Rural Families Feel Disempowered in the Face of Efforts to Reshape Their Schools

Worcester community members who are advocating to preserve their local school Credit: Kevin Goddard

Parents in Worcester fought to protect their small elementary school twice in recent months. Last fall, when the Washington Central school board began talking about potentially closing the central Vermont town’s Doty Memorial School — as well as Calais Elementary — families successfully organized to shut down the discussion.

They assumed that Doty, which serves around 75 kindergarten through sixth-grade students, was safe — at least for the time being.

But last month, school district administrators unveiled a different plan: to lease five of the eight classrooms at Doty to Turtle Island, the largest childcare center in Washington County, starting next school year. The plan would provide a lifeline for the nonprofit Turtle Island, which is losing its longtime home base in Montpelier and has been scrambling to find space to accommodate around 70 infants, toddlers and preschoolers.

But the arrangement would also result in Worcester’s fifth- and sixth-grade students being bused to Rumney Memorial School in Middlesex next school year — a move administrators said would provide the school’s oldest students with greater educational opportunities.

Worcester parents went to bat for the school again, writing a 10-page letter to the administration and school board outlining concerns. Nearly 150 people signed it. They showed up at school board meetings and community forums to voice their frustration with what they consider a half-baked plan sprung without warning. Several parents put forth detailed counterproposals for how the school district could lease space to Turtle Island without displacing Doty students.

Despite the opposition, the school board voted on May 7 to move forward with Turtle Island, contingent on negotiating an acceptable lease. The situation shows how communities react when they believe decisions affecting their children and way of life are being imposed without their full participation. And it is an indication of the pushback likely to occur should the state move to an education system with fewer, larger school districts and less local control — as both Gov. Phil Scott and the legislature have proposed this year.

“Quite frankly, the students of Worcester were ignored tonight.” Lisa Hanna

Around 50 Vermont schools have fewer than 100 students, according to the Vermont Agency of Education. They are thought to be especially vulnerable as Vermont’s education system is transformed.

Vermonters are accustomed to having a say in educational matters and are deeply protective of their local schools, said Daniella Hall Sutherland, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Vermont. It’s understandable then, she said, that communities might resist structural change to their schools, especially if plans are conveyed in a top-down or abrupt manner. Communicating promptly and clearly is a crucial skill for education leaders, she said.

Often, though, small towns face a tough battle advocating for what they view as the best interests of their students.

Last year, the Montpelier Roxbury school board voted to close the 42-student Roxbury Village School and bus its students 17 miles northeast to Montpelier as a cost-saving measure, despite residents’ arguments that the move would harm the vibrancy and economic viability of their town of 700.

There can be “inherent David-and-Goliath dynamics in situations where a larger entity is making a decision on behalf of a rural community,” Kristen Getler, who represented Roxbury on the school board when the decision was made, said earlier this school year. “There was no self-determination in it.”

More than a year after the decision, things still feel unsettled in Roxbury, some say. On Town Meeting Day in March, residents approved a nonbinding resolution that authorizes the town to buy back the Roxbury Village School from the school district for $1. The town will likely rent it to tenants, but Roxbury has little capacity to maintain the 10,000-square-foot building, said longtime resident Tom Frazier, who owns a garden center next door to the school. He anticipates that the town will have to hire a building manager at some point, which would likely raise residents’ taxes.

Frazier’s daughter Jackie is raising her two children in Roxbury. They are doing well at Montpelier’s Union Elementary, she said, but she feels little connection to the school and the families there.

“I think the saddest part is that Roxbury saw a huge influx of young families moving in — drawn by lower real estate prices — even before the pandemic,” Jackie Frazier wrote in an email, “and that momentum has now been cut off at the knees.”

Hannah Bryant, another Roxbury parent, said she is happy with the quality of education and teachers at Union Elementary. But overall, she said, it feels like a less personal school experience that has complicated the lives of Roxbury families.

“The district didn’t figure out the kinks in the system,” Bryant said, and “left those to be shouldered by families.”

Bryant helped start a nonprofit, Roxbury Rising, to fill some of the gaps left by the school closure. It holds community events such as caroling parties and gear swaps and helped subsidize a three-day-a-week afterschool program in the Roxbury Village School building. But she wishes the school district, and state leaders, would think more about how they could help rural communities such as Roxbury thrive, rather than seeing them as a problem to solve.

On the outskirts of Chittenden County, parents in Westford are waging their own battle. This spring, the Essex Westford school board approved a plan to bus around 40 sixth, seventh and eighth graders who currently attend Westford School to Essex Middle School starting next school year. The district anticipates that the move will save around $250,000 and provide Westford students with more educational and extracurricular opportunities.

But some Westford families are skeptical.

“I am a person that looks into the data and information and makes my own decisions,” said resident Meghan Valyou Orisko, who has three school-age children. “Westford is wonderful. Pulling these kiddos from Westford … is going to be detrimental.”

