of each town had to vote separately to form and to join this committee. And all five of the member boards did that in the fall. And the committee now meets twice a month. There are also subcommittees, primarily one on communications, which meet. And the charge, which we'll look at in a second, asks that the study committee provide a recommendation and a report by June 30th of this year. So that's the timetable that we're on. Again, I'm not agreeing every word that's out there. This is the official charge provided by the full board of the SU to this study committee. But the main piece of it, it starts on the second line when the word determined. So really the objective of the committee is to determine whether the formation of a union school district or another structure is advisable. And to make that recommendation, whether we should form a union school district, which is basically the preferred mahal as it's called in Act 46, a unified K through 12 education system with one school board and one budget for the entire system. Or if there's an alternative model, and there are several options that have been discussed, and another option not mentioned on your by name, but it could be to do nothing. It could be advised not to change the current structure. But in any case, the study committee in its report will need to make clear why it has come to its decision. In other words, to justify its recommendation based on the five goals of Act 46. And now it meets those goals. So then that recommendation would go directly to the State Board of Education. If it's reviewed and approved there, then would come to the voters of the five towns and watch the advisory union for their consideration and either approval or rejection at that point. So that's the basic overview Act 46. There are a lot of details and complexities and nuances if you dig down into this law. If you have any burning questions, try to answer them. But I have a feeling that a lot of your questions and maybe some of the thoughts may come out during the discussion. So seeing no frantically waving hands. Thanks, Matthew. And before we change to the next slide, the reason this slide was presented in the format that it's in, Washington Central Supervisory Union. And that's where this slide came from. It's maintaining an Act 46 link on the site. It's very detailed agenda minutes. Any of the reports or presentations that have been made to the study committee are listed. It's got the link to all the ORCA recordings. Very extensive information. The point now has come out in several discussions. Many people have recommended if you're going to watch anything in the ORCA presentation, the one on March 9th by the leadership team. People found very informative and very useful. The study committee found it very informative as well. So if you're going to watch anything, it's near the very beginning of that presentation. I find it invaluable. So if you've been to any forum, you've seen this slide. We're going to go into more detail on the information that's included there. And I'm going to ask Diane if she can come up and do the governance structures. Diane is our Act 46 consultant. Because of the structure we're in, we can take advantage of some resources. Many of you, I know quite a few people are familiar, but maybe you can just give an intro of yourself before you get going. Sure. Okay. So my name is Diane Kirsten Glickman. I'm a school board member actually from Jericho and Chittenden East, who had merged for the Mount Mansfield Modified Unified School District over a year ago. So we've been operating under that structure. And so I'm here helping to navigate and be a go between the committee and the agency and to try to facilitate all the pieces that need to be completed to comply with Act 46. On my spare time, which is actually my regular job, I'm a school nurse. Just thought I'd let you know. So governance structures, one of the things that's really great about this committee is that they've actually examined what they're doing already. How does this SU work? What are the pieces of it that are working for finance, for education quality? All of those different pieces. But one of the ones that we also looked at was the actual governance structure. How are things aligned in this district? So if you look up at the top, you'll see that we have, this is a diagram of the governance structure plus the lines of communication. It's not exactly chain of command, but lines of communication because some of the things go back and forth. So you can see at the top, you have all your towns and the numbers inside of them are population based on the latest census. You can also see the blue blob that has an S. It's your superintendent over on the side. Each town is connected to a board, which is its local elementary school board and then there's the U32 board. And then underneath that are the principals. And then there's the Washington Central, the full board, which you guys are part of, plus the executive committee. And all the lines in between are the different ways that each group is connecting to the others. One of the things that comes up when you have elementary boards is that there is a tendency to have the principal and the board doing a lot of that talking directly to each other. But the actual boss of the principals is the superintendent. So it does set up an interesting dynamic on that level. Do you have any questions about what you're looking at? Yes. The executive committee, which exists to handle centrally shared services, transportation, human resources, your finance officer, anything that would have to do with an employee had a work-related incident, had to fill out forms with the insurance, liability, all of those things tend to be all in one place. Part of that means that there is a budget item that comes from that that is usually buried into the local budgets. In other words, there's an assessment from that. And this is really common through all SUs throughout the state. So when the individual board goes to cut their budget, they usually can't cut anything that's from that central part that's assessed to them. That part is the part that's kind of not transparent and is not as accountable to the voters in terms of a budget item because it is placed in that area. That budget is approved there. Special education is under that area as well. Anything else that you can see there? So you have a total of 32 board members at your Washington Central SU Board, five each for the schools, and then seven for U32. It does make it interesting in making decisions with all the different places things have to go. So the preferred structure that Act 46 is talking about is a single board that contains committees, single budget, and all the towns above would come into that board and those committees do their work, direct the superintendent, who then directs and manages the educational leadership and delivering the educational programs to the students. That is the structure that they're envisioning and that most of the votes that have already come to pass as in Central, or Gens, Franklin, this is the structure they've adopted. Do you have any questions about this? Board representation would be proportional based on population. So there's been some talk about what would happen if Montpelier and or Roxbury were included into the mix and so I wanted to give you sort of a graphic so you could see what would happen if those two communities were also added into a single board structure. Keeping in mind that you can only have a maximum of 18 board members on board in Vermont. Populations are listed there. Do you have any questions about this one? The 18 board is at its standard. It is. And the population would just be a board. That's a maximum you can have. You can have less. So this is just a little bit to explain that once... Oh, yes. They're going to come. They're going to come. Yeah, they're going to come. Well, not side by side. But what I was going to try to say is that if you wanted to do multiple board governance models, you know, the next two slides I'm going to show you are visuals to describe those. But those multiple board models, which mean you continue to keep your supervisory union and have other boards in them, are listed in the law as actually under alternative models. They can be called second-choicers. Option B. So what happened, like, for Chittenden East is that we wanted to have a single board, single budget, but we made us plan B, as it were, so that if one town did not want to join, we could do the modified. So that was written into the articles. And as the vote turned out, we ended up with modified. So it was a second-choice option. What you can't do for the way we've been looking at this SU is to have those multiple board options be a first choice unless you want to qualify under alternatives. Does that make sense? For those of you who are in the know, I know some of this may sound a little strange. But let's take a look at that in terms of the depictions of them. So this is the kind of system that we have in Chittenden East because we tried. We had a vote that wanted all of our communities together with one board, one budget. One community said they did not want to join. And so what you can see happens is that the other four towns all are a part of one board and all are doing their thing. The individual K-6 in your case board would also be talking to the superintendent, would also be talking to the principal, and then there would have to be another board created to handle those shared services. Now, the shared services we talked about in the executive committee before would all be rolled into that one board. They would be doing all of the work all in one place. So when it comes time to talk about Special Ed, it's not happening in a different place. It's all happening in the same place. But once you have multiple boards, you still have to have your SU model. So you have a little more complexity, but not as much as the first slide. This is a depiction of a layered model as I had read it from our algorithms, our formulas on how to figure it out. There is some debate on how this will end up in terms of a model. So I wanted you to just look at it with caution because they're not sure that this one is going to be eligible for some of the transition funding or tax incentives, which are part of the bill that you may have heard about. And that's another thing that's really important to remember because if for some reason you choose something that doesn't come with transition funding, I can tell you that Chittenden East has used their transition funding and needed to use it. For legal fees, for communication, for plans and developing, how we would