S.O.S. — Save Our Schools
When I first moved to Ferrisburgh ten years ago, before my wife and I had children of our own, I worked as a substitute teacher in both the Addison and Vergennes elementary schools. We chose the location knowing our children would someday attend Ferrisburgh Central School (FCS), and I later grew to love Addison as well for its rural character, plucky student body, and the high teacher-to-student ratio. Since having children, my wife and I have both spent many hours volunteering in FCS in the classrooms and on the grounds. For the years I served on the new district board, during transition and beyond, I fought against a mounting sense of fatalism around the future of Addison Central School, advocating for the adoption of models that have proven successful for small schools rather than holding the school hostage to methods that only work efficiently for larger populations. I did not realize that I would need to fight the same battle for Ferrisburgh practically the moment I resigned from the Addison Northwest Supervisory District (ANWSD) board.
Small schools, especially very small schools like FCS, are in a unique position to be resilient and flexible to change. They lack the institutional inertia that often leads to groupthink and spurious one-size-fits-all solutions. I attended a small Montessori school for years in rural northern New Mexico. At the time it held barely 30 students K-6, divided between two classrooms. We had a headmaster who functioned as both a teacher as well as a lead administrator. We tended a small menagerie of farm animals, carpooled and bussed in a passenger van driven by a teacher, hosted special guests to teach individual subjects, and often learned through long-term projects and community service. This non-standard education, far from leaving us behind or lacking equity, provided the base that saw members of my class go on to see success in fields of science, medicine, journalism, construction, engineering, and the performing arts, several earning degrees from Ivy League universities. This was before the Internet was widely available in our area, the advent of which should actually make running small rural schools even easier.
There is a widely held assumption amongst our governance that we need to achieve some magic number of students before education becomes affordable, citing "economy of scale." This is an industrial metaphor, and although our children are not cattle, there is still a better way to look at it using the same idea. We are not really facing a deficit in "economy of scale," as much as we are tasked in finding our "sweet spot of production." If you had a quarter-acre to mow with a haybine, would you sell your house to pay for the machine and then lease another 300 acres to make it cost-effective? Or would you just plant a garden? 120 children are more than enough to fill a school. So are 60. Addison Central School is not the source of our budget problems, neither is FCS and closing them will accomplish next to nothing.
We have been door-to-door in Ferrisburgh for weeks, and can confidently state that the November 5th special vote to close FCS will fail spectacularly. I suspect the same in Addison. Yet the ANWSD has made it clear, on the record, that it has no intention of honoring the wishes of the rural communities it serves. Pursuing the same blind strategies that have failed us before, and which the board openly admits will only buy us a few years' time, it will attempt to depopulate our rural schools in 2020 despite prohibitive language in our articles of agreement, and will subsequently exercise its ability to close them against our will in 2021. What then is our response? Is it time to sell the family farm? Or is it time to ditch the haybine? This is a question that has plagued Vermonters for the better part of a century. Now it comes to our schools, and the current struggle in the Addison Northwest School District may well set a precedent for rural communities state-wide.
Ferrisburgh and Addison residents can visit the Town Hall anytime between now and the 5th to submit their ballots absentee. A "no" vote is the first step in a series of decisions that lay before us in the coming months. We feel no fear because the Board and Superintendent's draconian playbook has left our communities with nothing to lose: we choose to fight for freedom and stand in unity to that end. For a narrow window of time, the choice is still in our hands.
If you want to support the Ferrisburgh community in saving their local school please consider donating to GoFundMe for the Rural School Alliance - Ferrisburgh Chapter.
Rural School Alliance is a group started by community members from Addison County who are motivated by the desire to build on the successes of our thriving rural schools rather than shutter them for pressured savings and questionable educational outcomes.
The group's mission is to educate themselves and the public on the current crisis that the district faces and to advocate for alternative solutions to the ANWSD board's proposed school closures. The group considers itself an advocate for its children and rural communities. It upholds the unique identity and values of its towns, safeguarding our shared resources and the public trust.
If you’d like more information on the Rural School Alliance please contact ruralschoolalliance@gmail.com
