Worcester residents at Doty Memorial School in June 2024. File photo by Ethan Weinstein/VTDigger Several grades in the Washington Central Unified Union School District would be moved to schools in other towns under a reconfiguration plan officials announced last week. The plan comes after the di strict’s failed effort in February to shutter two community elementary schools in Calais and Worcester after residents’ opposition. Under the plan, all fifth- and sixth-grade students from Rumney Memorial School in Middlesex would join their peers at Doty Memorial School in Worcester for the upcoming school year, while all pre-K through second-grade students from both Middlesex and Worcester would attend Rumney. Steven Dellinger-Pate, the Washington Central district’s superintendent, announced the plan in an email last week. He acknowledged that “announcing this change late in the school year is not ideal” and said that “news of a transition like this can understandably bring about anxiety for both students and parents.” Dozens of community members in the district have since signed a petition calling on officials to pause the reconfiguration “until proper community engagement is completed and considered.” Parents and community members say the decision was made with no formal community input or discussion. Many parents have also questioned whether the move squares with the district’s articles of agreement under 2015’s Act 46, when five towns merged into the unified union district. The merged district also includes Berlin, Calais and East Montpelier.  “I think many of us are concerned about the precedent that it sets, that decisions like this could be made unilaterally, without significant community input at all,” said Katie Marshall, a Middlesex parent with a pre-K and a kindergarten student at the Rumney school. The quarrel in the merged, five-town school district offers a cross section of the future Vermont communities may soon find themselves in as cost pressures force more difficult decisions. State lawmakers are working to finalize a plan that may see some forced mergers among the state’s 119 school districts.  Many lawmakers are intent on keeping mergers voluntary, but Gov. Phil Scott has said he will not accept a plan that doesn’t involve some mandated consolidation. Smaller communities that have for years had direct, local control in their community schools’ operations may soon find they have less of a say. For school district officials, the maneuvering seems inevitable. Faced with declining enrollment and growing costs, school district leaders are tasked with thinking of regional strategies to provide quality education. The reconfiguration in Washington Central comes just months after voters in Worcester and Calais rejected plans to shutter two of the district’s elementary schools. That plan, likewise, was presented as a way to expand academic and extracurricular opportunities for the student body while cutting costs, but parents and residents questioned what effect the plan would have on the two small towns and ultimately voted the plan down. Diane Nichols-Fleming, the Washington Central school district’s board chair, said the reconfiguration plan is being made to “balance enrollment” and to maximize educational quality for both schools. Bringing the Middlesex and Worcester fifth and sixth grades together at one school “allows for an expansion of instruction, it allows for an expansion of peer groups, and it also gives space for the single-grade instruction that is critical in both math and foundational literacy,” she said. “That is a benefit for all students,” she said. Parents remained concerned, however, and aired their objections during a community forum Thursday night that more than 50 community members attended. Timothy Tharp is a Middlesex resident whose kids have attended the Rumney school but would next year be moved to the Doty school. He said he and other parents were “blindsided” by the move. “This was their community. This was their safe place,” he said of his children’s school. “And it just got yanked out from under them with no discussion and almost no warning.” For children in Middlesex, the plan would likely mean longer travel times to get to the Doty school in Worcester, he said. “We don’t even know how this decision was made. We don’t know what metrics they looked at. We don’t know if they did any studies about transportation,” Tharp said. “Our kids are going to have to be on the bus for way, way longer.” He and others who have signed the petition are calling on the district to hold more open community forums before finalizing the decision, to publicly share the analysis used to support the proposal and to explore possible alternatives. Some also allege that the decision runs counter to the district’s own policies and articles of agreement written when the merged district was created under Act 46. “The concern is not only this specific decision, but the precedent it sets: that major school configuration changes can be developed and implemented without a clear public process, meaningful community engagement, or board-level discussion before families are informed,” their petition reads. Nichols-Fleming said district officials hear parents’ concerns and are hoping to set “first-of-the-month meeting opportunities” to encourage more community dialogue to “better inform us as we go into the budgeting season and as we continue to look at the parameters around what the state gives us.” “We also want to be very clear, and not misleading to the community, that when we enter into these question-and-answer periods … it isn’t something that means it’s going to change the decision,” she said. Read the story on VTDigger here: Parents feel ‘blindsided’ by Washington Central school district’s grade reconfiguration. ...read more read less