VSBA Exceptional School Board Leadership Award

The Vermont School Boards Association is pleased to recognize the work of school boards across the State of Vermont. The Award for Exceptional Board Leadership is a means of recognizing the contributions of a particular high-performing board. It is also a way to acknowledge all of the hard work done by the 850+ citizen representatives who serve throughout the state.

The award will be granted to a board which:

Consistently demonstrates an understanding of the role and responsibilities of a school board relative to administrators, teachers, and citizens.
Consistently demonstrates effective and ethical operations as a board.
Has made demonstrable contributions to the well-being of students, and/or has made demonstrable contributions to the effective and efficient operation of the education system it oversees, and/or has contributed to the cause of public education in Vermont.

The 2022 Exceptional Board was awarded to the Windsor Central Unified Union School Board.

The Windsor Central Unified Union School Board came into existence in 2020 when the town of Barnard joined the other six towns of the Windsor Central District. Once all 18 members were gathered for the purpose of serving the needs of all towns students and communities, their work of becoming one truly unified district began.

Getting to this point took 25 three hour meetings as the Act 46 Committee, town hall meetings in each of the seven communities, and extremely challenging monthly board meetings. Emotions ran deep as they shifted from a vision of governing schools by towns, to having a shared understanding of all our student’s needs.

As the board adjusted to this new merged structure, they came to see the value of working together to achieve a shared vision.

While merging, the board had the foresight to create a community vision for a district Portrait of a Graduate and a five year strategic plan. Both were bold moves that supported a long range view of where we needed to move to achieve the level of equity that was planned for in our merge. These tools have provided the board, school leadership team, faculty and the superintendent the guidance needed to make the resource, instructional and programmatic decisions necessary to be a highly efficient and effective school district.