I am the parent of four young children in Francestown and have closely followed the events that have transpired within ConVal over the past year. I have also joined Francestown’s education advisory committee that provides input to the Select Board and our School Board member as they serve on the Feasibility Study Committee that is working through this process.

Why leave ConVal?

Francestown’s Town Meeting voted in favor of a feasibility study to leave the ConVal School District. This is due to an imbalance of priorities between ConVal and Francestown. At the time of the reconfiguration study last fall, FES was the highest-performing school in the district academically, and was fully funded by tax dollars from Francestown. As the region has changed demographically and state funding evolved, the district proposed to close Francestown Elementary School this past year.

The initiative to close FES is only the latest in a long series of such efforts over the past decade, and it appears that the School Board will continue to attempt to close FES in search of serving other priorities.

What does Francestown want?

The town values and wants to keep its elementary school. To keep FES open, it might have to establish its own school district. State law vaguely defines the “feasibility threshold” for withdrawal. In the absence of specificity, the Francestown Education Advisory Committee has assessed feasibility in three areas: educational quality, financial feasibility and community/social impact.

We believe the configuration below will better balance priorities of both Francestown and ConVal:

-- Francestown operates as a stand-alone school district (pre-K to fifth grade).

-- Francestown tuitions middle and high school students to ConVal (grades six to 12).

-- Francestown remains in School Administrative Unit 1, continuing its financial contribution to the SAU.

Under this configuration, the town would keep its high-performing school. This will give the town more flexibility regarding staffing, educational focus areas and partnering with local entities, including a large home-school contingent. This configuration would alleviate ConVal of the burden of responsibility for a school they have repeatedly sought to close. ConVal will be able better serve its priorities by allocating more resources to other elementary schools and the middle and high schools.

Under a tuition agreement between Francestown and ConVal, middle- and high-school students would retain a degree of “normalcy.” ConVal would also continue to receive funding through tuition payments from Francestown, and this will mitigate enrollment decline concerns and help populate key academic and extracurricular programs.

To date, ConVal School District has provided some preliminary figures to establish the cost side of the equation for both Francestown and ConVal, but has not included any savings. For Francestown, ConVal conservatively estimates that it would cost approximately $4.3 million to operate a standalone district.

It is important to add that state and federal aid would “follow the students” and would credit Francestown approximately $580,000. (State aid at approximately $4,000 per student for 145 students equals $580,000.) This credit reduces the cost to Francestown to approximately $3.7 million, which mirrors the $3.7 million Francestown paid into the district in the 2023-2024 school year. Though still preliminary, it appears that Francestown could offer a standalone school district for about the same cost it is currently paying into ConVal School District.

For ConVal, the district took Francestown’s tax contribution ($3.7 million) and spread this cost among the remaining towns. This did not include the reinjection of tuition dollars Francestown would contribute for grades six to 12 (approximately $2.1 million) or savings from the district no longer having to operate FES (approximately $760,000).

When incorporating these savings of $2.86 million, the tax burden is reduced from $3.7 million to around $840,000 district-wide. This figure is substantially less than the budget surplus the district runs on a typical year and could be characterized as within the tolerance for error on any given year’s budgeting process.

Though more granular information from ConVal is absolutely essential, it can be concluded that the linchpin of this approach is a strategically negotiated and sufficiently binding tuition agreement that will ultimately provide both ConVal and Francestown with confidence to move forward.

Under this proposed reconfiguration, the community of Francestown retains a key institution in town and gains more autonomy and responsibility. The voters of Francestown indicated that the school is a central pillar for the town, one worth keeping. The new configuration would retain much of the existing social fabric of the region through a tuition agreement which sustains the longstanding bond between Francestown the greater ConVal community.

It has become clear that the educational priorities of the Town of Francestown and ConVal School District have diverged over the last 50 years. I believe that it is time for both entities to evolve so their priorities are better served. I believe that in the presence of accurate, objective, and complete information, both parties can find a mutually agreeable path forward that better serves the students, taxpayers and greater community.

Patrick Troy is a member of the Francestown Education Advisory Committee.