move like our alternative program into one of our schools' designs if you needed any architectural work. So it's been really a helpful thing. But if you go to the point where you are choosing a model that does not come with any incentives or transition funding, it's a little harder. When I had the discussion with the agency of education, what they said to me was, I talked about this model and they said, well, we were really envisioning that as happening if one of the towns didn't want to join. And I said, well, that doesn't make sense to me because then you're going to have four, I mean, you're going to have even another board because you'll have, it's like a modified layer in between which added another layer of complexity. So I said to them that this is how I saw it and they said, well, we will be changing the language, we will make that clearer because it wasn't clear. It was said in two different ways in two different places. So I'm getting clarification on that but this would not be a primary structure to go for unless you wanted to come in under an alternative structure. So that is the diagram of the various governance structures that I have for you at this point. Are there any questions about any pieces of this? Yes. What is kind of envisioned in terms of routine communication between schools and principals? It looks like, that looks like the superintendent is kind of the go-between, but is that just intended as a, you know, those arrows about communication or about actual power? Right. And I'm keeping them as lines of communication because if we go back to the single board one, it was like the second one, this is how the actual chain of command is supposed to work as envisioned by Vermont School Boards Association, as envisioned by the best practices throughout the country. That the towns, creative board, or town, depending on where you are, that directs the superintendent, that sets the policies, et cetera, for the entire group, and that the superintendent then directs the principals in terms of a chain of command. With the first one, it just gets really muddy because of the way we've done things in Vermont. And I think that that's just because of the history of creating supervisory unions, which kind of grew up after there were already school boards. And I think that our governance structure and our finance structure just kind of like sort of linked along. It wasn't like it was a thoughtful process to get anywhere. It was always changing depending on what was happening in education and in towns. So does it envision school board meetings no longer having principal spreads and provided with the description of the school? Yes, Stephen wants to talk to that. So that question and discussion is actually outside of Act 46. Statute, we do not operate according to statute. According to statute, the principals work for the superintendent. We've operated differently. It's just how we've operated. I'm not trying to make it judgmental. That's why I'm coming in, because it's perhaps a little unfair to ask someone from outside our district or outside our issue. So that's tended to be how we operate. Do we look more tired if our principal superintendent hires and fires principals according to statute? With this model, how many seats does each town have? Do you want to? That's a great question. Yeah, it's proportional. There are a couple of ways to do the proportional, and there's a whole set of stuff, but the most direct way would be, and it would be very easy to look at this, is to go as to one for 1,000, no matter how small the smallest district is. They always have to have one seat at the table. That's how every other vote, you know, articles of agreement have gone. The only difference was with Essex-Westford, where they have two people at the table, but they have like half votes. But they're not real happy about that. In terms, it just makes things messier. Then if Montpeliers and whatever the numbers. You would like to see that? That's, yeah. There you go. So then you'd have to figure out how you would do that. That would be a big discussion. I'm sure. Yeah? So before you said one for 1,000, and Fullister has about 1,000, East Montpelier has 4,500. They get two? That's a tough one. That would be something that would be an article discussion in the Act 46 Committee. And we would go to legal for that. It would make sure that the legal, your legal representative, your lawyer was there to make sure absolutely met the statute of law. I don't know if you already said this, but isn't it also an option to have for example, without exceeding the maximum number of board members allowed by statute, Fullister could have two seats weighted. They're supposed to be weighted in a half, one half. Yes, that's what Westford did for Essex. So the ratios could be worked out that way as well, more voices at the table, but still there's just more requirements. Yes, under legal advice, I would do that. We would have that discussion. Are there any other questions about the diagrams here? Any particular one you want to see again? The current one we're in? No. So when you say, Dan, we talked about this, I mean, I think we already made a point versus lines of communication. So these diagrams really cut out the town of communication with principle by your own diagram. I'm sure you're not depending on that because, you know, the towns of communication with principle is their school. And parents do too? Right. All the time. Those lines of power lines or communication lines? In this particular one, the only reason why the one in the beginning said lines of communication was because it's blurry. And in this particular one, this is lines of delegation, I guess I would say. You could call it power if you wished, but delegation. So the board is the boss of the superintendent. The superintendent is the boss effectively of the principals. But then again, we're getting into that subject again that is outside of that. So what I think if what you're getting at is how to ensure towns and communities have as much voice now with their principal in another model, that's something for discussion. How that would happen. How they would have that voice? We have no problem having that voice right now in our schools. Nothing has changed in Chittenden East. Do you want me to continue? From the experience? No. So from my experience, do you want to know if they're in present at the board meetings? Some are in some are. What's the difference in terms of what Chittenden East went through and how it is now? I don't think we've noticed any difference. I don't think we've noticed any difference. We still have community coming. We still have community talking to us. We still have our principals present at meetings. Some of them are present at some meetings all the time and some will rotate through, especially the elementary principals. Depends on the topic that we're discussing. So Ruben. Yeah. So one of the things that I think is important to remember is that Act 46 is about governance and it's not about parental interaction or student interaction with the principal. So when a child has trouble, it means to go to the principal's office. Certainly the board is going to be involved. That's clearly an operational situation at the school. And so what this chart is really about is policy and governance and how the direction of the school and from a very high level management perspective, the information flows and the direction of the school flows. The school boards are not involved and we shouldn't be in policy and governance. We're not involved in the day-to-day operations of the school. That's absolutely correct. I'm wondering if you have hired a new principal in that district and how that might have changed and just how that might look for communities in hiring. So in hiring principal, there would be a committee that would give input to the superintendent and that would include parents, teachers and board members. That's how we've always done it. That's how we did it even beforehand. So there would be definitely constituents that would get to interview the final candidates and have some say. So we haven't had that opportunity but I have a feeling it would be from the direct community. I don't see why I wouldn't because the most important thing school boards do is, to my mind, is have great administrators and hiring someone who's going to set the tone for the school is critical. Slide them on all the lines versus authority or whatever. I'm curious to understand that when the rubber meets the road, our scope of authority is quite limited but it seems that our influence is profound. There is a lot of local influence even though I don't think there's actually a lot of local control. So what I'm curious to understand is how communities that have consolidated and one of the results of that is that our five schools are different. They reflect the communities in which they are operating and I think that's one of the things that community members have. So I would be curious to know how an under-emerged governance model that influence persists. So again, it really isn't much different than it was before because most of them major, profound and most interesting decisions were made in the interplay between parents, teachers and that administrator in school. So if they wanted to have more farm to school if they wanted to have a garden if they wanted to have a fundraiser for whatever, those kinds of things, all were coming from the ground up and each school continues to have its own unique flavor. We've rotated our meetings and every one of them is different. Everyone has just enough little twists that's their own and that's their continues to be their purview. Not, I mean our tax, well tax rate or per pupil spending. So I would have to go back and take a look at what changes have been made because of the way the tax sort of discounts worked. Everyone is being brought gradually to a similar rate but in terms of how much it costs individually at each school, we actually I don't even remember that being brought up this year in the merged vote. I think that Huntington has their separate one but we have a different number we have a different number average across so it's slightly higher for the high school because of the weighted for that but it was not, we didn't get it in between each school this year as a merged system. So you don't look at that at all? There's no consideration on the efficiency building? No, it's just on the town taxing rate. No, we are all together for that piece. I don't really recall that being a big feature of our budget presentation. So then you roll that for pupils spending up and then apply that evenly across the town and I