November 10, 2026 | By Caitlin Lovegrove and Steve RosenbergOver the last three years, the Harwood School Board has worked together to make some extremely difficult choices to bring our district’s budget into line with both what our kids need and what our voters will support.
During this time, we cut the equivalent of more than 50 full-time positions with some impacts being eliminating the elementary foreign language program, reducing access to art classes and our libraries, and removing full-time nurses from the Valley elementary schools. These were all painful decisions, but we worked as a unified board that was able to see past individual towns’ goals and look at the greater needs of the district. Despite recent challenges, we hope that, going forward, we can continue to work together.
These were painful decisions, but we worked as a unified board that was able to see past individual towns’ goals and look at the greater needs of the district. Despite recent challenges, we hope that, going forward, we can continue to work together.
This year, the legislature passed, and the governor signed, Acts 169 and 170, which imposed a series of increasingly deep cuts to our school budget. At our Sept. 23 school board meeting, Superintendent Dr. Mike Leichliter and Financial Director Lisa Estler made it clear there were three paths ahead: try to pass a budget that maintained our current staffing and programming by paying a $2.5 million state-imposed penalty; keep all our schools open but completely gut programming (no more buses, greatly reduced sports, no more pre-k, etc.); or close two elementary schools for the 2027-28 school year.
The board decided that our district wouldn’t vote for a budget including that penalty. And we decided, together, that stripping the schools down to the studs wasn’t acceptable. That left us with one remaining but awful option: closing schools.
To that end, we’ve examined as many feasible combinations as possible, based on both proposals prepared by the administrative team and proposals from the public. We knew that no matter the outcome, some community members would be understandably very upset. None of us took this responsibility lightly. Having done as much work as time allowed, at our Nov. 4 meeting, the board followed the agreed-upon process, and a straw poll found 9-4 in favor of moving forward with a budget for the 2027-28 school year that would close Fayston and Waitsfield elementary schools. Since then, board members have asked to tour the Moretown and Waitsfield elementary schools, and we are looking to continue the conversation on Nov. 18.
To allow for both our budget to be developed and for the process for school closure outlined in our articles of agreement to be complete in time for the March 2027 school budget vote, this discussion has to terminate at this meeting.
We do not have more time.
This was always going to be a tough decision with emotional ramifications, but we had hoped the board would continue to work as a unit, support the decision that was made, and engage with our community to help them move through this difficult time. We were concerned to see the letter, “Waitsfield reps ask board to reconsider school closure choice,” from the Waitsfield board members who we consider our colleagues, which we feel misrepresents key parts of the school board process.
First, the letter implies that the board did not follow an agreed-upon process of choosing the school combination that received the highest score on a worksheet distributed by Lisa Estler. This isn’t the case. At the Nov. 2 Building Use & Visioning Committee meeting, Fayston rep Lang Davidson asked Estler, “Lisa, correct me if I'm wrong. The reason you gave us homework is so that we would delve into this data so that we would come more educated to the meeting on Wednesday. …But it's not like we're going to decide what we vote on based on the tabulation of these charts. This is just to get us talking. Right?” Estler responded, “Right.”
Additionally, the instructions in the worksheet Estler circulated for board members clearly stated that, “The goal is not to make a final decision at this stage, but to build a shared understanding of the options and help inform our next steps as a board.”
Second, the letter states that at the Nov. 4 meeting, “…several members said they had changed their position and moved to close Waitsfield and Fayston, because of the public comment from Moretown families.” This isn’t correct. When reviewing the meeting recording, we did not see a single member state that they had been convinced by public comment to change from closing Moretown to closing Waitsfield.
There's a lot that’s really admirable in their letter, such as: “For months, we have told Waitsfield parents to trust this board. We told them that the board and administration were making this decision based on data, as much as possible, and on what is best for the entire district, not just for Waitsfield kids or Moretown kids, or Fayston, Warren, Brookside, Crossett Brook, or Harwood, for that matter.”
We completely agree. We recognize that the painful collective process we’re engaged in should be data-driven as much as possible. But data is not just confined to scores on a worksheet, where, for example, some gave surprisingly different answers to something as seemingly objective as wastewater capacity (the Moretown-Warren combination received the highest and lowest scores and many in between. We also must consider factors not on the worksheet, such as: the impact of remaining school locations on bus routes and traffic patterns, feasibility of potential future expansion, benefits and drawbacks of surrounding land and businesses, and the number of students moving to new schools in each scenario. This isn’t a criticism of Estler’s exercise; it’s an impossible task to develop a short worksheet that hits all relevant points.
This has been a very tough week for school board members, teachers, school staff, school administrators, and above all, parents. It’s very difficult to analyze both the hard and soft data we’re inundated with, and of course people can interpret the data differently.
We know the board has our kids’ best interests as its top goal, and I hope we can all focus on what is best for our children and our broader community as we struggle towards a decision.
Caitlin Lovegrove and Steve Rosenberg are Moretown’s representatives on the Harwood Unified Union School Board.