She said the decision to disband Westford’s middle school despite parents’ objections has left her feeling “powerless” and eroded her trust in the school board.

Valyou Orisko and other parents have organized to oppose the change, which they believe will create longer bus rides and logistical challenges for working families while diminishing parents’ opportunities to be involved in their children’s education. The dwindling number of students at Westford will lead to higher per-pupil spending, which parents fear will be used to justify closing the school in the coming years.

On May 7, Westford families presented a petition to the school board, signed by more than 200 people, asking members to pause the transition for one year to figure out if it really makes sense.

“Show us how this move will strengthen, and not destabilize, the district and how it will truly serve all students equitably,” Westford parent Kirsten Taylor told school board members.

Families are also asking the school board to amend the school district’s articles of agreement — a contract created when Essex, Essex Junction and Westford schools merged in 2017 — so that it would require a majority vote of Westford residents to close Westford School. That kind of provision was written into some school districts’ articles of agreement when they merged after passage of Act 46, the 2015 law aimed at creating larger and more efficient school governance structures.

The school board is working on a response to Westford families. Meanwhile, district leaders assured families that they are committed to ensuring a smooth transition for Westford middle schoolers, giving them opportunities to visit the school and meet future classmates this spring and changing bus routes to reduce students’ commute times. But the district’s initial plan for busing is already facing pushback.

Back in Worcester, resident Caitlin Howansky said she and fellow parents felt “blindsided” when she learned that fifth- and sixth-grade students would likely be moved. She has two children in the Washington Central school district,

Doty principal Gillian Fuqua emailed families on April 16, less than two hours before a school board meeting at which the matter was discussed publicly for the first time. Fuqua acknowledged that the change “was happening faster than any of us anticipated” and “may be upsetting or difficult to hear.”

Howansky said that while she supports finding ways to help Turtle Island, she is concerned about the impact on Doty students. She said she wishes the school board and administration had consulted Worcester families to try to find an arrangement that benefited everybody before announcing the plan.

Worcester resident Noah Weinstein, meanwhile, characterized the process as “rushed, opaque and unprofessional.” He said that, from the outside, Worcester residents might look like “passionate, nostalgic, impractical small-town folk who are just attached to things as they are.” But Weinstein believes that he and fellow community members are being pragmatic in thinking about “how a poorly formulated plan could have very real impacts” on students and the community. The school district has yet to clarify critical details of the plan, he said, including financial implications and structural changes to the school building.

Removing two grades from the school and repurposing classrooms used for art and music would arguably make Doty “less desirable for prospective families and even more vulnerable to closure,” Worcester families wrote in their letter to the administration and school board.

But Washington Central school board president Flor Diaz Smith and superintendent Steven Dellinger-Pate described the arrangement as an innovative solution to answer the dire need for childcare in Washington County and use the Doty school building more effectively. In line with statewide trends, the district’s enrollment has been on a downward trajectory that is not expected to level out anytime soon.

Schools such as Doty will likely be at risk under whatever education reform plan the legislature passes this session, Dellinger-Pate said at last week’s school board meeting. “This starts a process to find new ways to use our buildings.”

Fuqua said Worcester’s 15 fifth- and sixth-graders will benefit from being in larger classes of 20 or so kids in Middlesex.

“Students need more peers to work with, to make mistakes with and to collaborate with,” Doty teacher Honi Bean Barrett wrote to the school board. Her fifth- and sixth-grade students, she noted, are “generally positive” and “open minded” about moving to another school next year.

Before voting on whether to move forward with Turtle Island, many of Washington Central’s 14 school board members shared thoughts about how the process had unfolded and the implications of the change.

“I joined the board to advocate for students in our district, and I think we’re doing a disservice to those fifth and sixth graders,” said board member Julia Hewitt, who lives in Worcester. “I think we’re finding ways to frame it that are inauthentic.”

But Amelia Contrada, who lives in East Montpelier, said she thought “something creative and beautiful” could come from a partnership with Turtle Island.

Contrada said that although community members had expressed both pros and cons of the plan based on their own frames of reference, her role as a board member was to be “as objective as possible.”

After hours of public comment and discussion, the board voted 10-3 to move forward with negotiating a memorandum of understanding and two-year lease with Turtle Island. They will vote on whether to approve those legal documents next week.

In a second round of public comment at the end of the meeting, Worcester residents expressed their disappointment.

“Quite frankly,” Lisa Hanna said, “the students of Worcester were ignored tonight.”

Correction, May 14, 2025: Turtle Island is losing its home base in Montpelier. A previous version of this story described its predicament incorrectly.

The original print version of this article was headlined “Small Schools, Big Decisions | Rural families feel powerless in the face of efforts to reshape or close their schools”