understand there's some mechanism in place to bring the town rates closer? Right, and I think the best way to explain it would be for me to look at or show to you our budget presentation which we had to give to the voters to explain all that to but I do not have that in the top of my head. Yeah, this goes back to the hiring issues. I mean I disagree with you wholeheartedly having been involved with several principal hirings and staff hirings it would have gone very differently if local appointed members from local boards had not been on those committees and I have great concern that the people that will get appointed to things like that by the hierarchy are really being appointed because they will be yes meant because they are going to select certain people that are going to meet certain criteria and not really the needs of the community. And the community of this model, I mean the thing that really bothers me the most is we have these great little tribals but the people in the communities pay the bills for this and they own these schools and they are not they're losing accountability right now the local school boards are accountable to them. People don't always pay attention but I'll tell you in bad times they do. When I was on my school board days we had bad times and we had very angry people that we had to account for and this model just does not allow that. It's washed out. There is nobody that the townspeople of Calis or Wester or Middlesex can only go to and really have the authority to say no. I'm really concerned with this model. Australian ballot is going to really hurt us in this and I am not confident that our quality is going to go down and our oversight is going to go down and we're going to see negative results just as has happened in Maine in probably at least 42 to 50% of the schools that consolidate it. That's proven. It's out there. Today I give it to you. But I haven't, I'm not seeing in this conversation where we're going to get this piece of accountability local accountability to the local people who aren't paying the bills they work for. The superintendent works for the people in these towns. The principals work for the people in these towns and we're walking away and we're beginning to flip that to bureaucracy really controlling the people. I don't think we have to disagree yet. This is a valid discussion needs to be addressed. This is not the point in the presentation to do it. This is a discussion that needs to happen within the study committee and within the communities. I don't want to put his feedback. I understand and we hear the feedback but I just want to some of this discussion is study committee discussion that needs to occur and we're hearing it. I'm at the study committee but this is public. Was there someone else that had a comment? I had a question. I wondered if you've been in this long enough to have seen if it's making a difference on saving money which it didn't sound like the study that had done by the legislature didn't sound like it was going to save money to go with this model but it's being pushed down it seems to me as if it is going to save money and I just wanted to address that. Also to address the differences between how it's having the money save the head for our school and some of the other towns that haven't. So I can address the part about how Chittenden East has handled money saving and the interesting thing about it is that you don't know all the efficiencies you can make until you find out to have a structure that allows you that flexibility to find them but right now we were able to we can document $166,646 right now. We're expected to project it to save $300,000. However projected savings I don't like to talk about because I think a lot of people get a little wiggly about you know promising the moon. So we have made some savings our budget increased by .62% for all of those schools. We were able to save enough with all the efficiencies that we made so that a big project we had been planning to do which was to repave and redirect traffic flow between two schools that share a similar campus at $300,000 does not need to go out to bond we were able to find the money within our budget otherwise that would have had to go out to bond. So we're still uncovering all these different efficiencies and all these different ways of saving money as we go along we were able to avoid hiring extra teachers because we offered school choice for kindergarten classes in the north end between three schools so that we got optimal class sizes of 14 in each school with parents choosing to go three miles down the road further with centralized busing it wasn't going to make a difference. So we don't even know where these savings will take us but those are some of the ones that we have so far they're not millions of dollars. What's the percentage on that of the savings? Like $100,000 is what kind of percent? It would be a drop in the bucket I don't even know but I'm sure it's considered a drop in the bucket at the beginning of the start in terms of the savings but it wasn't why we got into it particularly it was for the flexibility. What are your terms? We are Jericho Underhill we don't have Underhill ID anymore Richmond Bolton Huntington is not part of the merged group so we don't have you yet Underhill Richmond Jericho Underhill Richmond Bolton Huntington so those are the terms but I'm not sure where. Do some of those schools have programs like Spanish that other schools don't have or are you seeing that get caught when you merge? Actually it was unequal already because that was one of the programs that was on the chopping block right off so they were whittling away at their foreign language programs and now what we're going to do is we have a proposal out for a language immersion program which would be a program that we would share between all the schools who are in the merged district but not with Huntington because they're not part of it at this point so we might do a pilot we're just talking about it now but it's a possibility at least it's out there so we have to look at our strategic plan figure out where our priorities are in terms of bringing forth our part about the global citizen and what they need for working in a larger world whether or not the language part how we're doing already and then how a language immersion program might be able to help and how we can budget the money for that so that might end up being an extra expense but there's no conversation about cutting we have not had to cut anything we have been able to decrease the cost through natural retirement and attrition so we're not talking about cutting programs as a board member we've all been through brutal budgeting seasons wondering as a board member what your experience with the budgeting process has been in the new entity it's been very smooth very easy Mansfield and a couple of other budgets went down several years ago before we merged so we were having difficulties at that time but we had absolutely no difficulty in coming up with the budget presenting the flyer I have a copy of the flyer here today so you can see how they documented the savings and the projected savings and what happened to the tax rates and I think that might have some of the more data that you were talking about so it went pretty smooth and the budget passed we've been doing Australian some of the towns were already doing Australian we had good turnout and it passed by a wide margin I have to admit I wasn't as prepared to talk about shit and did ease today I was supposed to just talk about the little triangles of hexagons it's great to hear sorry if I don't have all the data on fingertips because I wasn't ready for that that's just a follow up to the last question what was the experience in terms of kind of weighing the needs of the different schools now that you have one budget committee or one board talking about all the schools needs and what's there some playing one school off another versus another or feeling like this one's going to now not get as much as it might have gotten because it's the small one on block that kind of dynamic that's the suspicion that people have about how board members will have motivation or an agenda and that isn't at all how it happened the board members that we have are really committed to the fact that they're all our kids if we short anyone we short ourselves because they end up in one of the bigger schools in fifth grade and another school in ninth grade because we have the middle schools in the high school so the whole point was that Bolton was at risk of closing Bolton's expenses were through the roof decreasing enrollment is hitting all of us how could we better educate everybody in care for everybody so what we did was we implemented a program right off where we rotate our meetings in all the schools and each time we went to a school for the first time every year we get a full tour of the facility we hear about what's working what isn't working you can see visually you know this really needs some help wow they really have enrichment of the wazoo how are we going to deal with that so we've put a visual to that because not everybody knows what everybody else's schools look like so we put a visual to it and have put effort behind it in terms of having every building they do the same thing they did before your priorities bring them forth to the budget committee finance committee put it all together make sure that everybody has you know what we need the superintendent and the finance officer weigh in on it we have heard anyone say that they had any difficulty with any of that you know the only thing in full disclosure was that the principal of the high school said well you know in the old system it was easy for me to move money because I need some new pianos this year now it's going to be a little harder for me to do that I've got to go through another different process to get it but we're going to get it because I know that they'll want to replace those pianos I have a comment that may be able to and you talked about Shadynese a lot of the questions about Shadynese the merger that actually just happened over a year so we have a four years data and themselves again we're actually it's a year and a half now so we were functioning we were in November and then we were functioning all the other boards were defunct by July of this past year 2015 so we've done two budgets actually merge this one because we voted in November of 14 so we did 15 but that was preparing for ahead but we all did it in a different way though but the other boards still existed so this was the first one where the other boards actually still existed but they didn't do the budgeting we did it all