gat

up 40 percent in one year, quite a shock to local homeowners just hanging on by their fingernails.
This school would have been rejected outright by local taxpayers, who had (they thought) a
perfectly good school already, but the state condemned the old school for not having wheelchair
ramps and other features nobody ever considered an essential part of education before. Costs of
reaching code compliance in the old structure were so close to the cost of a new school that
taxpayers surrendered. The bond issue was finally voted. Even so, it passed only narrowly. What
happened next will be no surprise. Benson School turned out to cost a lot more than voters
expected. I am skeptical that it cost more than the State of Vermont expected, though.
I have some personal experience with Vermont’s condemnation of sound school structures from
the little town of Walden, hardly more than a speck on the map northeast of Benson in the most
beautiful hill country you can imagine. A few years ago, four pretty one-room schools dating from
the nineteenth century, schools still serving 120 kids with just four teachers and no administrators,
were condemned by the same crew from Montpelier that gave Benson its current tax headache. I
was asked by a citizen group in Walden to drive up and speak at a rally to save these remarkable
community schools, beloved by their clientele. If I tell you when I woke in the morning in Walden
a moose was rooting vegetables from the garden of my hostess’ home you’ll be able to imagine
them better.
The group I came to speak for, "The Road Rats" as it called itself, had already defeated school
consolidation the previous year. Montpelier’s goal was to close the little schools and bus kids to a
new central location miles from home. Now Montpelier took off the gloves. If persuasion and
seduction wouldn’t work, coercion would. Let’s call what happened "The Benson Maneuver,"
passing building code provisions with no connection to normal reality. This accomplished,
Vermont condemned the one-room schools for violation of these provisions. All official estimates
to reach new code standards were very close to the price of consolidating the little schools into a
big new one.
Road Rat resistance would be unlikely to mobilize a voting majority a second time; the publicists
of mass-production economics have successfully altered public taste to believe it doesn’t make
sense to repair something old when for the same price you can have something new. Our only
hope lay in getting a construction bid low enough that voters could see they had been
flim-flammed. It seemed worth a try. The Walden group had been unable to find a contractor
willing to publicly oppose the will of Montpelier, but by a lucky accident I knew a Vermont
master architect. I called his home in Montpelier. Two hours later he was in Walden touring the
condemned buildings.
Vital to understanding why the state wanted these places closed so badly was that everything in
such places worked against professionalization and standardization: parents were too close to the
classroom to allow smooth "professional" governance to sneak by unnoticed. It wasn’t possible in
such schools to float a scientifically prepared curriculum initiative without having it come under
close and critical scrutiny. That was intolerable to Montpelier, or rather to the larger octopus the
Montpelier tentacle wiggled for.
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