Before August 11: What Washington Central Is Actually Deciding
As the August 11 vote nears, the case for letting the whole district — not any single town — settle a school closure: a decade-long slide in student results, and an elected board that cannot enact the fix it recommended.
On August 11, the five towns of Washington Central vote on one question: whether school-closure decisions belong to the district and School Board as a whole, or whether any single town can veto them. A yes vote lets the entire district vote and decide, by district-wide majority. A no vote restricts closure decisions, in some cases, to a tiny minority. The procedural language hides the real stake — whether a district whose academic standing has slid for more than a decade can enact the plan its own board and superintendent recommended to improve student education.
The district's student outcomes are not what they once were. On the one measure that can be tracked across state lines and across years — the Stanford Education Data Archive, which places a district's third- through eighth-grade math and reading on the national scale — Washington Central has been sliding for more than a decade. In 2013 its students scored about 1.2 grade levels above the 2019 national average, in the 86th percentile of U.S. districts. By 2025 that edge had shrunk to 0.3 grade levels, the 71st percentile. Measured against the districts most like it — similar incomes, similar communities — the drop is sharper: from the 81st percentile among its socioeconomic peers in 2013 to the 50th by 2024, from clearly outperforming communities like itself to merely matching them. This is not one bad testing year. The same decade saw the district's college-continuation rate and its once-best-in-state attendance fall as well.
These are not the numbers of a district that only needs to settle a boundary dispute. Last October, Superintendent Steve Dellinger-Pate recommended reconfiguring it — moving sixth grade up to U-32 and consolidating five elementary schools into three. His justification was about programming: the district, he told voters, was "having to spread resources very thin … because we just don't have the funds to do all the programming that we would like." His memo to the board set the same principle — that "programming should drive structural" decisions — and pointed to inconsistent curriculum across the five schools, arts teachers stretched thin, and special-education cohorts too small for targeted services. In December the board voted, eight to five, to close Calais and Doty. Its chair at the time, Flor Diaz Smith, framed the choice the same way, describing a district that could not fund the programming it wanted across five schools while staying under the state's excess-spending cap.
Then, in February, two towns vetoed it. Calais voted 398 to 249 to keep its school, and Worcester 212 to 114 — 610 votes to stay open. That is about 7 percent of the roughly 8,300 registered voters across the district's five towns. Under the current rules, those 7 percent decided the question for 8300 district voters. A district-wide recommendation, adopted by a district-wide board, was settled by 7 percent of the district. That is what August 11 is about: not fairness in the abstract, but whether Washington Central can enact a decision its own board made for the district as a whole, or whether any single town holds a veto over the district's educational judgment.
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The district's debt paid to renovate three schools. The heaviest bills per student are still ahead at the other two.
Washington Central owes $7.33 million, all of it for building renovations at East Montpelier, Rumney, and Berlin. The 2023 state assessment says the heaviest near-term needs per student now sit at the two schools that never borrowed — Calais and Doty — the same two schools Calais and Worcester voters kept open in February.
The Price of Average
Vermont pays two dollars for every national dollar of school administration, half again the nation's upkeep, and — its largest premium — nearly half again as many teachers per student. Not high pay: it staffs the extra teachers its many small schools require. About $2.2 billion above the cost-adjusted national rate over twelve years, while its results fell to the national average.
Three measures fell. The diploma held still.
Vermont's test scores fell for a decade, on every ruler that spans it. College-going fell sixteen points. Chronic absence rose by half. The graduation rate moved three. Part 1 of 4: the numbers, and the easy explanations that don't survive them.
Vermont rewrote what a diploma requires
Proficiency instead of seat time, defined district by district — while the statewide test changed twice more. Maine passed the same law and made it optional. New Hampshire kept its version, and its standing. Part 2 of 4.
Who runs Vermont's schools
Only one other state calls its education body an agency: Texas. Almost no state changes how it picks its education chief. Vermont did both at once, in a 2012 law whose text gives no reason why. Reform, or experiment? Part 3 of 4.
The measure that didn't move
39% of Vermont students meet the state math bar. 82% graduate in four years. If a diploma certifies learning, why didn't the graduation rate move? Part 4 of 4.
Vermont's yardstick moved
Washington Central runs seven to eleven points ahead of a Vermont average that has itself fallen behind the country. Read against the nation, the district's standing shrinks on most measures — and adjusted for the community it serves, its national test standing is now average.
An honest look at Washington Central and its peers
Fifteen Vermont systems are about Washington Central's size, with similar incomes and a similar share of low-income students. Compared with them, three problems stand out at every group size — and an editor's note revisits the fourth.
August 11: vote like our kids' education depends on it
There will be a district-wide ballot question on August 11 — a vote on who gets to participate in decisions about our schools. This is a question about whether we will fulfill our obligation to our district's students and make use of every option available to us.
Cutting the medicine, not the management
UVM Medical Center is losing about $460,000 a day, and the health network's answer is to lay off staff, order its doctors to see more patients an hour, and strip weight-loss drugs from its own employees' insurance. None of those moves touches the two cost drivers Vermont's hospital regulator — and the consultant the network itself helped pay for — have identified in writing: a top-heavy administration, and a decade of Vermont premium-payers subsidizing money-losing hospitals across the lake in New York.
Save before you spend: a capital-funding strategy for Middlesex
Middlesex borrows at nearly 6 percent for equipment that neighboring towns buy outright. A disciplined shift toward pre-funding would cut the town's interest bill, replace tax spikes with a level annual line, and rebuild the emergency reserves the 2023–24 floods washed away. The evidence from twenty comparable Vermont towns — and from the profession's own standard-setters — says it is affordable, and that the town is already halfway there.
A petition, a statute, and a refused vote: how Washington Central's board declined to warn a special meeting its voters petitioned for
Constrained school funding turned a single town's closure vote into a district-wide question. A petition asked all five towns to decide it. The board, advised it had no choice, declined to schedule the vote.
2 Issues & 4 questions for June 2026 in Middlesex
Notes from the June 16th Selectboard meeting: a petition to upgrade South Bear Swamp Road from Class 4 to Class 3, Russ Bennett's CHIP-funded Colby Road proposal, and what each means for who can afford to live in town.