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.
On June 17, the board of the Washington Central Unified Union School District (WCUUSD) declined, by a vote of six to five, to schedule a special meeting that its own attorney had advised it was legally obliged to call. The vote came two days after more than 500 registered voters — above the five-percent threshold set by state law — had petitioned the five-town district for the chance to amend the rules governing how its schools are closed.
The episode is the latest turn in a budget-driven dispute over school configuration that has run through the district since late 2025. What began as an accounting problem — a unified budget pressing against Vermont's excess-spending penalty — has become a governance one: who, in a merged district, gets to vote when one town's school is on the line.
WCUUSD was formed under Act 46, the 2015 law that merged Vermont school districts. It joins five towns — Berlin, Calais, East Montpelier, Middlesex and Worcester — under a single board and a single budget, while preserving small elementary schools in several of the towns: among them Calais Elementary, Doty Memorial in Worcester, and Rumney Memorial in Middlesex.
A merged district means a merged ledger. Spending above the state's excess-spending threshold is, in effect, taxed twice: each dollar over the line draws a matching penalty levied across the district's taxpayers. For the 2027 fiscal year, the district has projected spending that would exceed the threshold by roughly $2.2 million, implying a penalty of the same size and prompting administrators to seek cuts on the order of $2 million to $3 million.
Those numbers fall unevenly. In the budget drafts presented during the closure debate, a scenario sustaining existing staffing and buildings implied a homestead tax increase of about 16.7 percent in Worcester (roughly $750 a year on a $300,000 home) and about 29.7 percent in Calais (roughly $2,594). Configurations with fewer schools narrowed the increases sharply. Because the budget is shared, the cost of keeping any one school open is borne, in part, by taxpayers in all five towns.
On December 17, 2025, the board voted 8–5 to recommend closing Calais Elementary and Doty Memorial in Worcester, and to put each closure to the voters of the affected town. Under the district's Articles of Agreement — the terms negotiated at the Act 46 merger — closing a school building requires the approval of a majority of voters in the town where the school sits. A special election was set for February 10, 2026.
Both towns said no. Calais voted 398–249 to keep its school; Worcester voted 212–114 to keep Doty. The closures failed.
With closure off the table but the budget pressure intact, the administration turned to reconfiguration. In May 2026, Superintendent Steven Dellinger-Pate announced — by email, and without a board vote — a plan to share the two towns' students across the two buildings: Rumney Memorial in Middlesex would become a shared pre-K–4 school and Doty Memorial in Worcester a shared pre-K–6 school, with Rumney's fifth and sixth graders bused to Worcester; each building would keep its own combined third- and fourth-grade class while blending the other grades across the two towns (Times-Argus). The superintendent framed it as "two schools, two communities (with) one learning environment" (Times-Argus), and acknowledged that "announcing this change late in the school year is not ideal" (The Bridge).
Reaction was sharp. More than 50 community members attended a community forum to air objections, and a petition asked the district to pause "until proper community engagement is completed." Parent Timothy Tharp said families felt "blindsided" (The Bridge). Resident Kate Biggam said the process had "eroded any sense of trust I have in the leadership of this district" (Times-Argus). Others defended it: proponents cast it as a student-first plan that would create "consistency," "stability" and "equity," and resident Hannah Brown said she was grateful for the "modicum of stability" the plan creates and that "to me this builds trust rather than eroding it" (Times-Argus). On May 21, the board declined to pause or alter the plan; Chair Diane Nichols-Fleming said there was "not movement on this board to pause or change the decision" (Times-Argus). The superintendent later announced he would resign in July.
The "no board vote" point drew a formal legal challenge. On May 29, attorney David Kelley wrote the board on behalf of "students, parents, and taxpayers," alleging it had violated Vermont's Open Meeting Law and that the reconfiguration was a policy matter that had to be approved by the board rather than delegated to the superintendent — citing 16 V.S.A. §§ 242 and 563(3) and Article 15 of the Articles of Agreement. At its June 17 retreat the board met in executive session with counsel and then read a response into the record: it held that under § 242 the superintendent has authority over the assignment of grades and personnel, that the plan — "considerably broader than a typical assignment" — nonetheless "remains within the purview of administrative operations," and that it had in any case discussed the plan in open session on May 20. The board "determines that no violation of the Open Meeting Law has occurred and that no cure is necessary" (board retreat minutes).
It was against that backdrop that the Sustainable Schools Coalition — a group describing itself as parents, caregivers, educators, taxpayers and community members drawn from all five towns — circulated the petition at the center of this report. Filed with the district clerk on Monday, June 15 by Maia Stone of East Montpelier, it gathered more than 500 signatures and invoked 16 V.S.A. § 722 together with Article 14 of the Articles of Agreement, which allow the voters to compel a special meeting.
