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Despite Opposition, Rutland Schools Poised To Hire Collins

Despite a petition against her, outgoing Burlington Superintendent Jeanne Collins remains in the running for the top job in the Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union.

As Seven Days reported last week, Collins is the only finalist for the superintendent job in Rutland, where she would oversee seven schools.

Since then, a petition on Change.org (link included for informational purposes only) has gathered more than 200 signatures in support of dropping Collins from consideration and initiating a new search. But the chair of the hiring committee in Rutland seems undeterred by that development, and said the people speaking out against Collins were less informed than the committee.

“We understand that the people who are expressing concerns have not reviewed all the material that the committee has considered,” said Carol Brigham, the chair of the committee.

Erik Pearsons, a school board member in Pittsford, said Collins work in Burlington is enough for him to make a decision.

“Our search should be extended for as long as it takes to get whoever we feel is right for our students,” he said. “Someone with that kind of a track record we just feel is not a good fit.”

Pearsons said problems like those in Burlington could “cripple” schools in the Rutland district. Financial mismanagement and budgeting issues under Collins have caused problems for the district, which now reportedly owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Internal Revenue Service and is working to recover from years of miscalculated budgets.

But Brigham said the petition doesn’t properly characterize the search process, which is designed to advance the most qualified candidates who would best serve the district. Brigham said Collins fairly earned her place as a finalist in the process.

After last week’s tour of the schools in the district and a public forum with Collins, Brigham said the committee continued their process.

“The next step was to go visit her site,” Brigham said. “A team from the complete committee – there was three of us – I was one of them, who went to her job site yesterday [Thursday] morning to also take more information to bring back to the committee, which is going to meet on Tuesday May 27 to deliberate.”

After deliberation, the committee will come up with a recommendation to the Supervisory Union’s board, to be presented on May 28.

Brigham said that when a final recommendation is made, it will be the result of a thorough process.

“We’ve been looking into it diligently and thoroughly and turned over every rock as they say and talked to everybody that we possibly could find about Ms. Collins and mainly finding out the answers, and how she is a leader in where she is and how we see that fitting into our [Supervisory Union]. But I just want to say that she fairly earned the invitation to this interview and we want to see the process completed.”

Taylor was VPR's digital reporter from 2013 until 2017. After growing up in Vermont, he graduated with at BA in Journalism from Northeastern University in 2013.
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