WCAX.COM Local Vermont News, Weather and Sports-Is Skiing Helping Some School Districts?

Is Skiing Helping Some School Districts?

Warren, Vermont - December 21, 2007

It's a tale of two towns and two schools.

Enrollment at Montpelier High School is expected to drop seventeen percent over the next four years.

"That's a significant decrease when you go from 395 kids to 336," says Montpelier High School Superintendent Steve Metcalf.

While just down the road in Warren, enrollment at the elementary school is up 24 percent this year alone.

"We have 19 new families in town, a total of 37 kids," explains Warren Elementary School Principal Andreas Lehner.

The two school districts represent different trends across the state. About 80 percent of Vermont schools are experiencing a sharp decline in enrollment. Most of the towns where enrollment is up have one big thing in common. They're ski communities.

"A number of the new families are families that have moved on from out of state. Many of them have owned property here and they had condos or vacation homes and they've decided to move here," says Lehner.

Case in point-- Peggy Delaney.

Peggy, her husband, and their three kids moved to Warren this past summer. The family has owned a condo near Sugarbush for 13 years and simply got tired of driving home every weekend to their home in Massachusetts.

"Now we get to go home and make a nice dinner and have a fire on Fridays and Sundays instead of sitting in the car and eating pizza on the road," says Peggy Delaney.

They still own their home in Massachusetts and even paid $7,000 to guarantee spots for their kids at their former school. But they now say they have no plans of moving back.

"We were paying the taxes anyway, so like our friends joke, with all our taxes, at least someone's getting an education here," says Delaney.

Up until last year, Warren and several other Vermont ski communities were also experiencing major drops in enrollment. Warren eliminated three of it's nine classes over the last five years.

School officials say they're puzzled as to why that downward trend has suddenly reversed.

"I don't know. I don't know what's happening. I'd leave it up to the demographers to tell me sometime," says John Nelson of the Vermont School Boards Association.

"It's something that doesn't hit every school every year. School boards have to take that into account. Our overall student population is at a low ebb. Historically it goes up and down, up and down," says Darren Allen of the Vt. NEA.

Declining enrollment is forcing schools like Montpelier to cut jobs and programs since school budgets are directly based upon a school's size.

"Just like if you had a family of eight people and one left, your cost per family member would suddenly go up," explains Metcalf.

But ironically for schools like Warren, next year's budget doesn't look much better since tax rates are based on a two year average of enrollment. That said, all Vermont schools are hoping their enrollments will grow, paving the way to brighter future and bigger budgets.

And we should point out that not all school districts near ski communities are growing. For example, schools in Stowe and Stratton are shrinking, while some non-ski communities are growing. But there does appear to be a strong correlation between rising enrollment and ski areas.

Keagan Harsha - WCAX News