Vermont Public covered the August 11 ballot question as a fight about fairness. It left out the reason the vote exists: a decade-long slide in Washington Central's results, and a board that cannot enact its own plan to reverse it.
Washington Central will vote on August 11 on whether all five of its towns should decide school closures together, rather than letting any one town veto the district board. Vermont Public reported the vote as a fight about fairness — Middlesex parents wanting a say, Calais and Worcester feeling overridden. That is the surface. Underneath is a question the report never raises: whether a district whose student results are sliding can act on the recommendation its own board and superintendent made to address it.
Begin with the results, because they are the reason any of this is happening. 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 onto 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. It fell 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. It is a long erosion of the district's academic standing, and it is what the board says it is trying to arrest. The same decade saw its 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, the superintendent recommended reconfiguring it — moving sixth grade up to U-32 and consolidating five elementary schools into three. His stated justification was about programming. The district, Steve Dellinger-Pate 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. It pointed to inconsistent curriculum across the five schools, allied-arts teachers “spread across multiple smaller schools,” and special-education cohorts too small for targeted services. In December the board voted, eight to five, to close Calais and Doty. Board chair Flor Diaz Smith framed the choice the same way: keeping all five schools open, she said, left the district struggling to provide “quality programming” while staying under the state’s excess-spending cap. As Dellinger-Pate put it, “regardless of Act 73, we have to make some decisions about how we want to educate our kids.”
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, and under the current rules those 7 percent decided the question for all of them. A district-wide recommendation, adopted by a district-wide board, was settled by 7 percent of the district. That is what August 11 is actually 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.
Reasonable people can doubt the remedy. Closing a neighborhood school is a real loss. And no one has proven that consolidating buildings reverses a district's slide on the national scale. That is the board's theory — that concentrating teachers, arts, and intervention in fewer, fuller schools is what a shrinking district needs to hold its ground — not a demonstrated fact. Those are fair arguments, and they deserve to be made. But they are arguments about whether the board chose the right medicine, not about whether the district should be allowed to prescribe any. The debate voters have been handed skips that entirely. It asks whose vote counts, and never asks what the vote is for.
Even the money argument misses the real one. The loudest objection to closure has been about debt — that Calais and Worcester, which never borrowed, are being asked to keep paying off their neighbors' school bonds while losing their own schools. It is an understandable grievance, and a distraction. Those bonds bought renovations at East Montpelier, Rumney, and Berlin. Calais and Worcester never renovated, and their bills are now coming due. The state's 2023 building assessment flags $417,100 of work at Calais and $434,200 at Doty within five years, on plumbing and systems dating to 1970 and 1959. Measured per student, those are the two most expensive buildings in the district to fix — the same repair spread across the fewest children. The debt is the past. Deferred maintenance is the future, and it lands hardest on exactly the two schools the vote would close.
What the vote is for is a district that has watched its academic standing slip for a decade, from well above the national middle toward it — and whose elected board recommended a reconfiguration it now cannot enact. A community deciding this vote deserves to know that is the stake — not a procedural quarrel, but whether Washington Central can govern itself in the interest of children whose results are slipping. Vermont Public gave its readers the politics. The harder story is the one about the students.
This paper's full reporting on Washington Central's outcomes and finances, with sources and charts, is at middlesexgazette.org.
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