Its substance targets Article 4, the provision that governs the closure of school buildings. The petition asks the district to let voters decide whether to amend Article 4 so that future closure decisions are made district-wide, by all five towns together, rather than by the single town that hosts the school.
The coalition grounds its case in the funding structure. Because the towns share one budget and one exposure to the excess-spending penalty, the cost of keeping a small school open does not stay in the town that votes to keep it: it flows into the common budget and onto every town's tax bill. A decision with district-wide financial consequences, the petitioners argue, ought to be made by the district-wide electorate. Under the current Article 4, by contrast, the four towns that help pay for a school have no vote on whether it stays open — only the host town does. The February votes in Calais and Worcester, in which two towns' electorates settled questions with budgetary effects for all five, are the petition's central illustration.
Opponents read the same facts differently, and see in the amendment an attempt to override, after the fact, the local control that the merger expressly preserved — a bid by the larger towns to outvote the smaller ones on the survival of their schools.
The petition placed a 60-day clock on the board, and the board took it up at its June 17 retreat. Its counsel, attorney Bernie Lambek, told members the petition was valid, that the Articles of Agreement expressly permit such amendments, and that the governing statute uses the word "shall": in his account, the board's duty to warn the special meeting was mandatory, and "it is appropriate and lawful for the voters to decide on this issue" (board retreat minutes; Times-Argus). Chair Nichols-Fleming, who did not cast a vote, put it plainly: "We don't have the discretion not to" warn the election (Times-Argus).
A genuine procedural question complicated the timing. Lambek advised that the election likely had to be both warned and held within the 60 days — not merely warned. That made August 11, the state primary date, the last practical election date inside the window; a later September date would fall outside it. Some members doubted that a midsummer special election held on a busy primary day would draw a representative turnout.
When the only motion on the table — Zach Sullivan's, to warn the election for August 11 — came to a vote, it failed 6–5 (board retreat minutes; the member-by-member split is from the Times-Argus).
No meeting was set.
Members in the majority advanced both procedural and substantive objections.
Marty McMahon opposed the amendment itself, calling it "morally wrong," warning "I'm totally opposed to this petition … I think it's going to tear us apart," and floating a "necessity defense" for declining to act (Times-Argus). Chris McVeigh questioned whether the board had to act at all, asking "what are the circumstances when a board can choose to not put something up to vote" and pointing to "a recent Supreme Court ruling" — though counsel answered that here "it is appropriate and lawful for the voters to decide on this issue so a special meeting is warranted" (board retreat minutes). He also characterized the petition as the work of those "disgruntled" that towns had exercised their rights, said "that horse is out of the barn already," and suggested the petitioners' proper remedy was the courts: "given the vote, the petitioners could proceed in superior court" (Times-Argus). In a subsequent Front Porch Forum post, McVeigh wrote that his vote had been "based on conscience and equity" (Front Porch Forum). Other members rested on the timing problem — the warn-and-hold-within-60-days reading, the primary-day date, and summer turnout.
The common thread: that a board may decline to forward an amendment it believes is wrong, or unworkable on the timeline available, and leave aggrieved petitioners to seek relief from a court.
The minority, and the petitioners, treated the legal obligation as dispositive and the merits as a matter for the voters, not the board. Ursula Stanley said the statutory duty held regardless of the August timing and called the board's inaction "a travesty." Daniel Keeney said he was embarrassed by the debate: "Agree or not, it's people's right to vote … Are we actually having this conversation right now?" Zach Sullivan rejected the suggestion that the amendment amounted to voter suppression: "I don't know how you categorize asking to be allowed to vote as disenfranchising people" (Times-Argus).
The day after the vote, Stone wrote to the board demanding compliance: "This is not a matter of personal or political preference, but of civic duty" (Times-Argus). Their argument is narrow and procedural: whatever one thinks of district-wide closure votes, the statute directs the board to warn the meeting, the board's own lawyer said so on the record, and the proper forum to defeat the amendment is the special meeting itself — where the voters, not the board, decide.
The Times-Argus headlined its account of the meeting "Split decision deepens divisions in Washington Central." With the August 11 date now passed over and the 60-day window closing in mid-August, the petitioners' stated options are to press the board to warn a later date or to seek an order from the superior court. At least one resident, Matt Rkiouak of Middlesex, has filed a complaint with the Vermont Attorney General's office asking it to examine the board's compliance with the petition statute. The board has not, as of this writing, scheduled the meeting.
Note on dates: this report follows the district's own June 17, 2026 retreat minutes, which record receipt of the petition by the clerk on Monday, June 15. Some press accounts give adjacent dates (June 16 / June 18) for the same events.
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