Voters 4:1 support new school district to run career center

March 4, 2022 | By David Delcore | Times Argus staff writer

BARRE — What will soon be Vermont’s newest school district just passed an 18-town test, as voters in six area school districts collectively and overwhelmingly agreed to partner in a new one that will be solely responsible for running the Central Vermont Career Center.

Plans for the July 1 launch of what will — at least initially — be the Central Vermont Career Center School District got the boost it needed as voters around the region approved the measure 7,493-1,688.

Though the ballots were all cast on Tuesday, results weren’t available until the last of them — those from Barre Town — were fed into two tabulators that were busy on the third floor of Barre’s Alumni Hall on Thursday and Friday.

The process of commingling ballots so that there was only one reportable result — not 18 different ones that had to be added together — wrapped up shortly before 2 p.m.

Barre City Clerk Carol Dawes, who oversaw the two-day process, didn’t need to look at the tape from the second tabulator after glancing down at the first.

“It passed,” she said, as Jody Emerson, director of the career center waited for the results.

The tabulator's tally — one that included its first 508 ballots from Cabot on Thursday morning and some of the 1,375 from Barre Town Friday afternoon, wasn't decisive, but it was lopsided. According to the machine count 3,231 of the ballots it read were cast in favor of the proposed school district and only 750 were opposed.

That comfortable cushion was padded by the results from the second machine, which was fed 1,275 votes in Barre during Tuesday’s election, was idle Wednesday and pressed back into service Thursday morning starting with a batch of ballots — 304 — from Plainfield. That machine also counted some of the Barre Town ballots Friday afternoon before producing its own lopsided results. A total of 4,262 of the ballots counted by that machine were cast in favor of the new school district, while only 938 were opposed.

The combined results — the only ones that mattered — showed the measure passed by a margin of more than four to one.

That was welcome news for Emerson, who took over as director of the career center last year and is now in line to become its first superintendent.

“It’s exciting,” Emerson said, pausing briefly before adding: “There’s a lot of work to do.”

That work will fall to Emerson and a 10-member board that is starting to fill out.

Voters collectively elected three of four members in at-large elections — one a write-in — and at least one of the six school boards — Washington Central — appointed its representative Wednesday night.

Guy Isabelle, who stepped down from the Barre Unified School Board to run for a seat on the career center board, was elected as the Barre district’s second representative. It was a landslide.

So was the election of Jim Halavonich to serve as the Harwood Unified Union School District’s second representative. Like Isabelle, Halavonich ran unopposed and voters from all 18 towns had the chance to vote for him.

Although there were no announced candidates for extra board seats for the Montpelier-Roxbury Public School District and the Washington Central Unified Union School District, one of those seats was filled by a successful write-in campaign.

Montpelier resident Lyman Castle needed 60 write-in votes to secure a seat on the board and he received roughly three times that amount, according to Dawes. Though there were write-ins for Washington Central’s extra seat, she said none met the 60-vote threshold.

That means the Washington Central board, which elected Chair Flor Diaz-Smith to serve as its appointed representative to the career center board on Wednesday night, will have to make a second appointment.

Diaz-Smith served as chair of the study committee that first explored and then recommended the proposal that was endorsed by the state Board of Education in December and just approved by voters. Contacted Friday, she said the results were gratifying and the governance change overdue.

“I’m absolutely thrilled,” she said, noting career technical education is too often an “afterthought” and deserves to be treated as critical component of pre-K-12 education.

Diaz-Smith said the committee concluded the best way to accomplish that was to create an autonomous school district solely focused on the operation of the career center.

Since it opened under a different name more than 50 years ago, the career center has been governed by school boards in Barre. Initially, that responsibility fell to the Barre City School Board, later to the Spaulding Union High School Board, and most recently to the Barre Unified School Board.

The latter board endorsed the proposed transition, as did members of the five other school boards: Montpelier-Roxbury, Washington Central, Harwood, Twinfield and Cabot.

Due to their smaller size the latter two districts won’t have a second elected seat on the new career center board, but both will appoint a member to represent them in what will be a truly regional endeavor.

The just-adopted $3.5 million budget for the career center was crafted in anticipation of the change, a three-year lease for space the center occupies on the Spaulding campus is in place, and Emerson said the focus in coming months will involve preparing for the district’s July 1 launch.

This story was first reported in the Times Argus.