Rebecca Holcombe’s announcement Tuesday that she’ll be stepping down as Vermont’s Secretary of Education comes at a critical time in the Act 46 school district consolidation process.Holcombe has been meeting with school board members from districts that don’t want to merge, and they’ve been pleading their case as to why they should be able to remain independent.
The Secretary is supposed to decide if the boards can remain independent, and then issue those decisions in a proposed statewide report that’s due June 1.
So that leaves some school board members who have met with Holcombe wondering who will ultimately decide their fate.
The Franklin County town of Montgomery voted twice, not to merge with the other schools in the Franklin Northeast Supervisory Union.
So school board chairwoman Mary Niles says the Montgomery board took it pretty seriously when it was time to put together their Section 9 alternative proposal.
“We spent months kind of working within the board, as well as receiving quite a lot of feedback from a pretty vocal community group,” Niles said. “And over the winter we flushed out our Section 9, and then submitted to the Secretary for her review.”
A few weeks ago, Niles and some other members of the Montgomery school community sat down with Holcombe to talk about the proposal.
Holcombe has been meeting with the 60-or-so school districts that want to retain their full boards, and not merge with a nearby district.
The conversations were supposed to be a personal way of convincing the secretary, who’s ultimately responsible for proposing the final statewide plan before June 1.
Niles says she was as surprised as just about everyone else in the state when Holcombe announced she would be resigning at the end of this week.
And Niles says the state now needs to step back and slow down the Act 46 work.
“I will be surprised, really surprised, and very upset, if we are sticking to this June 1 deadline now that we have this very abrupt resignation,” she said. “It throws a lot of things into question, I think.”
One of the big questions is just how an interim education secretary will be able to step in and make these very big decisions that will affect dozens of school communities across the state.
Scott Thompson lives in Calais and served on the Washington Central Act 46 Merger Study Committee.
Thompson says that while he disagreed with Holcombe on the school merger question, he valued her dedication and abilities to navigate the sometimes volatile subject of school mergers.
“Sec. Holcombe’s resignation is a blow,” he said. “No one else I know of has a better understanding of the fine detail and the political lines of force in the run-up to releasing the state plan in a few months. Maybe the legislature and the governor should put the process on hold until a successor can be appointed and fully briefed. I hope they do something of the sort."
Krista Huling is the chairwoman of the state Board of Education, and she says she had no indication that Holcombe would be leaving so soon, and so quickly.
Huling says there were other Agency of Education staff members at each of the meetings with the school boards, and she wants to keep to the schedule, even if it means having an interim secretary put together the state plan.
“I think this has been a long-term process, that this bill has set out,” she said. “I feel like we are on track to continue moving forward.”
Huling says she’s calling for a special State Board Meeting next week to try to chart a path forward.
Huling points out that it will be up to the State Board of Education to approve the statewide plan.
Prior to Holcombe’s resignation the board said it would hold a series of meetings throughout the state to give local school boards one more chance to make their case before the state plan is finalized in the fall.
The latest merger activity according to the Agency of Education