together so you've saved $100,000 with two budgets $166,000 in direct savings directed to the merger how much did we save how much are we down on our budget or .62 was the only increase we needed and we didn't cut jobs or programs so I think that it begins to get difficult to describe what can you attribute to the merger and like I said you don't even know what you can do until you have a different system to do it with it's like all of a sudden you open it up and you say oh we can do X, Y and Z we can make different things happen we only have to go through this kind of a process like we moved our alternative program for the K-6 K-4 group into a school as opposed to having it be a standalone we're planning to do that with our 5-12 programs as well so we were paying rent and those kids were separated and isolated and now we can move them into a school we can better utilize the school we have that private preschool because we had unused space we're hoping to move the central office into the school but that's going to take some money for redesign which can come from that transition button thank goodness so that's kind of exciting to see if that might happen yeah thanks one of my questions already got answered and I really appreciate your being on the spot sort of without meaning to Dan just standing up and talking about a totally different district which is really helpful although as you pointed out it's only been a year and a half so there's a whole lot of questions that haven't been answered yet yet about what it looks like to be the preferred model and again thank you for being on the spot I'm hoping at some point that we'll be hearing from the study committee of this our schools to hear their reflections on what they've learned so far through the study process and that's coming up in the presentation so if there was anything else yes and I can come back another time for more prepared I can assume that you're probably in favor or at least neutral about the transition if someone from your district were standing up there and was opposed to it what are some of the things that the opposing people might say great question so Huntington opposed it and so within our articles of agreement you can see what they call a minority report and it was the report that they gave to say that they did not agree with it they had two Huntington representatives on the committee one supported it and one did not most of the reasons that they cited in that report had to do with not enough time not enough data to prove that this works and we could have we could have been in that committee for 10 years and you're not going to get data until you've done it for a certain amount of time concerned that the bigger board would not take care of the younger grades and the first thing we did was get universal preschool and not only that we got a grant for extended day so that all of our kids who are free and reduced lunch if they want a full day five days a week that can be given to them because we understand that that's an investment in our future children so anyway so what else would they say their basic thoughts were fear that someone else would close their school so there was a fear there was distrust not enough data and as we said to them if you're not happy with what you have now if we're not getting everything we want now you know why not take a leap why not trust in the creativity and the good people that you've said are in your community to bring this forward and get something better that's what they would say and they've had three votes towards a merger 19% voted for the first time 29 voted 29% second time and this last round was 47% so it's really close you know I just I want to I applaud the effort to improve quality for kids but I have a lot of concern here that these schools potentially have a great interest to the town itself of economic interest and social interest in drawing people what I'd like to know I know the answer to this if a given community wanted to let's take a Westerer or a Cowles you've got a shrinking population but by that that larger group the new board which is weighted based on population so you can have a big imbalance of power within a few towns can really govern decision making I mean if they decide to close a school because it makes sense to them financially which in our situation here that actually is going to probably be the case would that town have the ability with that town have the power to stop the closure of that school and then you know that which may have really resounding impacts on property values on even their ability to draw families that's true Bolton is in that situation Bolton was in the situation before we merged they remain in that situation they have the tiniest population around 70 maybe with pre-K and so they are the smallest school they're definitely at risk never got that exit off the interstate so Bolton is a struggling situation as well at this point what happens is you build in what you need to into your articles about school closures in the foreseeable future and then you have to again understand that all the town's kids are all your responsibility and I think that events will evolve and whether or not a particular school may close or not it's not on our discussions right now so I think we're all always at risk for that and the other question would be would we choose a different school none of the schools are at their capacity but there are three in the north end and three at the south end just because it's the smallest one doesn't mean that that would be the one that would close it's all right I'd like to move the presentation along you can still ask any questions as we're going we've still got a fair amount of stuff to go over that may generate some additional questions or you still got a chance to ask questions I'm not trying to shut that off but I'd like to move on to some of the other information we have to share is that alright I'll get the round after could you go back fourth slide okay so we have more information through all this stuff presentations we've had the study committee presentation on demographics and student learning we've had a panel of eighth grade students from each town that share their impressions of their elementary school and the transition to middle school and how middle school is gone and then there are special ed curriculum leadership team and some finance presentations and Emily is going to start with special services and curriculum I'm not good at public speaking but can you hear me so talking about data one of the things that we've been provided with during the course of these meetings are great presentations on by Kelly Boshi the head of special services Jen Miller Arseneau our curriculum director our leadership team Marie Bebo our finance director and all of that stuff in detail you can see on the work of presentations so I was asked to create a two sentence summary on special services and curriculum assessments and instruction which I've done and it's pretty simple and basically it just says that as far as special ed is concerned our SU already provides administration and evaluation services of behavior specialists to all of our schools only our para educators have one with students in the schools any needed outside services that a student might require and special equipment that a student might need are budgeted at the individual school level so what we've learned from the discussion with the special services director talking about how sharing staff and sharing equipment would truly benefit the district we did at the end of the meeting ask for a little more data about whether the cost and quality of special ed delivery has been looked at and assessed by other districts who have already consolidated and we're looking forward to hearing a little bit more about that and then on the curriculum level that was more about establishing alignment on the delivery of student learning outcomes across all of the schools so there would be one set of grade level performance indicators that could be measured one right now every one of our six schools has a continuous improvement plan that they have to work on and it has to be reported to the agency of education and ideally we should have one that's district wide and that would mean that all of our educators would share in the collective responsibility of our pre-K through 12 students and we feel that or the presentation implied that this would promote equity throughout this supervisory union and it would better enable providing the resources allocated based on student needs and that we would better be able to monitor the outcomes and there would be accountability and measuring that could be reported on and that we could save so talking about data, wanting more data what's been going on is that each of these meetings we've had presentations by curriculum, by special ed by finance and so this is a learning process for all of us and people with questions I think would really benefit by looking at those work of presentations and seeing exactly what we the information that we've been given by the presenters the floor is going to talk and I want to interject just for a minute this is probably a difficult part of the presentation because we've had these presentations but the study committee has not had an opportunity to reflect as a group so the study committee as a committee doesn't have a response doesn't have a common understanding of all the presentations so what they're trying to present is what information we've got as the committee gets to reflect we'll inform we'll have informed decisions we'll decide how we felt about that presentation how we valued it, how we judged it but we haven't had that chance to reflect yet so floor is going to talk on the leadership we should take questions as we go along I think just a quick question, I've got a lot of voice am I hearing an acronym ORTA or ORCOM could you explain what that is that's the television component we're being filmed right now and if you go to the Washington you can go to the Orca site and find it the easiest way I think to find it is at the Washington Central supervisor at 46 site and there's a link there to the ORCOM so all the meetings are recorded as are most I think the school board thank you so like Steven said I was just going to talk briefly about the leadership team the leadership team came to talk to us at our past meeting and we have been waiting to hear from them so we were very excited and the principle is the feature of our elementary schools and our high school discuss so a simpler governance structure might better serve the students while they also noted to us how they work together under the current structure