Harwood pauses consolidation discussion to order school buildings review
April 16, 2025 | By Lisa Scagliotti
Community members and school staffers fill the seats in the Harwood library at the March 19 school board meeting. Photo by Lisa Scagliotti
The Harwood Unified Union School District School Board has put the brakes on its consolidation exercise, shifting focus to invest over $110,000 in an architectural review of each school facility’s condition before any specific changes are recommended.
The move came last week after hearing from community members opposed to closing schools in the district as outlined in recent presentations.
Instead of further shortening its list of building consolidation scenarios from six to three now, the board agreed to redirect TruexCullins architects.
“We are changing things. We are not going to narrow down options today. We're done talking until we get back all the information that we need,” board Chair Ashley Woods said at the April 9 school board meeting. “We have made changes to the Truex timeline to allow us to go forward with the assessments, however unpopular they are. We do this in response to the people's outcry from Fayston and Moretown and other towns in our district, teachers and everybody saying we need more information.”
The board approved a second phase of work with the Burlington firm for $110,740 to do a detailed assessment of the district’s five elementary schools and Crossett Brook Middle School. The review excludes Harwood for which a detailed review was done recently to inform since-paused renovation planning done in fall 2023 and early 2024.
Woods called the upcoming review “due diligence,” saying it would happen over the summer. “That could take six months. It's hard to say how long it will take,” Woods said. “Please know that no one at this table is hell-bent on closing the Fayston school or the Moretown school. Nobody wants that. That is not our plan.”
The vote supporting the next contract phase with TruexCullins was 8-2 with members Rob Dabrowski of Waterbury and Rebecca Baruzzi of Fayston voting against and Woods not voting. Only 11 members were present as the board has three vacancies not filled by the March election. The board is expected to fill the two open seats from Waterbury and one from Duxbury at its meeting Wednesday night.
The next step with TruexCullins follows the initial $48,500 contract approved in November to brainstorm a wide variety of scenarios where the district could operate using fewer than its current seven schools. The board also created a new Building Use and Visioning Committee to work with the consultants on the criteria and various factors to consider in crafting proposals.
At the board’s Jan. 22 meeting, the architects presented 15 options that outlined different facility combinations with fewer schools; only Harwood and Crossett Brook remained in use in all of them. On March 19, the presentation was narrowed down to six options with a seventh keeping the status quo. All of the six scenarios called for closing the elementary schools in Fayston and Moretown; two scenarios also suggested closures for Warren Elementary and Brookside Primary School in Waterbury.
The Building Use and Visioning Committee’s next step was to ask the full board to review that list and boil it down further to three scenarios in addition to the status quo option. The intent was to then do a detailed assessment of those choices to determine costs and cost savings to help with decision-making and future planning.
Public input shifts the focus
At the school board’s last two meetings, the consolidation exercise drew far more community members and school district staff than meetings in January and February ahead of the annual budget vote. Approximately 60 people attended the two sessions combined in person with a few individuals offering comments during the 15-minute public comment period the board allots at each meeting.
Speaking last week, former school board member Peter Langella, a Moretown resident and parent, shared that an online petition titled “Save the HUUSD Elementary Schools,” has been created and it already had over 300 signatures.
“Our beloved elementary schools in the Harwood Unified Union School District —specifically Fayston, Moretown, and, to a lesser extent, Warren—are under threat of closure. Every proposed reconfiguration plan eliminates at least Fayston and Moretown and aims to send the students to schools where they won't fit. This is an urgent crisis for our children, families, and rural communities,” the petition states.
“We want to urge you as a board to reject any plan that closes schools,” Langella told the board. He instead urged the board to look at school facility needs for upgrades and repairs for a bond to address those needs.
The petition remains live online with 318 signatures as of April 16.
Langella, who works as a high school librarian in the Champlain Valley School District and as an adjunct professor with Vermont State University and the University of Vermont, previously commented touting Moretown Elementary as a “holistic, inclusive, creative place helping grow our children into more compassionate humans.” He praised its multi-grade classrooms and an ecology program that uses outdoor learning environments.
He reminded the board that just recently the district announced school rankings from U.S. News & World Report that listed three Harwood district schools in the top 10 of their categories in Vermont, including the Moretown school.
“Simply put, we love our school,” Langella said.
He also criticized the board leaders for not soliciting broader input from the community. “I've sat in your chairs and I'd like to remind you about something -- you do not work for the HUUSD. You work for us, the people in your towns that elect you to sit in these chairs. You should engage your communities to understand what we want and then bring that here, rather than bringing what the district wants back to us. It is an important distinction.”
