This commentary is by Pallas Snider Ziporyn. She is Vermont state chapter leader for Start School Later, a nonprofit organization devoted to ensuring school start times are compatible with health, safety, education and equity. She lives in South Burlington with her husband and three sons. In a rece nt House Education Committee meeting, Rep. Joshua Dobrovich suggested that one of the potential advantages of district consolidation would be to make Vermont schools standardized like Starbucks. He described a vision of creating school buildings and facilities that are consistent across the state. “You go to Starbucks in Boston, you go to Starbucks in Burlington, you get the same cup of coffee, you get the same experience,” he stated. Vermont schools are not Starbucks, and Vermonters should fight tooth and nail to prevent this dreary vision for Vermont’s future from becoming a reality. Strong community schools are part of what makes Vermont special.I am a Vermont transplant from Maryland, where I served as a school board member for a large county school district — approximately the size of the whole state of Vermont — representing 84,000 students and 126 schools.While there were some efficiencies from operating at such a large scale, there were some major downsides too. Local communities had limited agency to make changes to their own schools to serve community needs and interests. Any potential for differentiation was seen as a threat to district stability — if one school had a program but another didn’t, it was seen as unfair.Therefore, if an individual high school wanted to build a clubhouse for their sports field, for example, the school board would reject the request unless they could build one for all 12 high schools in the district. Similarly, the district moved principals and the best teachers around constantly, not wanting any individual school to get too much attention or become too differentiated from the rest.The schools down there felt generic, soulless and removed from the pulse of their communities. Frankly, our “towns” — also divorced from local control — felt that way too, part of an endless sprawl of suburbia.I chose Vermont for its strong sense of local culture. I cried at my first town meeting, thrilled to see real democracy in action. I’m devastated to hear that the governor and some members of the Legislature want to dismantle one of the greatest things Vermont has going for it, the beating heart in many of our communities, our local schools. Make no mistake — this plan is not just about reducing administrative bloat by centralizing administrative offices; it is also about closing schools and standardizing school offerings. H.454, the House education reform bill, sets minimum average class sizes. Yes, I said “minimum average class sizes.” And they aren’t small.Starting in fourth grade, class sizes will be a minimum average of 25. That is a floor, not a ceiling. They might be 30 or 35. Don’t be fooled: this isn’t an educational recommendation, but an indirect way of forcing small schools to close. The governor’s proposal will mean larger class sizes, more empty buildings in our communities and less flexibility for local schools to respond to the needs of their student body. It will mean earlier school start times and long commutes for young children on buses, some of whom will likely have to wait for school buses in the dark. It will mean destroying the character of local schools and local culture so that every school feels as generic and predictable as Starbucks. It means giving up what makes Vermont unique for an untested promise of cost savings. Data from other parts of the country in fact have shown that district and school consolidation efforts can lead to increased transportation costs and increased capital construction costs, sometimes fully offsetting the administrative efficiencies. We do have to change our education finance system but state-mandated district consolidation and school standardization is not the way to do it. A 2013 report from the Center for American Progress found that Vermont could save money by consolidating some small non-remote districts, but it also cautioned against a “one-size-fits-all approach” and noted that decisions on if and how to merge should be left to communities. The report also identified the optimal district size as 2,000-4,000 students, far fewer than the 10,000-30,000+ students proposed by Gov. Phil Scott’s plan.Vermonters, please don’t accept this as an inevitable consequence of these trying times. Now is more important than ever for us to come together as communities and fight for our preservation.Read the story on VTDigger here: Pallas Snider Ziporyn: Vermont schools should not be like Starbucks. ...read more read less