too stand up getting late can start to fade here if I don't so just a couple words on finance like Emily mentioned we heard from at one of our study committee meetings we heard from the board director of finance for the supervisor and I think her presentation was consistent in a lot of ways with what we're hearing from Diane as far as ideas and concepts about some of the savings that could occur through administrative and governance efficiencies they could be achieved by going from essentially seven entities right now are six boards and in the central office each having their own separate budgets and going to the model of one board and one budget and just to put a finer point on it some of the efficiencies where we would anticipate savings at least at some level I think that's one of the questions is exactly how much of a savings you'll be looking at but there are some kind of ones we would naturally look at or anticipate auditing services, bank account management, check processing payroll benefits purchasing and payroll tax filings some of the areas where by going from several entities to one you anticipate some level of savings some other possibilities that were talked about sharing in physical maintenance and then also in food service sharing and purchasing and to continue down this slide it's in our charge that we're required to talk to outside districts so outside districts mean towns on the side of the five towns that are in our current issue we've had discussions and meetings so far with Montpelier with Twinfield and with Roxbury Twinfield and Montpelier we've had two meetings and all three of those met with the entire study committee on March 9th that's on the video if you wanted to see them we've done some check-ins and we've conducted a community survey so any questions about anything that's got to do with that slide? Kevin? A concern or question about some of the efficiencies that Orchis mentioned I know from just in my town the people that do the work put in a lot of time often times that isn't buildable or is not built and so I feel like if the services get split between different schools the job just becomes exponentially more demanding and I think you lose some of that especially with like food services at our school has a direct impact on the kids they interact with them a lot and I feel like if that job was shared between schools it would become maybe more whitewashed or much more demanding job than it already is I have concerns about sharing some of that staff between different schools and I know it might be an issue for school nurses too working at two schools might be more than one job it's more like three jobs that makes sense that's my main concern need to be recorded we'll get some answers so with the outside districts does Act 46 allow merging with Montpelier yeah Act 46 allows for outside districts to come in it wouldn't have to be it could be outside of Act 46 I mean districts, towns, can for those of you that are familiar with artistic here at U32 have had multiple talks at different levels over many years so it's a logical we virtually surround them so it's logical to have that discussion I think all three groups have been very frank and forward in what they currently see or what they might be currently interested in Roxbury is very interested in joining RSU they send the majority of their tuition their 7th through 12th grade tuition they have a pre-K through 6th majority of their tuition students already come to U32 so it's a logical choice for them they're in a unique situation they're small, they have 36 students in their elementary school they have two and a half teachers and right now they're completely alone the SU they were with is in negotiations Northfield and Williamstown are talking along with Washington and Orange of doing what's called a side by side Northfield, Williamstown would do pre-K through 12th form one entity Washington and Orange which operated pre-K through 8 would be their separate entity they would operate side by side under one SU Roxbury originally was talking was expecting to be able to join in with Washington and Orange but because they're both pre-K through 8 Roxbury's only pre-K through 6th they could not join that in the study committee so they're now in isolated small school that's terrified that in a couple years the state's going to say this is what you're doing so they're very interested in having an opportunity to merge with us, Twinfield in the study committee with Danville and Cabot and kind of frank and upright of forthright they're not 100% sure how that possible merger may go so they're exploring what all their options may be so they're interested in hearing where we're at they're not at the stage or the point where they're necessarily looking for everything but they're trying to do diligence to their communities so they want to know what the options are one pillar how many summer they're very happy with where they're at now they like the way their system's working they think it's the pricing is pretty fair they like the way they're set up there in a one school one board, one budget scenario their pre-K is grade 5 through 8 they've no interest in changing that they still want a middle school that was 5 through 8 and they've been very upfront in saying they would be interested in continuing discussions but if we're not in the same governance structure as them one board, one budget they wouldn't be interested in looking at any kind of a merger so you got it so Diane noted that in the current preference, the current structure that we're under the WCSU budget is not perfectly transparent and I'm wondering if the finance reports that's also something they consider in addition to the efficiencies you talked about well under statute now the way we're configured the SU budget is approved by the full board and it has to be approved before the town budgets are approved because the towns pay an assessment is that the word I want to use an assessment for some of the services so I'll speak for East Montpelier and East Montpelier board members I think will understand where I'm coming from at our town meetings the SU budget frequently comes out and there's a certain amount of dissatisfaction in the community that they don't get to participate in the decision of whether that budget is approved or not approved or changed so under one budget everyone would be voting on that would be part of the budget that you're voting on oh okay so the next thing I'll offer this is statistics so let me offer like a bazillion disclaimers this is from the community survey that U32 AP statistics class is doing a detailed analysis of the statistics this is just some stuff that I did and Chantel's going to have some stuff in a minute but I mean you can look at this from many ways first of all the response rate average developed 5% across the SU so of registered voters that's what I figured the 5% against I think I don't remember 100% but this is strictly from the initial report what was the survey tool we just used a tool that had scanable forms or online so this is the data from this it's preliminary you know it's not something to take to the bank it's not 100% this is where we're at right now and then we looked at three other questions one of the questions was the way it was worded was like I think U32 provides a high quality education or I think Doty provides a high quality education so I had to modify the question a little bit so it would make sense so I just put provides a high quality education and for U32 13% said they couldn't answer that 78% agreed with that statement that U32 provides a high quality education and 10% disagreed for Belin 70% couldn't answer that and the reason I suspect I mean in statistics there's correlations but you can't know for sure but this question was asked SUY so I think a lot of people that weren't in Berlin probably felt like they couldn't answer that but 70% said they couldn't answer that 23% agreed with that statement 10% disagreed with it in Calis no comment 66, agree 31 disagree 6 and East Montpelier 58% couldn't answer agreed with it 37% disagree 5% Middlesex 56, 39 and 4 Worcester 68, 25 and 7 the next question is so again it was is the school board and then U32 or East Montpelier I just shortened it as a school board doing a good job governing U32 was 33% 52 agreed 16 disagreed Berlin 22% 59 agreed 19 disagreed Calis 15% couldn't answer 69 agreed 17 disagreed East Montpelier 17 didn't answer 51% agreed 29 disagreed you can see the percentages on the last two just go to the last one and the other question that was asked it's important for each elementary school to have its own board across the entire SU 13% couldn't answer 45% agreed 43% disagreed in Berlin 39% agreed with the statement 51% disagreed with it Calis 51% agreed with it 39% disagreed with it East Montpelier 32% agreed 48 disagreed Milisex 48, 39 Worcester 66 and 31 so those were the three questions I looked at and I just pulled the digger directly from the report Chantel has more of a qualitative analysis so I kind of offered to do this because I'm a number geek and I just decided that sure I can look at them and see what I see but I didn't do a whole lot of math what I did was I wanted to do I was more interested in patterns and kind of trends that I was seeing and what I saw pop out of me right away was some outliers so that's what I decided I was interested in who were the outliers in this just full disclosure the way I did this was I put the survey in front of me the whole survey that consolidated everybody's answers across and then we also have the surveys for every single town the same way so there were six of them and I laid them all out in front of me and I moved page by page through the whole thing I don't see anything too surprising really what I saw was that our communities see things a lot the same way which I found heartening actually but there were some things that I found interesting the first question was what are the important issues that you see the most important issues that we're facing and for the most part everybody said property taxes was a one so they said that's pretty darn important except for Worcester I thought was interesting and I saw this over and over again for Worcester that they didn't find they weren't as concerned about taxes they weren't as concerned about the cost of the school they answered that one in three everybody else answered it a one social issues was kind of in the middle for most everybody except for Berlin and Berlin found social issues to be a one education was high the importance of education was like one or two in all of them the order was basically small failure, callous, little sex