News

Windsor and Westminster: different Act 46 experiences

By JEFF EPSTEIN
[email protected]
WINDSOR, Vt. — With Act 46 turmoil continuing in other parts of the state, the Windsor Southeast Supervisory Union met Wednesday to calmly coordinate the work that individual member districts have done headed toward their town meetings.

Both Windsor and West Windsor have completed their budget work and are ready to finish merging into the Mount Ascutney School District on July 1, and Weathersfield and Hartland also recently completed their own budgets.

“They’ve all been passed. All the warnings have been written,” said WSESU Superintendent David Baker.

Down in Westminster, meanwhile, local district staff were apparently trying to craft a local budget to go to town meeting, and were surprised to find it was “locked out” of local entity accounting software administered by the state Agency of Education.

In an email earlier this week to the lawyers representing forced-merger districts suing the state, David Clark, chair of the Windham Northeast Supervisory Union, explained that Superintendent Chris Platt had relayed the story about the software issue. 

Moreover, he explained, superintendents and business managers “have been advised by AOE that this is because they have to prepare combined entity budgets only. AOE will not allow them to create the individual local entity budgets, which in our case are Athens, Grafton and Westminster.”

At least one other district, Lakeview School district in the Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union, was also preparing a district budget for a town meeting in the event an injunction was granted staying the forced merger under Act 46.

But it too was ordered to stand down, according to an email sent to David Kelley, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, and made available to the Eagle Times.

“I received very direct guidance from the AOE …we are not to create individual budgets for districts involved in mergers,” said John Smith, Jr., the OSSU chief financial officers. Smith did not return a call from the Eagle Times Wednesday.

An agreement between the state and lawsuit plaintiffs was supposed to defer action on creating the new union districts until mid-February. The legal state of the action remains unclear.

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