Separate ballot asks voters to decide $54.9 million career center bond

September 28  |  By Lisa Scagliotti

An architect's drawing shows the proposed site plan for the new facility on the U-32 campus. Image courtesy of CVCC

For the second year in a row, voters in 18 Washington County communities are being asked to consider supporting a bond to pay for a new Central Vermont Career Center.

But this year’s $54.9 million proposal is dramatically different – and a fraction of the cost – from the $149 million bond that voters rejected in 2025.

There’s one catch, however: Voters will need to seek out the ballot with the bond question, because it will not be automatically delivered in the mail.

Public Forum: The CVCC School District School Board will hold a public forum about the bond proposal at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 6 and it will be available via Zoom. Details and the agenda with links are posted on the Roundabout’s Public Notices page here.

First, the proposal.

Creating a second campus at U-32

The revised plan for expanding the Central Vermont Career Center is substantially different from the initial plan the district put to voters a year ago. In 2025, the district proposed purchasing a 27-acre property in the Graniteville section of Barre Town with a plan to construct a 167,000-square-foot facility that would have replaced the center that’s been operating at Spaulding High School in Barre since 1969.

Cost, location, and site issues such as traffic and wetlands, all contributed to the resounding rejection at the ballot box in a special vote last November, when 60% of the voters opposed the plan.

Demand from interested students and space constraints at the existing center motivated district leaders to go back to the drawing board. For example, the center had 443 applications for the 2025-26 school year compared with just 134 applicants for the 2020-21 school year. That’s an increase of 230% in five years. School officials say that the current center can accommodate approximately 245 students, with more than 100 qualified students waitlisted or turned away each year.

With 39 students attending the career center this year, Harwood is the third-largest sending school to the center after Spaulding and U-32, according to district data.

After the bond failure last fall, career center school district officials said they were determined to put together another proposal. They carefully reviewed voter feedback across many platforms, examined the demand for their programs, looked at the current facility’s constraints, and considered multiple alternatives before landing on the latest project plans.

CVCC Superintendent and School Director Jody Emerson said district leaders decided to take a different approach to considering the size, structure and cost of the project.

The new plan now calls for keeping the Spaulding career center in operation and building a free-standing, two-story, 61,000-square-foot facility at U-32 High School. Together, the two career center locations will be able to enroll approximately 450 students.

The new configuration will not only open up CVCC programs to more students, Emerson points out, but it will make greater use of both campuses and shared resources, creating more opportunities for students to pursue academic and career education together.

Emerson explained that today’s career and technical education programs have evolved to combine both technical skills and academic focus. Students may be working toward entering the workforce in specific technical careers, but they also may also be preparing to pursue higher education in their chosen fields.

“Every program at CVCC has college credits, industry-recognized credentials, or both. Students don’t need to choose between career or college; they need to be provided opportunities to explore both,” Emerson said.

The two-campus approach will give CVCC the ability to expand its offerings while making good use of the facilities and resources in both locations, she said. The additional location will also allow the center to expand its offerings in fields including health care, early childhood education, construction, automotive/diesel, hospitality, arts and business.

For example, the site plan for the new center at U-32 designates an “animal area.” Asked about that, Emerson said the spot is a placeholder for space that could be used for a future veterinary technician program. “Animal Science is likely to be a new program by the time the building opens,” she said.

The spot chosen for the new career center facility at U-32 is now a playing field. School officials say the campus can accommodate creating a replacement field elsewhere on the school’s campus.

On the ballot

For the project to be approved, voters across the 18 municipalities of the career center school district need to vote in favor collectively. After Election Day, ballots are tallied in a single combined count. Specific city and town results are not determined.

The career center district includes all of the communities across six separate Central Vermont school districts: Barre, Montpelier-Roxbury, Washington Central, Harwood, Twinfield and Cabot.

The CVCC ballot that all voters will receive has two questions: One asking voters whether they approve of the $54.9 million bond; another asking voters to approve a 30-year lease with the Washington Central Unified Union School District, which owns the U-32 property.

In addition, voters in the Washington Central district, which covers East Montpelier, Middlesex, Worcester, Berlin and Calais, will have their own local ballot with a single question pertaining to the career center project. They are being asked to approve their school district entering the 30-year land lease with the career center school district.

Bond vote ballots won’t be mailed automatically

It’s important for voters to know that ballots for the CVCC project are not being automatically mailed to all registered voters across the district with their general election ballots. The decision to hold the bond vote for the November election was made too late for those ballots to have been printed and ready to be mailed with the general election ballots for Washington County voters.

In Vermont, general election ballots are being mailed to all registered voters. Those ballots contain all of the elections from Congress and statewide offices such as governor and lieutenant governor, to state House and Senate seats, to regional judges and justices of the peace. Voters are encouraged to vote using the ballot they receive by mail and return it by mail or by dropping it off at their municipal clerk’s office or at the polls on Election Day.

However, in order to weigh in on the Central Vermont Career Center bond (and the lease question in Washington Central), voters will need to either vote in person on Election Day, Nov. 3, or seek out the career center ballot ahead of time.

Career center ballots are now available from city and town clerks across the 18 communities. To vote on the bond before Nov. 3, voters may request a ballot by mail from their local clerk or from the Secretary of State’s Vermont Voter Portal website here. They also can visit their municipal clerk’s office in person to cast their ballot on the bond (and in Washington Central towns, the additional ballot on the lease question).

Voters can direct questions to their local town and city clerks.

Find more information about the Nov. 3 bond proposal online on the CVCC website here. A file on that site labeled “FAQs” contains details, including the ballot questions on the districtwide ballot and on the Washington Central ballot.