Worcester and Berlin was at least interested in education in terms of kind of related to the other things so what I saw from that is that social issues are something of a great concern for the town of Berlin yeah I saw that I actually right and I think some people didn't as I read through these two or three different times I started thinking that I think some people had it backwards perhaps so I think that might have been something we need to talk about is how well we explain what the numbers mean but one was supposed to be the most important and six was the least important which I think some people got backwards really looked more closely at the numbers yeah five percent so like was it exactly five percent no it was more from yeah people at the numbers they're already just keeping it going on when I find yeah so I mean Berlin and East Montpelier are bigger so five percent is a bigger number of people about five percent almost in our town it was kind of weird because it was different from numbers of people but it was because the towns have very different populations so response tools like Berlin 55, Calis 62 East Montpelier 102 Middlesex 85 and Worcester 35 those are the actual numbers yeah okay so then I moved to the next question which was the most important issues involved in providing education again I saw it was really interesting I kept seeing out and please this is not my opinion at all this is just this is just numbers that I saw so quality of education 66 percent of people gave out a one as the most important very important Berlin was the lowest quality of education was 57 percent there Worcester was the highest again at 74 percent cost 29 percent said cost was a one although in Berlin it was 42 percent in Worcester it was 14 percent so again I just two towns as outliers in the trend that I saw which was kind of interesting was that Worcester is worried least about taxes and cost and keep in mind this is 5 percent of the population and taxes and they care they're the biggest outlier liar and care most about the quality of education Berlin on the other hand was just the opposite and worried more about the cost about the quality and again 5 percent of the population so and then again I said this before but I saw in a few different questions that the social issues are a bigger concern in Berlin than in other towns so that was my quality of analysis of the numbers and for the actual percentages for each town this is based on the registered voters in 2014 so the number of respondents from Berlin in 55 represented 3 percent of the registered voters Kallus is 62 represented 5 percent of the relative registered voters Eswampiliers 102 represented 5 percent of the registered voters Middlesex is 84 represented 6 percent of the registered voters 5 represented 5 percent of the registered voters so pretty uniformly I think I speak loud enough to me this says a couple of things first 5 percent we know it's not relevant so small but those outliers clearly show us the different cultures in the different towns and bridge those cultures together if one is going to be different the other thing I wanted to comment on that is 3 percent of the registered we don't even know people who voted for registered voters I think this is just information I think just expanding on what Dutch has said there a little bit too what I find interesting is the two that are significantly different from the other 3 are also two of the schools that are going to probably care the most power a significant portion of power on that board so there is going to be some cultural clash there there certainly is good potential and there is financial incentive as well as cultural so I think this is not going to be from Rose Law I'm talking about Berlin and East Bob Hillier caring they are very different Westster won't carry a lot of clout Callis won't carry a lot of clout Middlesex won't carry a lot of clout and Berlin and East Bob Hillier won't carry a lot of clout and with the $8 million bond sitting in Bob Hillier there is a lot of financial incentive to have decisions to lighten that burden I've heard that from a lot of people including Tony Klein so that's what it concerns me that the decision making is not going to be local enough I think that the smaller communities are really not going to have much of a voice in this larger community or in this larger community I don't think that's entirely it comes down to can you expect people to make irrational decisions in favor of something that another community might value over what the collective all that is going to be I don't think that's entirely it comes down to can you expect people to make irrational decisions in favor of something that over what the collective all values so I don't think it's entirely that the concern is that it'll be each man for himself and if Wooster goes from having a fully representative board of one person it's more when you take a look at the whole thing how much of these little things that Wooster value actually matter when you're looking at the whole picture so I think it's not just about trust it's really about it's a completely different analysis of what's important as opposed to the whole of just one town and I want to disagree with that okay so let's just go to the very last slide and certainly we probably won't have much time to reflect this in our agenda if it's already I'm going to allow opportunities for questions and comments from the community as long as we've got and we'll just table anything else in our agenda if we have to we don't have anything pressing so next steps we're having a presentation on April 13th on Democratic Civic Engagement that's probably the last major presentation that the study committee will have we'll continue discussions with other districts we're gathering feedback from teachers and staff today we went to U32 in Berlin we've been to Calis in East Montpelier and about this Wednesday with the Wednesday after we're meeting with Doty and Runding beyond the community survey we're continuing for instance our forum tonight together community inputs and questions a governance model will be selected if the governance model is different than what we're currently doing now we'll have to agree on articles of agreement articles of agreement spell out what the governance entity would do it covers things like who would be in that district boards configured how debts and buildings are being handled and some technical things like what's the name of it going to be and things like that so if we wanted to change your governance model we would have to come up with articles of agreement for instance one of the article agreement frequent details with school closures and then we need to prepare and present a report to the full board on our before June 30th that report can either be with a recommendation or it will be we have not been able to reach a recommendation yet and we need further study but on the 30th we're required to report to the full board thanks for the presentation I've gone to a few meetings and a couple things just for feedback what I'm struck by is understanding what the impetus was for this Act 46 and the bill that was in the legislature the year before how little information there is about the possibility of any financial tax benefits of doing this other than a drop in the bucket and shouldn't be used and secondly based on the 5% and it's just 5% and the feedback which seems somewhat consistent in terms of level of satisfaction I'm again struck with why would we do this why would we eliminate local school districts and abolish local school boards based on the information that's been presented because I see nothing that would justify doing that so I think if we go forward the committee ought to really think about when this comes time to a report and selling this to five towns if there's not any information about how this is actually going to save tax dollars and that seems to have been now put aside now it's about learning opportunities for children but based on the information I'm just not seeing anything that would convince me that eliminating local school boards and abolishing school districts would be worth a leap off a cliff try to be mindful of letting everyone make their comments and we may spend a little less time on discussing them here but I want everyone to be heard I guess maybe this is the lawyer coming out about how creative could we be with articles and agreement in terms of could there be an article that says that any programmatic type of particular school could be vetoed by any of that school's representatives that specific example might be too detailed I don't know we haven't really I don't think there's any limitation unless there's a for you the reason we would be doing this is because we don't do it the law agency of education will do it for us I mean there's not an option not to act at least it's the law is written now as I understand it and I'd love to be corrected if I'm wrong fair to say I think the way it's fair to say is if we elect to do nothing we need to be able to justify to the agency of education that we're fully meeting those five goals and there's reason to suspect from the data that we've been shown we're not meeting some of those goals so it puts us at risk if we do nothing the agency of education will tell us what they think we would they'll tell us what they want us to do is that fair? I'll add to that and also I wanted to say I've been told directly by people from the agency of education as well as Rebecca Holcomb that we would be told what we had to do if we chose not to do this I think it's only fair to share that information it was a public meeting that I had with them last summer and you know they were very concerned about local control and I hear those words all the time but to choosing to not do this is a choice that basically means we're handing the choice over to the state because they've told us that that's not a good choice for us so it was pretty direct when that was said and I think I just opened a can of worms but I also wanted to speak to the gentleman sitting next to Reuben I'm sorry I didn't catch your name but you said something about not getting compelling evidence in this talk that's not what this talk was about this talk was to tell everybody who we've heard from what the information was about if you want to actually hear the information to see if it was compelling or not the best way to do that is to go watch those orca videos of the meetings I've done that I've gone to some of the meetings and the legislature amended act 46 with six months of it being passed because of the actions of the people of the state I sort of heard you but what I was saying