‘Whitcomb Academy’
Has a Nice Ring

The purpose of this letter is to provide additional support for Lang Durfee’s proposal in your Jan. 26 edition regarding Bethel’s choices for educating its high school students in the years ahead.

Bethel’s school board is to be commended for pursuing educational alternatives to the present situation, which while providing quality education incurs big per-pupil costs. The extreme taxes that result, as we all know, are a product of a state-operated CLA formula, which hardly anyone, including the consultants sent out by the department of Education in Montpelier, can explain.

Considering merging with other towns or tuitioning its students to another school district certainly has to be explored and studied, and doing so is in the best interest of the town and its children. In these cases, however, the partial or complete loss of local educational control of the students is going to occur, no small loss to small-town residents and parents whose pride in their school is extremely evident.

Lang’s idea of including in the agendas of these study committees the possibility of becoming a private school, not unlike Lyndon Institute, St. Johnsbury or Sharon Academies, is both visionary and thought-provoking. Besides obviously continuing local control, there are numerous other advantages including funding, avoiding state-mandates and less transportation costs. Whitcomb Academy sounds better to me, as an alumnus of this school (1954), than any other title which involves being tied into different school districts.

As a retired educator from Vermont, I still maintain an interest in my home town’s educational status. My professional career involved quite a bit of interaction with both public and private institutions within my role as a secondary principal I would stress that looking into the possibility of becoming a private school seems to me to be an investigation that might lead to a significant, postitive change for Bethel while retaining, as Lang said, the benefits that Whitcomb add to the Behtel community.

Thanks for the opportunity to add my thoughts to this issue.

Richard Brown

Dade City, Fla.

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