When I think about how education is changing in Vermont and New Hampshire, and particularly in the Upper Valley, I’m reminded of a Noel Perrin essay from 1980 titled “The Rural Immigration Law.”
Perrin, a Thetford Center resident and Dartmouth College English professor, made a go of small-scale farming, starting in the 1960s and continuing until a few years before his death, in November 2004. He made a bigger go of writing about farming and rural life with newspaper and magazine essays collected into books titled “First Person Rural,” “Second Person Rural” and so on.
Though Perrin wasn’t writing about newcomers from foreign lands, readers today might get a whiff of nativism from “The Rural Immigration Law,” first published in the now-defunct Country Journal. One of my takeaways from it was about how new residents of the Upper Valley place big demands on the region’s small schools. Perrin could see a reckoning far in the distance, one that now seems to be upon us.
Perrin envisioned a fictional couple, Don and Sue Nice, who move up to Grafton County from Boston in search of a simpler life and start to complicate their new hometown.
“Don is just as upset as Sue when they discover that only about forty percent of the kids who graduate from that high school go on to any form of college,” Perrin wrote. Soon, the Nices are joining with other parents, all newcomers, to make sweeping improvements. They also want golf courses and nice restaurants and a better airport.
“In short, if enough upper-middle-class people move to a rural town, they are naturally going to turn it into a suburb of the nearest city,” Perrin wrote.
The solution, Perrin continued in his typical wry way, is a tough immigration law that forces newcomers to adapt to rural life by raising pigs, growing vegetables, cutting their own firewood and volunteering at church suppers.
It’s been clear to me for some time that the Upper Valley has become a version of what Perrin warned would happen. (The extent to which Perrin helped usher it in by writing about the charms of rural life in Boston Magazine is a subject for another day.) Farms are closing up, jobs are centralized in Hanover, Lebanon, Hartford and other hub towns like Woodstock, Claremont and New London, and community life, which once had its own rhythms, now has to be more closely nurtured. Hello, suburbia.
A subsidiary effect is that with good jobs available, living here has become so desirable as to be unaffordable, particularly for people with work tied to the land, but that, too, is a subject for another day.
Talking to John Carroll and Rebecca Holcombe, among others, for a story about school funding in Vermont (“ ‘This is a huge problem”; Oct. 19) reminded me of Perrin’s essay. Carroll, a former state senator and chairman of the State Board of Education, and Holcombe, a current state senator and former secretary of Education in Vermont, both live in Norwich. That both are concerned about where our schools are headed and that Carroll is a Republican of the old New England line and Holcombe a moderate Democrat, are signs of how dire a situation we find ourselves in.
Perrin could not have predicted how obsessed we would get about education. Not only did people like the Nices move here and want to improve the schools, they also built new private schools like Crossroads Academy in Lyme, Upper Valley Waldorf School in Quechee and The Sharon Academy, among others. Vermont towns that don’t have schools for certain grades offer tuition vouchers and families have moved to voucher towns and sent their children to expensive private schools in other states and countries.
To attract tuition students, even public schools are striving to expand their offerings. Part of the rationale for the proposed new $99 million Woodstock Union Middle and High School was to attract tuition students from towns like Hartland, Weathersfield, Stockbridge and Pittsfield. The Dresden School District, which oversees secondary schooling for Hanover and Norwich, created a committee dedicated to researching how to bring in more tuition students, partly to ease the financial burden on Norwich. The constant jockeying for students as school enrollments have declined since the 1990s is inescapable.
Where Vermont is realizing that it has to be smarter about its education spending, New Hampshire has begun to strew its spending across the landscape, opening charter schools and giving families “education freedom accounts,” which state education officials have so far declined to audit. New Hampshire centralized its public schools more effectively than Vermont did in the 1960s and ’70s, so perhaps a rebellion is natural.
Vermont, though it has gone through a great deal of wrenching change, from Act 60’s rewriting of education funding in 1997 and the high-stakes testing of the federal No Child Left Behind Act through personalized learning plans and then mergers under Act 46, still seems to have no plan. Massachusetts, from whence so many people fled to Vermont, regionalized its high schools in the 1960s and ‘70s (I’m a graduate of Quabbin Regional High School in Barre, Mass.).
Carroll pointed out that public schools in Massachusetts and New Hampshire reliably rank higher than Vermont, which has declined toward the middle of the pack. Holcombe expressed concern that the state, which now controls the purse-strings, pushes the cost of too many social services onto its schools, and that the state is spreading its money across too many schools, including private ones. There are places where scale works, she said, and places where it doesn’t. A recent report asserts that Vermont could spend $400 million less per year on its schools and increase its instructional staff if it consolidated further and reduced spending on administration.
The backdrop of the higher spending is that Vermont’s funding system made it easier for districts with less property wealth to raise money by creating a statewide grand list. But it’s still districts with greater property wealth that drive spending.
Multiple studies have found that one of the biggest factors in academic success is a family’s income and level of education. Kids from upper middle class families like the Nices tend to do fine no matter where they go to school, which I suspect was Perrin’s point. Yet the last three decades have seen such families congregate in relatively few towns, where they create enclaves of wealth, too expensive for working class people to buy into. There’a a reason Norwich, Thetford and Woodstock saw big homestead property tax rate increases this year. Their schools are not small or isolated and they have very few students in poverty or who are English language learners, all of which brings more funding to school districts. Perrin wasn’t writing idly about Grafton County: Residents of Hanover and Lyme must thank their lucky stars that the wealthy towns defeated New Hampshire’s version of Act 60.
If there’s a lesson in Ned Perrin’s essay, this might be it: Maybe it’s time for Vermont to acknowledge that it’s become more suburban than rural, at least as far as its schools are concerned. As part of regional districts, schools in smaller communities can have some clout in dealing with the state. And if school districts are willing to band together, and keep public money in the public system, then the state should slacken its grip on those schools and allow them to innovate and share their results with their neighbors, which would, in turn, allow them to build community. Keeping the new pupil weights might encourage wealthy towns to build housing that working families can afford.
The world has changed a lot since Perrin wrote his essay. If you live in Strafford and work in Lebanon, it can be hard to keep tabs on what’s happening at The Newton School. Or imagine you live in Corinth and work in Lebanon, or Montpelier. Schools do more now because we need them to, as many parents work miles away, though remote work might continue to change that.
There is no easy solution to Vermont and New Hampshire’s reckoning with the role and funding of public education. But an acknowledgment of what we need schools to do would be a good place to start.
Perrin did suggest a way to pay for it all, though: “What about all those second-home owners who aren’t residents anyway?” he asked at the end of “The Rural Immigration Law.” “That’s easy. Double all their taxes right now.”
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.