1. What are the key dates?
On or before December 1, 2010 the board of each Supervisory Union must discuss if it wishes to explore the merger of districts. School districts can also have this discussion, but are not required to.

On or before October 1, 2012 "the board of each Supervisory Union will vote on whether or not they are going to perform a more comprehensive analysis of merger, and report back the results of the vote to the commissioner of education, and to each member school district." This means the board has identified the towns that are a good fit and they want to move forward with an official study, with the goal of creating a RED with those towns.

You must create a RED on or before July 1, 2017 if you want to receive the tax breaks.

2. Why are we being told we can't have school choice AND our local school?
Vermont's tuitioning law does NOT allow for public schools and tuitioning for the same grade to exist in any school district. (Title 16 sec. 821 and 822) If you are a town with school choice in any of your grades and you join up with other districts (to form a RED) that do have a public school for those grades, you will no longer have tuitioning in those grades. However, if you are willing to think outside of the box, you CAN have a local INDEPENDENT school and school choice.  An example of this would be a community with an existing elementary school and secondary school choice. You can choose to close your elementary school, offer school choice to all grade levels, and subsequently re-open your elementary school as an independent school or Town Academy. If this was done, your options for merging with other communities under Act 153 would be limited to the other K-12 choice districts. You could also choose to retain an elementary school and close the secondary school, creating school choice at the secondary level and joining with other secondary level choice districts.

3. But we were told that if we merge we will have more school choices than we have now, is this true?
If your new RED (Regional Education District) has more than one public school at the same grade level and has decided as part of the merger plan to allow students a choice between those schools, you will have JUST those options. This is very different from school choice/tuitioning which allows students grades 7-12 tuition to ANY public or approved non-sectarian independent school of the parent's choice, without any geographic boundaries. (Title 16, sec. 822)

4. My town doesn't have any schools, but the taxpayers want the incentives. How can we save our School Choice?
If you merge with other districts that have schools, you will lose school choice in those grades. If you want to preserve your K-12 school choice you can either not participate, or you can choose to  merge with other K-12 choice towns. REDs are not required to be made up of contiguous districts, so the potential exists for the geographically spread out K-12 choice towns to unite as a single district. However you will have to address oversight of Special Education through whichever Supervisory Union you end up joining. Also, under Vermont law elementary tuitioning CAN be more restrictive than secondary tuitioning. It will be up to your RED board to determine if they will pay for ANY public or approved independent elementary school that parents choose, or if they will choose to pay for "one or more" schools as the only schools they will pay tuition to (Title 16, sec 821).

5. My town has a K-6 school and tuitions students for grades 7-12. What are our options for keeping School Choice?
You have two straightforward options: do not participate in a merger, or create a RED that only contains districts with K-6 public schools and have 7-12 choice. If your new RED does not have a 7-12 school or designated 7-12 school, you will still retain school choice. A  third option you could consider is the creation of a RED that is large enough in scope that it includes all of the (public only) secondary schools your families tend to choose - this is not true school choice because you will be limited to the schools available when the RED is formed, but in some cases you may not have other viable options. 

6. Is this all up to the School Boards and Supervisory Unions?
The final merger decision will go before the voters. However, it is a long road to get there and citizens should be involved every step of the way to make sure you are happy with the direction your district board and supervisory union board are taking, right from the start.

7. Is a RED a Supervisory Union?
No, a RED is a Union Unified Supervisory District. It can have its own superintendent, or under H.66 it can belong to a Supervisory Union with other School Districts.

8. If we join a RED can the RED close our schools?
In the first four years of a RED a school can only be closed if the town that hosts the school agrees to the closure. After four years the RED Board can vote to close any schools it governs.

9. Is there any grandfathering of students?
Yes, if the new merger would give you fewer educational options than you had before the merger. Children are grandfathered ONLY into the school they are currently enrolled.

10. What are the incentives?
The incentives are reductions on your homestead property tax rate: .08 the first year, .06 the second year, .04 the third year and .02 the fourth year.

11. My town has a low property tax rate compared with the other districts we might merge with, how will that affect us?
All of the towns in the RED will need to have the same equalized homestead property tax rate, so some rates will go up, others will go down. To bring the rates together will take some time. "The rate for each town within the RED shall not increase or decrease by more than 5% in a single year." According to the law.

12. We would really like to have school choice in our community, how do we get it?
Unfortunately at this time the only way to get true school choice in Vermont (every parent choosing the child's school) is to close your school. There are two statutes (sec. 821 and sec. 823) that establish K-6 tuitioning and two (sec. 822 and sec. 824) that establish 7-12 tuitioning - there are differences in the implementation and educational options.  There are additional statutes in Chapter 21 that discuss tuiotioning and school designation.