The Vote That Kept the Doors Open

On Tuesday, February 10, the people of Calais and Worcester, Vermont walked into their town halls and voted to keep their elementary schools open.

The margin was not close. In Calais, 398 residents voted against closing Calais Elementary School. Only 249 voted to close it. In Worcester, 212 voted to keep Doty Memorial School open. Only 114 voted to shut it down.

The schools are small. Calais Elementary has eighty-nine students. Doty Memorial has fifty-seven. One kindergarten class has seven children. The Washington Central Unified Union School District has lost 14 percent of its students over the past decade, and officials expect the decline to continue.

The school board had recommended closing both schools and consolidating students into three larger buildings in neighboring towns. They offered a full-time librarian. A school nurse. Band and chorus programs, the five-school model could not afford.

The voters said no.

Andrea Tucker and Anthony Houser moved their family from Texas to Calais. They came, Houser said, for “the small state feel, the small school down the street feel.” Closing the school, he said, would be a “momentum killer” for families like theirs.

Tucker put it plainly: “Our small schools are an asset to invest in and leverage in response to a declining population.”

Rosie Close, a fifth grader at Doty Memorial, spoke at a public meeting before the vote. She described a tradition: Doty students make and serve soup at the town’s free “community lunch” every Wednesday at the town hall.

“If they closed Doty,” she said, “that would kind of take away part of the town, too.”

Wendell Berry has spent sixty years writing about what holds rural communities together—and what tears them apart.

A Kentucky farmer and essayist, Berry has watched small towns empty out as their economies collapsed, their young people left, and their institutions vanished one by one. He has argued that schools, churches, stores, and local businesses are not line items on a budget. They are the threads that weave a community into existence.

“A community,” Berry wrote, “is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.”

When the school closes, the knowledge goes with it. Parents no longer gather at drop-off. Children no longer walk the same halls their parents walked. The building falls silent, and the rhythm that organized daily life disappears.

Berry understood that the arguments for consolidation always sound reasonable. Efficiency. Resources. Opportunity. But he also understood what the spreadsheets cannot measure.

“People in small rural communities need their own small businesses, stores, workshops, legal and medical services, schools, and churches,” he wrote. “People become neighbors by working together, talking to each other, and needing each other’s help and encouragement and comfort.”

When a school closes, neighbors stop becoming neighbors. The place that brought them together is gone.

The voters of Calais and Worcester made a choice. They chose connection over convenience. They chose the Wednesday soup served by fifth graders over the band program offered somewhere else.

They may have made this choice harder for themselves. The district budget will now stretch across five schools instead of three. Resources will be thinner. Some programs will wait.

But they kept their doors open. They kept their children walking to schools their grandparents might recognize. They kept the rhythm that makes a town more than a collection of houses.

Someone should write this story. Not the news report—the newspapers have already done that. The deeper story. The one that asks why these people voted the way they did, what they feared losing, what they hoped to preserve.

Someone should interview Rosie Close and ask her what Wednesday soup tastes like, who taught her to ladle it, what she hears when the room fills with neighbors.

Someone should sit with Andrea Tucker and Anthony Houser and ask what they left behind in Texas, what they found in Calais, what made them stay.

These are the stories that explain a community to itself. These are the stories that explain a community to the world.

The Power of Authors calls writers to this work: Stand where the place is shared. Write what makes neighbors out of strangers. Bear witness to the institutions that hold communities together—before they disappear, and while they still can be saved. Available on Amazon. For an autographed copy: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM

The doors stayed open. The story waits to be told.

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