New Woodstock middle and high school project on hold indefinitely

This story by Christina Dolan was first published by the Valley News on June 25.

WOODSTOCK — The Mountain Views School District Board met last week to finalize a date for a September bond vote to fund the repair or replacement of Woodstock’s middle and high school buildings. By the time the meeting adjourned, the board had decided to abandon the September vote and leave the schools’ much-needed repairs on hold indefinitely.

“That’s absolutely not an option,” Ben Ford, Woodstock representative to the supervisory union board and the new building committee’s chairman, said at the June 17 board meeting. “It’s just too much risk; there are too many unknowns. That bond would fail massively and would waste everybody‘s time, money and energy.”

The reason for the sudden pivot was the passage, over Republican Gov. Phil Scott’s veto, of H.887, the so-called annual yield bill, just a few hours before that June 17 school board meeting.

The yield bill sets property tax rates for the upcoming fiscal year. This year’s bill also reinstated a penalty, long-suspended, on capital improvement spending.

Beginning July 1, every dollar a district spends above 118% of the statewide average of per-pupil spending would be taxed as if it were two dollars.

For the Mountain Views School District, the resurrection of the spending penalty for school construction would effectively double the tax rate on what could have been 30 years of construction-related bond payments for the district. The legislation sounded the death knell for any hope of putting a bond before voters in the fall, as the board had planned.

“By forcing any bond approved by the voters after 07/01/24 to be included in the per pupil spend rate, the Legislature has effectively prevented schools from borrowing funds to maintain their existing schools or build new schools,” James Fenn, Mountain Views director of finance and operations, said in an email Tuesday.

The cost increase tied to capital spending is a concern for the district as the Woodstock middle and high school buildings that serve 440 students were built in the 1950s and 1960s. They were ranked the second worst in the state by a 2022 facilities condition study commissioned by the Agency of Education. (The worst facilities in the state, according to the study, are in the Orange Southwest Unified Union School District, which includes Randolph-area schools).

“A single catastrophic failure of any system in any one of our buildings will have a devastating impact on our per pupil spending,” Fenn said.

Vermont suspended its school construction aid program in 2007, resulting in nearly two decades of deferred maintenance for Vermont school buildings, which are among the oldest in the nation, averaging about 61 years old, according to a 2022 report commissioned by the Vermont Agency of Education.

The Mountain Views School board first approached voters this past March, on Town Meeting Day, to ask for a $99 million bond to completely replace the school buildings. Voters in the Vermont school district’s seven member towns — Barnard, Bridgewater, Killington, Plymouth, Pomfret, Reading and Woodstock — rejected the proposal soundly, 1,910-1,570.

Following the bond’s defeat, the board conducted community surveys and solicited design and cost estimates for three different options, including renovation of the existing buildings, renovation, and partial building replacement, and the construction of an entirely new building. The purpose of Monday night’s meeting was to consider the cost estimates and decide which project to bring to voters in September.

Mountain Views Superintendent Sherry Sousa said she brought the excess spending penalty to the attention of interim Vermont Secretary of Education Zoie Saunders in a recent in-person conversation and received no clear answer on the purpose of the provision.

“I asked her about her understanding of the limitations that H.887 places on districts to pursue a capital improvement bond. She indicated that she needed to look into this issue further and would reach out to me for a longer conversation,” Sousa said by email Tuesday.

Neither Saunders’ nor Scott’s offices responded to requests for comment.

For now, Woodstock’s middle and high schools will remain in use, and the district will “keep it safe and functional as best we can,” Fenn said.

“We have no major projects planned for the middle/high school building at this time as we continue to hope that it will be replaced in the near future,” he added.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated when the Woodstock middle and high school buildings were constructed.

Read the story on VTDigger here: New Woodstock middle and high school project on hold indefinitely .