One of the biggest local fights each year is whether to pass the school budget.

In recent years, budget requests have been turned down more than once by the voters in Northfield and Roxbury. It’s a local issue.

The money to pay for the schools comes from our property taxes even though those taxes have been administered by the state for more than ten years.

Now, a commission appointed by the Vermont Board of Education has decided that mega schools would be best and local control should be ceded to 12 to 24 statewide school districts.

It is the next step in the complete takeover of our public schools by the state of Vermont.

The proposal is to consolidate the current 290 school districts in the state to one or two in each county.

The commission stated that this proposal would “increase learning opportunities” for the children in grades K through 12.

“We had educational goals in mind and used redistricting as a way to get there,” Kay Charron, program coordinator for the commission's report, told the Rutland Herald during an interview with Kristina Kumka from the paper.

The board’s recommendations include forming new, larger school districts, adopting new educational standards to “better measure how much and how well students are learning through high school,” as well as – and get this one: “adopting a nongraded educational system where students advance based on proficiency rather than age or course completion.”

They concluded that doing away with grades would allow kids to be better educated by allowing “all different learning styles,” whatever that means.

The commission said that they based their conclusions on "national education redesign models.”

The mission, according to the report, was to “recommend a state policy framework that will build and enhance the capacity of schools and communities to reinvent Vermont public education so all students acquire the knowledge and skills needed for college, careers, and citizenship in the 21st century.”

To me, this means that the state will completely control education with absolutely no input from local school boards.

More importantly, the state would be able to dictate which schools stay open and which ones get closed.

Roxbury, say goodbye to your local grade school if this thing passes the Legislature. Your kids will be on a bus one hour each way every day to get to the new mega school in mid Washington County.

The commission seems to put little stock in small schools, believing instead that the big school is the answer and that kids get a better education when dumped into big citylike schools.

Ms. Charron said that “in some models nationwide, the commission found students earning associates degrees by the time they graduated high school. I don't think the schools, the size they are in Vermont, would have the capacity to make that happen with the resources they are given.”

Now get this: To implement the plan, the commission would be looking to FEDERAL STIMULUS MONEY so all of these new mega schools can be built.

Of course, the COST PER STUDENT wouldn’t be going up, she said.

What kind of mumbo jumbo is this proposal?

Thankfully, this screwball commission can’t impose this without a change in state law.The law would have to change to give the state board more power to establish school districts, exclude towns from being considered school districts and revise the desired number of school districts, according to the report.

This proposal would take away all local control and will be the death knell for any say over our local public schools. Already, the state has great influence over what goes on in our schools. With this, we can completely forget having any say at all except, of course, having to pay for them.

Building one mega high school for all of Washington County would be a nightmare.

I can just see getting to a P.T.A. meeting at the center of Washington County or even caring what is happening at all in such a school.

One reason people live in Vermont because they don’t have mega schools with thousands of students like New York City.

A lot of the current population moved up here from the highly congested areas to the south of us and brought with them their children.

Our small schools have given us all a very good education over the years. Being able to have a say in the way the schools are run is important. This proposal should be relegated to the ash bin of history just as the last twenty two attempts to do the same thing have been.