KENT, Conn.—With school doors swinging open Tuesday to welcome Region 1 School District students back for another year, attention is again being focused on a region-wide study that will weigh the positives and negatives of the consolidation of elementary schools.
Despite greatly reduced numbers of students in the schools, previous efforts for consolidation of the lower grades have been vehemently rejected by district residents, But, last spring all six towns agreed to participate in the study that will be conducted from this September through next May. Findings will be released in June 2027.
Region One Superintendent Melony Brady-Shanley and Business Manager Sam Herrick will conduct the study.
The study is designed to outline the “financial and educational realities” facing each town in the district, allowing “each local board of education and community can make informed, data-driven decisions about their school,” the proposal stated.
Region 1 schools have reflected a state-wide decline in student enrollment in recent decades. With costs escalating and populations dwindling, the question for some towns—Sharon and Falls Village, in particular—is how small is too small. It has proved to be a highly emotional topic.
Former Kent Board of Education Chairman Scott Trabucco is following with interest the latest study of educational and population trends. He recently urged the Board of Selectmen to explore options other than the ones that may grow out of the Region 1 study.
“I’ve been following the effort by the Region 1 administration to explore the possibility of consolidating the region’s K-8 schools or at least the 5-8 grade population,” he said in a letter to the selectmen. “I wanted to suggest that the Board of Selectmen and the Board of Finance take this time to explore other possible directions that Kent could take instead of waiting to be presented with a choice to either join a new consolidated school located up in Falls Village or go it alone.”
He recounted an ugly environment that evolved several years ago when the region proposed consolidating all the middle school sports teams. “The Kent Board of Education surveyed the parents and received an excellent response from over 100 parents, 90 percent of whom were opposed to joining the consolidated team mainly over concerns about travel times to and from practice and overpopulated teams,” he wrote.
Kent voted to keep sports in town. “The region responded by trying to force Kent to join, claiming that the policy that governed our shared services for special education allowed a majority of four towns to force a new program on all the schools in the region,” he recounted.
He said the region’s effort to coerce Kent resulted in “some pretty unforgivable behavior” during which the town was accused of not caring about its children and local parents were impugned as being “lazy” and not knowing how to carpool.
“All of them completely ignoring our actual concerns and the fact that we cared a lot about our kids and sports and were trying to keep the opportunity to participate as accessible as possible,” he wrote.
Accessibility has always been a challenge in Region 1. The sprawling district stretches from the Massachusetts border to Kent. Kent students ride at least 40 minutes to get to school but at the time Kent joined the district it was the only act in town. Region 1 was the first regional high school in New England when it opened in 1939 and it was 16 years before Connecticut had a second such school.
“I am concerned that this idea of consolidating the local center schools will follow much the same path as the sports issue but worse,” he said. “We are uniquely situated in the region geographically, many of our students are physically closer to Region 12 than they are to the Region 1 high school. Or closer to New Milford, where many of our students do after school activities.”
Trabucco attended last week’s meeting of the Board of Selectman and urged that authority and the Board of Finance to be the agencies to investigate other possibilities before the town is presented with choices “that aren’t in the best interest of the town.”
“I’m afraid we will have no real voice in this process until it is decision time,” he said, urging the selectmen to gather information that could be presented to townspeople in the spring. He said he believes it is the Board of Education’s responsibility to administer the structure the town has voted for and not to implement change. That responsibility, he believes, lies with the town’s governing authority,
He noted, there has been talk for years, particularly on the Board of Finance, about engaging Sherman and New Milford in a conversation about cooperating with Kent or combining schools, a process that would be arduous and legally challenging. All six Region 1 towns would have to approve Kent’s exit from Region 1.
On the other side of the coin, any school district the town would like to join would have to amend its regional plan, a process that typically requires approval from the state Board of Education, followed by favorable referenda in the existing member towns and Kent.
“If this is going to happen, it needs to start immediately because it will take a lot of time. Most people aren’t paying attention yet but if you wait until everyone is angry about losing our local school or having to bus our fifth to eighth graders up to Falls Village every day, it will be too late to explore and offer alternatives,” he said.
“Our schools are shrinking—Sharon and FV very small and it might end there,” he said. “I just worry about a mandate in that sort of situation. It just makes sense to look at other options.”
First Selectman Eric Epstein said he did not believe it should be up to the selectmen or the finance board to take the lead on the issue. Selectmen Lynn Mellis Worthington said it is a subject that the town needs to talk about as a whole.