was that if we don't do something the state's going to tell us to do it the law gets passed on July 1st and at December 31st there was already a bill in the legislature to get to modify the caps when people realized what was going on so to think what's going on come in tell us what to do hire people to the state of the mind I don't know if that's the best way to make the decisions because within seven months of the passage of act 46 the legislature amended in reaction to what people around the state you're talking about the caps I couldn't agree the less what you should tell their job the legislators worked for us they made a mistake with this act they made the same mistake and their communities ended up in revolt and they broke out of the they ended up making their consolidation law voluntary after the fact 42% of towns have dropped out very reasons they have non-accountability rapid rising costs if we don't push back I'll tell you what I will personally lead the revolt to get rid of jannobans whoever it takes and I think a lot of other people will do that that's what democracy is about if something bad happens we don't sit there and say I have to do this because you're saying this is bad law and I think we should be pushing back he's absolutely right I've already been there's been a lot of pressure on the House Ed and Senate Ed that's what the caps got rolled back this is just the beginning so I think if boards actually stand up and push back they don't have the cahoots to take this on I'll tell you jannoban I don't care what they they won't be in the job mark if they don't really do while I do agree that there are some components of this law that are bad there are several communities throughout the state that have gone very quickly to utility and at that point while it's bad I don't know if we're going to get a collective force throughout the state to overturn aspects of the law so I just want to point that out not taking the side I'm just trying to point the fact that several states have jumped on the chance to do this not saying it's good for our community not saying overall they would have to counter a lot of people throughout the state I'm kind of just saying that the articles of agreement I think that they are a fertile area that we can work on and just create what we want to create even though we're in the maybe in the boundaries of act 46 the articles of agreement are where we can create our governance and what it means and it can be detailed I imagine that the agents of education would review it and maybe have some concerns but I think we could do a lot of good things in that area so that's keep ideas coming I think that's really where if this is going to move forward that's where things can be created and established to maintain as much local influence and impact as we can I think Chris took most of my lines out but that's what I wanted to say this meeting really was about hearing from you what is important for you what do you value from your local schools and boards and what do you not like want to lose and also to understand that as a committee we don't have consensus yet we've been receiving all this information and we don't have consensus among us where we're headed but we do understand that every school is different and we really want to value that when we start to either do our sort of agreement which is probably where we're headed but that we're going to take everybody's equally value just as we form this committee we make sure that Doty was represented properly so please keep that input and that democracy part of our process so you can inform whatever decisions we can as we move forward do my best to have this not squeal or lean I have a couple of points that I want to make one my hugest frustration both as a community and a board member with Act 46 is the expectation that was set by the legislature in setting it it has nothing to do with saving money Act 46 was done by the legislature because there's practically a revolt about property taxes but Act 46 has damn near nothing to do with property taxes and that's the bottom line they had to do something, they did something but what they did has nothing to do with the problem that they were charged with solving now that said I tend to be a fair class full kind of guy and I was on the Act 46 study committee going through the summer and what I saw aside from the baloney imposed on this by the legislature is that I think there is actually genuine educational value for our communities and our kids at a bare minimum and very carefully exploring these options so while the reasoning and the expectation and this is also unfortunately the biggest hurdle the committee is going to have to overcome which is the taxpayer revolt when we all have to come out and say guess what, we think this might be a good thing to do but there's no money to be saved in doing it and that's something that I think we can lay very squarely at the feet of the legislature and it's just they said I'm completely unrealistic and unfair expectation for what they were accomplishing with this Act that said, I've heard a lot of good things about the work that this committee is doing and I really do believe that there's educational and community benefit that at a bare minimum we need to explore very carefully and with an open mind I just went, I'm well I'm on the Adobe school board but I'm now on the study committee I wanted to comment sort of along the lines of what Ian was saying about how there's a lot of certainly the volunteers on the school board but also the school employees often go above and beyond and volunteer their own time to carry out what they're doing in the schools and my concern is that while we're consolidating governance we're also going to be professionalizing governance and what I mean is that we're not going to have those local volunteers at the town level like building committees on school boards and other volunteers they're just not going to be the same by-end when you've got one big board who can't possibly know the facility as well as each individual school board so you're going to have layers higher at the top to perform things like having a building's facilities manager maybe that's a bad example because I know that we're trying to go in that direction anyway probably a good idea but you're going to it's going to be professionalized these are going to be hired people to do work that volunteers used to do maybe that's one of the goals because or maybe that's maybe some people in this room think that's a good thing because the professionals will do it better that's one of my concerns and going towards the fear that Act 46 seems to have brought out and what we have to do something because the state's going to do it to us later I will note that those requirements in the law are years ahead 2018-2019 and the community seems to mean that the communities that have already merged under Act 46 were already those communities were already going down that road for one reason or another like chin and east and we're going to have you know in another year we're going to have a new governor probably a new secretary of education and not only that but we're going to have another but by those dead far out of deadlines we're going to have another election for governor and not only that we're going to have two elections for governor before those deadlines happen and so I'm just concerned that we're going to be the people in these towns are going to do something out of fear when we don't know what is going to happen down the road to these struggling communities and it could become quite a political it could be further up in the minds of the political thought in this state than it has been so far it's not a big political football now it doesn't seem to be anyway but as more towns resisted it might become so a couple of good points I hope the uncertainty regarding the legislative future of this law and whether this state could or would impose on Washington Central some governance structure of its own devising we choose not to act let's say that there's a 25% chance of that happening of that really coming to pass how high does the level of discomfort and risk associated with that possibility have to be before we treat that 25% chance as a relative certainty if it really has a 1 in 4 chance of that coming to pass I think the last thing I ever want to see is the state coming in and imposing its decisions on Washington Central for how it wants this SCU and this district to be run so I respect the argument that the legislators are uncertain we're going to have changes in politicians but I still think there's a fair chance that this is going to end now so we have to take it seriously as a practical reality to the gentleman's point about the fact that there aren't really many financial savings to be had or at least no reductions in property taxes I think that's probably true my hope or the conjecture or what we talk about with what inspires us with the optimism of those of us who see it this way is that what if we could do 20% more for our kids with the same amount of money that we're spending now if we could do things with Precave we could hire a facilities manager a professional facilities manager who actually we know the buildings inside and out and be able to respond quickly and in a moment to problems that arise so through efficiency, the kinds of efficiencies that Diane was describing and many others I think there's potential to do much better the students of Washington Central with the amount of money that we spend we don't see a drop in our property taxes I have one better thought but I forgot I just want to speak to the point about you know, we better do something before the state does it to us and I think it's ironic because we were not having the conversation about abolishing local school boards until the state told us to do it so we are doing what the state is telling us to do and one of my greatest frustrations about Act 46 is it doesn't say hey go and figure out how to achieve these goals in Act 46 it says achieve these goals by eliminating your local boards and having one board, one budget which is not the same thing I would be much happier if our goals were to achieve the things in the Act instead it's do these things and how to get rid of the local school boards and how do you still achieve those things it's like the first step is sort of the capital of a person but there is this opportunity to pose to the Department of Education that if we did it this way we would be achieving these goals I think that we've heard in a public meeting somewhere that they're not interested even though the law requires them to consider those sorts of