Langella suggested that people would pay higher taxes for good-quality schools that don’t reduce programming and services.
“Imagine if you brought the best possible budget for children to our communities and went all-in trying to sell that to the voters,” he said. “Young children deserve to be educated close to home. Research shows that school closures kill towns …please center the children as your number-one priority.”
Another Moretown parent who spoke was Caitlin McLeod-Bluver, who teaches at Winooski High School and was named is Vermont’s teacher of the year for 2025. Like other parents and staff, she she praised Moretown Elementary School’s close-knit atmosphere and its extensive grounds and amenities.
“We do not need to move forward with consolidation,” she said. “Instead, we can steer our local conversations to be centered on what is best for our students. At a time when educators are already fighting on a federal and a state level, please do not make us fight on a local level too. Our school is a thriving place of excellent learning and a community hub. Let that drive our conversation.”
Parent Sasha Bianchi of Moretown, who works in public health research, questioned the school district’s criteria shared with TruexCullins for creating the consolidation scenarios.
“There's an old saying that's ‘bad data in, bad data out.’ You are now basing decisions on a set of criteria that a very small subset of people in the school community created. You did not ask parents or students or community members or other school staff what was important to them to create these criteria and now you're hurtling toward narrowing your options based on criteria that are not reflective of the values of the people you serve,” she told the board. “Please get off the path of school consolidation. It's not the path to prosperity for our district.”
At the March 19 meeting, Fayston parent Jill Rickard took issue with the potential for longer bus rides should the district close some schools. “We probably would not have chosen to buy a home in North Fayston had we known that our child would potentially have to commute for up to two hours each day to Warren Elementary School. Studies have shown that long commutes contribute to reduced sleep, lower educational results, reduced physical activity, increased stress and mental health concerns,” she said.
Should the district move to close schools, Rickard urged the board to consider assigning students to the school closest to their home.
Woods last week spoke for nearly 15 minutes about the facilities issues, state education reform proposals, and potential federal funding cuts on the horizon. All of these crucial issues keep her up at night, Woods said, stressing to the audience that the facility review still has a long way to go and that the board hears the concerns from the community.
“Please do not think of us as the enemy. Keep emailing us. Keep calling us. Keep talking to us,” she said. “We don't plan to jam this down anybody's throat. We are not trying to make decisions without involving the community.”
A recurring conversation
The issue of consolidating facilities has been discussed in the Harwood district by administrators, school boards and community members since before it merged from multiple small town districts into the unified district in 2017. The concept has been debated as a way to trim district expenses long-term, although proposals to date have involved new expenses to accommodate combining school operations into fewer buildings.
The most recent failed attempt was in 2021 when voters rejected a nearly $60 million bond that would have renovated Harwood Union Middle/High School and expanded Crossett Brook Middle School in order to combine all 7th- and 8th-grade classes there.
Last year’s failed school budget, that ultimately passed on a third vote, prompted the Harwood board and administration to shift from working on a renovation plan for Harwood Middle/High School to looking at ways to reduce the number of schools in the district in search of long-term cost savings.
Superintendent Mike Leichliter, who joined the district in 2022, coming from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, has expressed his chagrin at how much time he has spent in his job working on reducing staffing and thinking about school consolidation. He said he and his wife did not expect that would be the case when they moved. “We fell in love with Vermont. We also fell in love with this community,” he said recently. “What we fell in love with was all the schools.”
He said he was eager to be active on this issue, accepting an appointment to the state commission studying the future of public education, representing school superintendents on that panel. In that role, he’s paying close attention to state-level education funding and governance reform discussions in Montpelier.
Despite the uncertainty at multiple levels, Leichliter said he was pleased to see more community members attending school board meetings. “We need our community to get engaged,” he said. “I am glad we have a large group here.”
Building review can inform renovations
The upcoming TruexCullins building review will be vital not just for a consolidation discussion, but also for ongoing maintenance planning and a potential bond for renovations beyond Harwood, school administrators stressed.
Along those lines, the school board last week unanimously signed off on the district’s $1,386,922 maintenance plan for the 2025-26 school year. That would pay for the latest contract phase with TruexCullins, along with projects at each school, such as repairs and updates to windows, roofs, parking lots and sidewalks, painting, and a vital $125,000 fix to underground piping for Harwood’s heating system. Work also includes modifications to space at Harwood to prepare for moving the district’s central offices there when their current lease in Waitsfield ends.
Harwood School Board meetings are recorded and posted online on the school board’s YouTube channel and on Mad River Valley Television.