The State Board of Education heard arguments from a central Vermont school district Wednesday about why its larger size should grant it a greater number of board seats on a shared supervisory union’s governing board. The debate foreshadowed tensions that could broaden in the coming months as state officials work to craft larger, consolidated school districts.

The political row before the state board pits the Paine Mountain and Echo Valley school districts against each other. Each district serves students from two towns and both are under the umbrella of the Central Vermont Supervisory Union.

Supervisory unions function as administrative superstructures that allow otherwise distinct member school districts to share services.

In November of last year, a majority of board members in the Paine Mountain district voted to request that the state Board of Education rework the number of seats allotted to each district on the supervisory union’s board to give them a clear majority.

Both districts now have three seats on the union’s six-person board, but officials with the Paine Mountain district argue it should be changed to more accurately represent each district’s overall resident and student population.

The Paine Mountain School District operates four schools for the towns of Northfield, Vt., and Williamstown, Vt., which have an overall resident population of roughly 6,000 and 3,500, respectively. The Echo Valley School District, meanwhile, operates two schools in Washington, Vt., and Orange, Vt. Both towns each have populations of just over 1,000.

Dan Morris, the chair of the Paine Mountain district’s board, told state Board of Education members Wednesday that his district serves 80% of the students in the supervisory union while Echo Valley serves only 20%.

He said the arrangement has created an imbalance in the supervisory union, and in a letter to the state board of education wrote that their current designation “does not provide adequate representation for the students and taxpayers it serves.”

During Wednesday’s meeting, Morris pointed to the supervisory union’s recent hiring of a new superintendent as evidence of the imbalance. The 3-3 voting split on the board, he said, was “unduly magnifying Echo Valley’s voice and diminishing Paine Mountain’s.”

Morris said during the meeting that this, and other issues arising out of the imbalance, were “pretty distressing for people in our two towns.”

He asked the board to consider changing the proportion to a 4-2 split, or adding seats to the board to create a 5-3 split, with the majority of voting members allotted to the Paine Mountain district.

Echo Valley School District officials disagreed.

In a letter included in the board’s June meeting minutes, Michael Concessi, a current member of both the Central Vermont Supervisory Union and Echo Valley School District boards, wrote to state Board of Education members that Paine Mountain’s proposal sends a clear message that large districts can overpower smaller ones, which could lead to mistrust and threaten collaboration.

On Wednesday, Matthew Flinn, chair of the Central Vermont Supervisory Union board, asked the state board to deny their request.

“This petition is the first of its kind in Vermont. Whatever you decide will set a precedent, not only for supervisory unions statewide, but also for the redistricting committee’s work ahead,” he said.

The State Board of Education moved to deny the Paine Mountain district’s petition. But the issue highlights broader questions around proportional representation as the state will soon begin work to overhaul the educational landscape. While school districts are required to allot representation on governing boards proportionally based on population, the same is not true of supervisory unions.

The School Redistricting Task Force, the body tasked under H.454 — now Act 73 — plans to meet for the first time within roughly the next two weeks, on or around Aug. 1. The body is charged with designing new school district boundaries for the state’s public education system.

Members on that task force will almost certainly be faced with questions about the role of supervisory unions and how they should be governed as they aim to consolidate Vermont’s 119 school districts — contained within the 52 supervisory districts or supervisory unions — into anywhere from 10 to 25 future districts.

The new education reform law requires at least one of the new district maps the Legislature will consider next year include supervisory unions. Some advocates believe that administrative structure is important to allow private schools to continue educating public school students from communities with which they have historic ties.

While that task force proceeds, the School District Voting Ward Working Group, set to first meet by Oct. 1, will begin creating voting wards for the new school districts as soon as possible — depending on what the task force has accomplished.

That group will eventually make recommendations to the Legislature for how to draw voting districts within each new school district “that are compact, contiguous, and drawn to achieve substantially equal weighting of votes” while meeting other state and federal requirements, according to Act 73.

State Board of Education members pointed to this uncertainty in moving to unanimously deny the Paine Mountain district’s request.

Jennifer Samuelson, chair of the state board, noted after the vote that the upcoming work of the redistricting task force “does give me pause about the board sort of stepping into waters where borders are being shifted in real time, potentially.”

The division highlighted what could be a difficult balancing act for the state’s recently constituted task force crafting new school districts.

In his argument Wednesday, Morris, Paine Mountain district chair, pointed to five other supervisory unions in Vermont that allot board seats to member districts in proportion with student population.

The list includes the Lamoille North Supervisory Union, which Morris said gives 13 seats to the Lamoille North school district, and six seats to the Cambridge School District.

Other districts, including the Bennington-Rutland, Windham Central, Windham Southeast and Windsor Southwest supervisory unions, also allot their members’ board seats based on population, Morris said.

“These examples show that reconstituting the (supervisory union) board to be a more proportionate reflection of the students served would not make our (supervisory union) an outlier,” he said. “Many other (supervisory union’s) already take this same approach.”

This line of thinking goes against the intent of laws governing supervisory unions and supervisory districts, Flinn and other Echo Valley district officials said.

“Equity in representation does not always mean proportionality — it means ensuring that both districts have meaningful input into shared governance,” Dominique LaFond-Copeland, the chair of the Echo Valley district, wrote to the state Board of Education. “In this case, equal representation has yielded effective collaboration and should be preserved.”

Many other Vermont supervisory unions, including the Rutland Northwest, Two Rivers and Windham Northeast supervisory unions, she wrote, maintain equal board representation despite unequal district sizes.

Board members, in discussion, were cautious about making changes to a supervisory union that they said appears to be functioning well — that is, aside from this political squabble.

The board, in its motion, left open the possibility of returning to the request at a later time. But members said now was not the right time for such a change.

“I would hate to do something now and then have to undo a change that we might make just because there’s going to be another change that needs to happen,” state Board of Education member Lyle Jepson said on Wednesday. “That does not make sense to me at all.”

This story was republished with permission from VtDigger, which offers its reporting at no cost to local news organizations through its Community News Sharing Project. To learn more, visit vtdigger.org/community-news-sharing-project.