DUMMERSTON — At the last two Brattleboro Town School board meetings, the chair, Jill Stahl-Tyler, spent a great deal of time complaining about the Vernon School District being a part of the Windham Southeast Supervisory Union (WSESU).
She went so far as to read a letter that she was going to send to the State Board of Education, urging that body to reassign Vernon to another supervisory union. She even requested that the district be reassigned to the Windham Central Supervisory Union.
In this endeavor, even though the board did not take a vote, Kim Price and Robin Morgan joined her in signing the letter. They all said they would be signing as board members. Thank you to David Schoales and Spoon Agave for refusing to join in.
As part of the discussion, Stahl-Tyler said that a similar letter to the Board of Education would be coming from the Putney and Guilford school board members.
This leads one to conclude that this is a coordinated effort on the part of disgruntled former study committee members.
The Vernon School District has been a valued partner for the last 60 years, and to cast it aside is nothing short of outrageous. The district has a coordinated curriculum, teacher training, and negotiations with the surrounding towns and the high school, to which the town sends between 75 and 80 percent of its students.
Furthermore, if for no other reason, that means that the remaining four towns would have to absorb Vernon's share of school costs.
This particularly illustrates the type of actions that the citizens who voted against school mergers were afraid of: those where the leadership keeps acting in a manner contrary to the voters' wishes. We should all be concerned by this type of behavior.