The district's 2023-24 federal civil-rights filing can't be right as filed. Without accurate numbers, there is no way to know whether its staffing, discipline, or special-education figures got better or worse.
The Washington Central Unified Union School District (WCUUSD) is unmanageable. If educating our children wasn’t essential, I would not vote in favor of any WCUUSD school budget given the state of the school’s reporting.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) publishes an annual Civil Rights Data Collection data set. The 2023-2024 data was recently made available. The collection is published two to two and a half years after the school year it covers; the 2023-24 file came out at the end of August 2026.
This year’s WCUUSD data in the report has a large number of issues that make it highly likely the district failed to properly report data. Comparing the data reported in 2021-2022, the number of students with IDEA (special education) plans would be down 70%, while enrollment fell only 7%. If the reported numbers were correct, more than half of students at U-32 with IEPs (10 out of 19) were suspended out of school. Students with a Section 504 plan would be up 130%, and combined the two plan counts would have fallen by 30%. It would be very surprising for any of these things to have happened.
For returning teachers, U-32 is marked as having 69, while only actually reporting 50 current teachers, and 80 FTEs. Not having accurate teacher information here makes it impossible to compare WCUUSD teacher staffing per 100 students with either the rest of Vermont, other districts or the U.S. average. Information on the number of teachers absent more than 10 school days is reported as 0 – while in 2017-2018 (the item was dropped from the 2020-21 and 2021-22 forms and restored in 2023-24), 39.7% of FTEs met this criteria.
Harassment allegations are reported as 6 – but none at U-32. In the previous year (2021-2022) every harassment allegation came from U-32. Meanwhile, Calais reports disciplining students for harassment in 2023-2024 – each disciplined student should have a corresponding reported harassment allegation.
Data inaccuracies like this call into question the reliability of the rest of the data in this report, including the ACT & SAT numbers, dual enrollment figures, absentee rates etc.
In prior years, how are we to justify the more than twice the national average counselor FTEs per 1000 students, the over three times the national average Nurse FTE per 1000 students and the 1.5x teacher FTE per 100 students? Without accurate data from 2023-2024 years, we have no way of knowing if these numbers got worse or better.
How can we in good conscience approve a budget with so many unknowns, and continue to funnel money with no accountability? Funding an education for our community is non-negotiable for me, so I’ll always vote in support of a reasonable budget or if I see no alternative. But it is clear to me that WCUUSD is being mismanaged, and that there is an abundance of areas where this shows up – including in its mandatory data reporting.
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