What's next for Region 12?

Published 4:47 pm, Wednesday, April 30, 2014

The residents of Region 12 have sent a powerful message to town and school officials with their overwhelming rejection of both questions on Tuesday's referendum ballot.

District voters shot down a proposed change in the 1967 regional plan that would have removed the guarantee that each Region 12 town would have a K-5 school within its borders and led to Bridgewater and Roxbury being the only towns in Connecticut without an elementary school.

Voters also handily defeated a $41 million proposal to build a consolidated elementary school on the Shepaug Valley Middle High School campus and to renovate the four-decade-old middle/high school.

As anticipated, Bridgewater and Roxbury -- the two smallest towns in the district -- voted in big numbers against both proposals.

Bridgewater residents spoke with almost one voice, as there was a more than 90 percent "no" vote on both questions, while nearly two-thirds of Roxbury voters rejected the change in the regional plan and nearly three-quarters turned down the $41 million plan.

Also as anticipated, Washington -- the center of the pro-consolidation movement over the decades -- supported both questions by roughly two-thirds votes.

However, the surprisingly low voter turnout in Washington -- 33 percent to Bridgewater's 68 percent and Roxbury's 54 percent -- contributed to a district-wide 63 percent "no" vote on Question 1 and a whopping 68 percent rejection of Question 2.

Now that the referendum has been held and the smoke is starting to clear, the question is this: What's next for Region 12?

For starters, school and town officials and district residents alike need to do their best to put behind them the acrimony, emotion and rhetoric of the past couple of years leading up to the referendum.

The folks in Bridgewater and Roxbury who successfully blocked the loss of their schools and tens of millions of dollars in bonding need to be humble in victory, and consolidation proponents in all three towns need to be gracious in defeat.

School and town officials will be going back to the drawing board, and they need to start with a clean slate and a sincere desire to truly listen to each other, to honestly try to understand each other's positions, and to work together in seeking a new game plan.

One good starting point is the universal agreement throughout Region 12 that something has to be done to deal with severely declining enrollment and rising per-pupil expenditures.

Another starting point is certainly that consolidation is now off the table.

The Board of Education took a calculated risk in going forth with a consolidation plan when it knew Bridgewater -- and very likely Roxbury -- would reject such a proposal.

What made the risk even greater was, as the result of a 2009 state Supreme Court ruling, it took only one town to block any changes in the regional plan and, therefore, any consolidation proposal.

That risk did not pay off, and school officials are hopefully that much wiser.

It is clear no consolidation plan will pass in Region 12, and it is equally clear all three towns need to be on the same page -- or at least in the same ballpark -- regarding the future of the district.

In the short term, officials might bring back the $8.3 million middle/high school renovations portion of the $41 million plan.

There might also be a push to merge the elementary schools in Roxbury and Bridgewater, achieving some cost savings by making Roxbury's Booth Free School a pre-K-to-grade-2 school for both towns and Bridgewater's Burnham School the towns' grade 3-5 facility.

But there are other serious philosophical and pragmatic issues that need to be explored with regard to educational quality, attracting more students to Region 12, fiscal matters and the viability of the district.

We hope people of good will from throughout Region 12 will work harmoniously to achieve an enlightened game plan that will reunite the district and be good for the students and residents of all three towns.