School will begin with facility upgrades and a focus on literacy skills and fundraising
This article appeared in The Vermont Standard on August 24, 2023.
School will begin with facility upgrades and a focus on literacy skills and fundraising
When students return to Woodstock Union High School and Middle School (WUHS/MS) on the first day of classes next Wednesday, Aug. 30, they’ll be greeted by critically needed upgrades to the infrastructure of the aging building, which is slated to be replaced within the next several years.
In an interview this week, MVSU Superintendent of Schools Sherry Sousa said that MVSU District Building and Grounds Manager Joe Rigoli and his team had a busy summer.
“All the new heating systems going into the middle school and high school classrooms are just about done,” Sousa said, referencing the replacement of the unreliable, failing steam heating infrastructure that had plagued the deteriorating building for several years, especially in the cold winter months. Work remains to be done on the school’s boiler room, Sousa said. “The hope is that [the boiler room] will be done before the winter and the cold weather sets in,” she offered. “We’re in a good process here and it’s almost complete.” The result is sure to add to staff and student comfort levels as winter approaches, the superintendent noted.
The lift station at WUHS/MS has been another key focus of the building and grounds crew over the course of the summer. A lift station is essentially an elevator for effluent: sewage from the high school and middle school complex, as well as from the adjacent Union Arena, is gravity-fed to a tank behind the high school, from which it is pumped or “lifted” up to the street level, where it is lifted again into the municipal sewer system. “The work has begun on that system and we’ll have a major amount done over the Labor Day Weekend,” Sousa commented. “The hope is that it will be completed within a few days and we’ll have it ready for this fall.”
In a discussion with Rigoli in the spring of 2022, the MVSU building and grounds supervisor said the lift station at Route 4 at the entrance to the WUHS/MS campus dated to the 1960s and parts for it were proving increasingly hard to find. The all-new lift system slated to be completed early next month has been sized in such a way that it can be integrated into the proposed new WUHS/MS building, which is projected to open in September of 2026.
The vision for a new WUHS/MS
Efforts to put a bond issue before voters in the seven-town school district on Town Meeting Day are continuing apace, as is a robust, multiyear, private fundraising effort aimed at defraying a sizable amount of the new school’s financial burden on taxpayers.
On Town Meeting Day last March, voters across the seven towns of the newly named MVSU approved $1.65 million in expenditures leading to the construction of a new high school and middle school at the site of the present WUHS/MS.
“The funding the voters okayed was essentially for two things: one was for the architect to complete their detailed design process,” WUHS/MS New Build Working Group Chair Ben Ford said in a phone conversation Monday evening. “And then there’s the planning and permitting that go into the site work, things that we consider to be soft costs. There’s also $150,000 in there for bringing on a construction manager.”
Ford noted that three leading regional or Vermont-based construction management firms — Whiting-Turner of Springfield, Mass.; DEW Construction of Williston; and PC Construction of South Burlington — have responded to a request-for-proposals (RFP) issued by the school district. MVSU’s Rigoli, Finance Director Jim Fenn, and the New Build Committee are in the process of evaluating the detailed proposals and choosing a final construction manager for the new WUHS/MS complex.
The chosen construction management firm will then work hand-in-hand with project architects Lavallee Brensinger of Boston, Mass., and Manchester, N.H., to complete the design, site planning, and cost estimating for the new high and middle school building such that a bond vote can be brought before voters in Barnard, Bridgewater, Killington, Plymouth, Pomfret, Reading, and Woodstock at their respective town meetings next March.
The MVSU’s concerted private fundraising effort to support the construction of the new WUHS/MS complex is an outlier in the state of Vermont, if not the region and country. “We’ve taken a step back and said, ‘What can we do to limit the impact on taxpayers?’ because it all falls on your homestead taxpayer in terms of the impact,” Ford commented. “Going back to the numbers, those other school districts were hitting their residents with like a 30-percent increase to their tax rates or more in one year. There’s just so many people that can’t afford that and they certainly can’t get behind that sort of thing.” Ford continued that the MVSU board has established a policy that the WUHS/MS building project cannot impact local taxes more than 16 percent. “That was the tax impact for Burlington’s project to pass, so that’s a good benchmark there,” Ford noted.
Marlena McNamee, the development and fundraising director for the new school construction effort, spoke by phone Sunday evening about the present status of the WUHS/MS capital campaign and about future objectives for the fundraising effort, which is anticipated to stretch out over a decade. She reported with some surprise that in the wake of the July flood, which fostered the diversion of a lot of philanthropic support to disaster relief efforts, the new-school-build campaign notched two anonymous contributions of $100,000 each. The recent six-figure offerings brought the total amount of money raised by McNamee and school community leaders to $3.2 million as of last weekend.
“Our next fundraising milestone is to raise $5 million by Dec. 31 of this year,” McNamee offered. “Our five-year fundraising goal is $10 million. And really long-term — it could take 10 years — the goal is $20 million. The private fundraising, especially in the first 10 years of the bond repayment, is purposeful in that it kind of matches the first 10 years of the repayment amount. And that will significantly offset the cost of our new middle and high school to taxpayers. Year one of the bond repayment, if it passes next March, would be in 2024-25,” McNamee concluded.
Focus on Literacy
Academic attention to enhanced student literacy — the focus of a major curricular initiative in grades pre-K to 4 in the MVSU system last school year — will turn to better integrating reading and comprehension skills-building across grades 5 through 12 in the coming year.
“We’ll be focusing on the question of what our literacy practices are that will assure that our students are proficient in reading upon graduation,” Sousa explained. “We’re looking at how our older students at the upper elementary, middle, and high school levels can continue to build on the skill sets established in the earlier grades.” The school district’s reading specialist, Julie Brown, is leading the literacy effort, the superintendent said.
“Julie will be preparing and training teachers throughout the course of the year,” Sousa offered. “We call it structured literacy, in that we’re making sure that the foundational elements of reading are in place, and then expanding on that in terms of vocabulary and word structure. It’s about how to engage with a text, how to do deeper reading into a text.” Regular consultation with and between teachers across all grade levels from 5 through 12 is integral to the program, Sousa noted, to assure that literacy skills grow strategically and incrementally from year to year through graduation.