On Tuesday, Feb. 6, the ConVal School Board held the annual budget deliberative session at the gym in ConVal High School. This is an annual event where we present the budget and warrant articles that are budget-related or require ConVal district voters to approve or modify.

The warrant article that gained the most attention was No. 10, the one addressing the issue of consolidation/reconfiguration. Three amendments were offered up by ConVal towns community residents to modify the warrant article, but none gained the required majority votes to have these amendments adopted. This is democracy in action, where voters are given the right to voice their opinions as to what will appear on the ConVal School District ballot for voting on March 12 in all nine towns in the district. This warrant article requires a two-thirds affirmative vote  of the voting public to pass.

What does this warrant article do? It gives the  ConVal School Board the authority (like most other school boards in this country already have) to determine which ones (or all) of the four identified town schools should be closed and in what sequence due to being underutilized with no increased enrollment projected for the foreseeable future. These four schools are located in Bennington, Dublin, Francestown, and Temple.

The School Board will be forming a task force consisting of the board, ConVal administration and town resident members to undertake this detailed analysis. This task force will take over one year of intense work to develop a  solution to this issue. This analysis would take place after an affirmative vote and continue through the 2024-2025 school year. No implementation action will be taken until the 2025-2026 school year. That is over 15 months from now.

These schools were built and renovated to contain a much larger student population. We cannot educate these students at the same level as students in larger-population schools. Special-needs staff have to travel up to half their time to service students. We cannot afford to keep support staff in these schools full time, which is an unacceptable situation. We cannot fill the current open staff positions needed to provide the quality education received in larger-population schools, which is material in our decision-making process.

We rely on an informed public to allow your School Board to make the needed forward-looking decision to better educate our children. Our democratic system allows the public to elect representatives to represent them in determining what is best for our students and towns. A yes vote will allow us to move forward and make the hard decisions we were elected to do. We are being open, transparent and involving the community. We live and work in the same towns you do. We, like you, only want what's best for our students and communities while being fiscally responsible.

Please support the long-term mission of providing excellent education to all our students and vote yes on Article 10 on March 12.

Alan Edelkind is the Dublin representative to the ConVal School Board and chair of ConVal's Strategic Organization Committee.