Stowe School Board member upset, resigns

“I do not believe that it is in the best interests of the students and the taxpayers in our community to give up control of our schools and budget through the actions, or inaction, of the school board and the superintendent,” Bland wrote in his email to board members and Tracy Wrend, the superintendent. “Nor will I facilitate the demise of the Stowe school system by handing over or losing control of our schools to another school district. I therefore resign from the Stowe School District Board of Directors.”

Currently, the school board is in the middle of a governance study under a 2015 education law that encourages and eventually requires school districts to merge into larger units with neighboring districts in an effort to better serve students and manage costs.

For towns like Stowe that don’t think a merger is in their best interest, there is a way out, but it requires a bit of legwork.

The law requires a district that does not expect to merge voluntarily before July 1, 2019, to complete three tasks:

• Evaluate its current ability to meet or exceed the goals that the law hoped to accomplish.

• Meet with other districts in the area to discuss ways to promote improvement throughout the region.

• Submit a proposal to the State Board of Education to maintain its current structure, work with other districts in some way other than a merger, or merge with other districts to form a different governance structure. 

Stowe is working with the newly formed Elmore-Morristown Unified Union School District on a self-evaluation, which was scheduled to be the topic of Wednesday night’s joint meeting with the Lamoille South Supervisory Union.

While the supervisory union’s meeting was publicly warned two weeks ago in the Stowe Reporter, the school board’s special meeting was not published, and wasn’t put up on the district’s website until Monday night. That’s where Bland’s concern started.

Bland had asked Wrend last Wednesday to add the special meeting to the website calendar.

Not receiving a response, and not seeing a warning in last week’s Reporter — Stowe School District’s designated newspaper — he sent another request to Wrend on Friday.

“Although notice of a special meeting can be given 24 hours before the meeting (under the open meeting law) … if the special meeting went forward under those circumstances, the public will have been ‘shortchanged’ in the process,” by the short notice, he said.

Bland recommended postponing the meeting to give the public more notice. If the board decided to hold the meeting, he would be sitting among the public who happened to show up, rather than at the board table, Bland said.

On Monday, following the holiday weekend, Wrend posted the warning on the school’s website, giving the public more than 48 hours notice — all that is required for any meeting under the state open meeting law.

“We strive to get the meeting agendas into the Stowe Reporter the week before, but sometimes we do miss the deadline,” Wrend told the Reporter, which received the agenda on Nov. 21. “I wish I had put it up on the calendar earlier, but that’s not a reason for us not to continue our work on the self-evaluation. Saying we did not give appropriate notice would be inaccurate.”

The self-evaluation was also already on the Lamoille South Supervisory Union’s agenda, which was disseminated to each town in the district earlier.

“How can we expect greater public awareness and input at our meetings (on what we are doing, or not doing, under the Act 46 mandates) if the public is given such a hasty … notice of the special meeting?” Bland asked Wrend in an email. “I would’ve thought that, given the importance of the meeting, notice to the public of the special meeting of the Stowe School Board of Directors should’ve been given several times, through various media, over the past couple of weeks. Do you really want to widen the Stowe School Board’s credibility gap with the community by telling the Stowe community that your ‘warning’ of the special meeting was ‘sufficient under the law’?”

“I suspect Bland thinks that not posting the meeting agenda earlier was part of some evil plot, but I can assure you it is not,” Wrend said. “I didn’t even have a confirmed meeting room until yesterday.”

The Stowe School Board will hold a regular meeting on Monday, Dec. 5; agenda items include Bland’s resignation, a school privatization study conducted by the Stowe Local Schools Initiative, and Stowe’s math program.