suggestions but that is something that is in the law is making that kind of suggestion we can get where we want us to go but we would like to have local school boards still in the room I just want to say what I would think would be a more fair appraisal I don't think the state is saying you must go you must eliminate boards the state is providing financial incentive if you do that but it's also saying you saw some of the, for instance the layered model there's muds, there's risk there's other governance structures that don't require us to eliminate all their school boards so they're not saying you must eliminate all your school boards but they are providing a cure with saying if you decide to do this we'll provide some financial incentive so from the state side I think that's I remember my other point very exciting so I just wanted to address briefly that the concept that these five towns are culturally so differentiated from each other that combining them would cause a loss of cultural heritage or value which we can't contemplate or something like that I'm not sure if I'm stating that correctly but it just seems to me that if these five towns in Central Vermont would share 98% probably of their cultural values to be honest can't come together and come to cause then that's depressing to me and in fact we already have done it because we're sitting in a school that we already share and govern as a collective unit across the five towns you might also mention something I've pointed to you before which is that there are people on this committee from Willsect and he's my pillar in Berlin and Callis from Worcester and there's not a person on this committee from the Goodman Trust and Ideal Education I have three kids in the system and so that gives me sort of at least allows me the possibility to think about a consolidated governance structure where I think people could consider the needs of all students across Washington Central without bias and with their best interest in mind it doesn't seem to me like a far-fetched idea what seems like a far-fetched and crazy idea is that Berlin, Middlesex and Worcester and everyone else would go to war over I don't know some aspect of future direction of the school so maybe I'm naive about that I wanted to I wasn't going to speak to that but I think I'm going to use something I wanted to say before and that is that working on this on this committee and I'm working in the full board more in the last couple years what I have seen is a group of people who all just really care about kids they all care about kids and they all are great to work with and they're smart people who are creative and we don't sit and we go wait where are you from? I'm going to sit over here there's none of that it's just everybody's just on the board and we work together for the kids so I have a really hard time seeing that as well the other thing I wanted to say is that we haven't talked a whole lot about the articles of agreement and I think that it should be said that we can be really creative with these articles of agreement and my hope is that by taking the bull by the horns and doing this together now proactively that we can create some really great articles of agreement things like Rick you asked about closing the school what if we made it so that it had to be unanimous and the town had to vote for it both that's what I'm going to fight for what if we came up with some great local democracy kind of ideas and I'd love to hear from Susan more on this about using advisory committees within the school or something else local that could run and help to run or at least advise be a conduit from the community to the principal and the faculty of the school that's more local and maybe even had a little bit more to say than just what we have to say which is budget, policy and student learning outcomes that's all we do so what if we could create an advisory committee that could do more than that and I know they're not voted on but we can do some creative things and I'm hoping that by being very proactive with this we can think outside of the box and we can use all these creative minds to come up with some really great things and I hope we have some good detail and thorough discussion because I actually think the committee has not had that yet we've had presentations but kind of like the discussion tonight we don't really know what will happen you know we have hypotheses we have hopes we have some really fine hopes in terms of working together I think we work together really well and that you know I don't think there will be any disintegration of the forward both of all of our tabs I think we get along pretty well generally but I also don't think we have very hard facts you know it kind of tells with Act 46 originally being a cost savings measure and then being transformed into an equal opportunity measure and now hopefully the equal opportunity has essentially taken over but we really have dug into the information that we have and I must say I don't think we have very specific information about how this whole thing might work in reality in tough situations so I am hopeful that our group will discuss that in more detail in order to remain in meetings so I would encourage everyone to come out and see anything on the work presentations that you want to know more about coming to challenges about what about this, what about that but come to our meetings to do that which is I don't want to say unfortunate but we'd love to hear from you but it is a good source of information of what we've heard already and if you hear something different from what we have we can hear absolutely in multiple barriers I would add to what Chris just said even if you can come to the meetings let your principal know let the central office know let the board member know the contact information for all the study committee members on the website at act 46 website at the central office if you can't go and you have a concern the first part of our agenda is public comments or comments that board members have received so even if you can't be there and you want something addressed you have a concern you want the board to hear if you can't come share it we don't want to be exclusive we want to hear what people have to say and we're willing to be very flexible in how that information gets to us so even if it's an email or a phone call or a letter whatever it is if you've got a concern and you can't come please make sure that the information gets out I guess I want to put one other thought out there which is every issue of cuts being made so like at Romney we have Spanish and maybe the article's confederation could have something like you need not confederation but it's like the article sort of had something that says you need a unanimous vote before cutting programming and then I only know that my three kids will continue to have Spanish around me but the other side of that is my oldest my second creator has never taken anything on computer programming and I think she should and I can talk with Brian Chris and Laurie and others and we've got a majority of the Romney board here right now about adding that program how would this consolidate board possibly add that program to all of the schools so I would say at this point it's a good question for the study committee to ponder I don't know what's nine o'clock so it's something we need to talk about it's something we can explore what other districts have done and how they may have addressed adding things I think it's just hard to put committee members on the spot and try to do something on the top of their heads I can say from a buyer's point of view my point of view what I'm looking for and the possibilities that could happen and I think different people look at different possibilities I'm very distressed to see the cuts that are happening and I want to do everything I can to prevent more cuts and at least retain what we currently have for programs so for me that's a strong motivator and if we can realize some small savings collectively that it was maybe it was Chris that mentioned it or Matthew if we can do 20% or 10% or 5% better with the current expenditure that we've got now then I think that's where we might be able to find the opportunity to add some things in but it's a discussion that committee has to have so we're aware of that we're going to wrap up here in a minute are there any more questions or comments okay well that's why I put it out so can you scroll to the bottom part so what this math represents is the current status of governance consolidation within the state right now and the bottom has the color code so the red one the salmon one that's what we were told the color was in Berlin today the salmon one or our successful votes can change not all of those are one board one budget they represent a change from what they previously did the greens are districts as used that are voting in April the purples are voting in June the yellow and that's what we're currently is a merger study committee that's a formal committee that is required to make a recommendation again as we stated the recommendation could be keep what we're doing the recommendation could be one of the structures that you saw tonight the recommendation could be a structure that none of us have yet envisioned the blue is the exploratory committee that's a lower level committee where they're not asked to make a recommendation they're only looking at what options might be and the grays are districts that are already in one board one budget so for instance Springfield is already in one board one budget and the white ones are not any study committee right now I mentioned Rocksbury is interested in wanting to have us explore letting them join our district this district here is white because they're the ones that are in a district with a New Hampshire school so you want to scroll up and so you can just see some of the different state ones we know the Northeast Kingdom one has decided to do nothing and Stowe has decided to do should I say nothing or they're looking at well anyway white ones mean they're not in any form of a merger discussion so it's just presented as information once April and June come and it'll give us more feedback on whether communities have voted to change their governance structure or not any last questions is that a question I just wanted to say that the next meeting is April 13th is that right and we'll be talking about democracy and engagement and that's one of the things I'm excited about so if anybody's interested in that I want to come on April 13th thank you okay I'm not telling people they need to leave but I'm going to adjourn at 46 study committee meeting by consensus at 904