BRISTOL — The Mount Abraham Unified School District board on Wednesday evening will host what the board is calling its third Community Conversation of the fall.
At the 6 p.m. meeting, which was moved to Mount Abe’s larger cafeteria after the Nov. 5 Community Conversation drew an overflow crowd to Bristol’s Holley Hall, the board’s Community Engagement Committee will focus discussion on what it calls “a range of possible options for our facilities.”
Those options will include the five different school closing and reconfiguration possibilities that were presented for discussion at the Nov. 5 meeting, and could also include citizen suggestions that the committee asked groups of residents to brainstorm together at the end of the meeting.
The committee will also again go over the district’s enrollment trends, student outcomes and financial predictions and, in the committee’s words, provide “an opportunity for informed deliberation and community feedback about a range of possible options for our facilities.”
Current enrollment at MAUSD’s six schools — Mount Abraham Union Middle/High School in Bristol plus elementary schools in Bristol, Lincoln, Starksboro, New Haven and Monkton — stands at 1,347 and is projected to drop by 56 students to 1,291 by the 2023-2024 school year, according to district estimates.
At the Nov. 5 meeting MAUSD Superintendent Patrick Reen said the district is being challenged by the projected increases in salaries and benefits and other costs, including operating all six district schools when they are not full, combined with the loss of revenue because of declining enrollment.
A handout at that meeting projected that, even without programming and staffing cuts, the district tax rate could increase by 27 percent for the 2023-2024 school year.
That figure would, for example, mean an additional roughly $1,000 in taxes for a property owner already paying $4,000 a year.
According to the handout, the district could be $710,000 over the threshold for triggering the penalty for excess spending in the 2020-2021 school year if no cuts were made, a number that could grow to about $3.7 million by 2022-2023 without cuts or reconfiguration that could include school closings.
Any school closure in MAUSD would have to be approved by voters in a school’s host town, according to the district’s articles of unification.
The good news is that board members said what they heard at meetings held in each community in October and in Holley Hall on Nov. 5 largely lined up with the district’s strategic goals.
They said they heard support for personalized learning, community connections and the towns’ schools, education that creates “socially and emotionally healthy kids,” equity and fairness for students; and flexible scheduling and “varied and robust programming.”
The board intends in January to review residents’ input and pick facilities scenarios to study, examine them from February to July, unveil a plan in August, conduct discussions over the next two months, choose a course of action in November 2020, and warn a vote on the district’s future for March 2021.
The committee is also encouraging those who plan on coming to Wednesday’s meeting to look over materials on the Community Engagement website in advance, especially “Shaping our future together,” which includes demographic and financial info as well as possible facilities scenarios. 
The information may be found online at mausd.org/school-boards/community-engagement-committee.
Wednesday’s meeting will also offer music and refreshments from 5:30 to 6 p.m. and free childcare.