Oxbow school district budget passes on fourth try
Modified: 1/14/2021 10:55:38 PM
BRADFORD, Vt. On the fourth attempt, voters in the Oxbow Unified Union School District approved a budget for the 2020-21 school year in Australian and absentee balloting on Wednesday.
Voters in the district’s two towns, Bradford and Newbury, approved the $16.8 million budget by a count of 552-351, with one spoiled ballot.
“I was really surprised by the margin,” Danielle Corti, chair of the Oxbow district’s board, said Thursday morning. “That, to me, meant we didn’t just win a few people over.”
The last vote, on Nov. 24, saw a higher turnout, as voters rejected the same budget, 593-578. For that vote, the two towns sent ballots to all voters, but for Wednesday’s vote, only voters who requested ballots from their town clerks received them.
Newbury sticks with Oxbow district
Modified: 12/30/2020 9:17:35 PM
NEWBURY, Vt. Voters have rejected a proposal to leave the Oxbow Unified Union School District and return Newbury Elementary School to a standalone school district.
In Australian and mail-in balloting on Tuesday, Newbury residents voted 169-140 to defeat the proposal.
Newbury had tried in 2018 to avoid joining the Oxbow district, which pairs the town with Bradford, Vt., and oversees an elementary school in each town as well as Oxbow High School and River Bend Career and Technical Center. The State Board of Education required the involuntary merger that created the district under Act 46, Vermont’s 2015 school consolidation law.
Newbury, Tunbridge among Vermont towns considering leaving school districts
Students at the Ripton Elementary School head to the bus at the end of the day on Tuesday, December 1, 2020. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
Modified: 12/28/2020 8:45:38 PM
MONTPELIER At least five towns across Vermont will vote in the coming weeks on whether to secede from their unified school districts, a first wave of district breakups that could herald more.
For David Major, the former Westminster School Board chairman who helped organize a petition for his town to vote Jan. 5 on secession, it is fundamentally a question of local control. Westminster has already collaborated with its neighboring towns on such services as food service and special education, Major said, and has seen no added benefit to being forced to combine school boards with Athens and Grafton under Act 46.
Dissolution of the Consolidated Oxbow Unified Union Scholl District - Kathy Damon, Emmy Hausman, Bud Haas, Marvin Harrison, Paul Jewett caledonianrecord.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from caledonianrecord.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Published: 12/17/2020 10:00:24 PM
Modified: 12/17/2020 10:00:13 PM
Workers going ‘nose commando’ help no one
Thanks to Peter J. Murdza Jr., for his letter about Hanover postal workers who do not follow pandemic protocols (“Postal workers in Hanover without masks a concern,” Dec. 15).
Though I have never previously had a problem with the Hanover Post Office, when I went in to mail two packages recently, the clerk (who did not wear a name badge) was wearing a face mask covering only his mouth. I did not step all the way up to the counter and asked him to please adjust his mask so it covered his nose properly. He declined to do so.