Welcome to Rumbull Strip, Vermont.

This far north, if you ask anybody in this town, they'll tell you, straight out.

Mompilia doesn't hear us.

They just don't care about us up here either way.

But in our own small communities, we are somebody.

But when your voice is gone what is left there's there's nothing

that was Lincoln Patel longtime school board chairman from Holland, Vermont, small town way up on the Canadian border.

This is a show about something that happened here in Vermont last winter.

It was a terrible winter and toward the end we were all pretty fed up and tired and broke and

everyone was worried about taxes because they're too high.

And right in the middle of all that came a piece of school legislation called Act 46.

It was a school consolidation bill that promised to lower our taxes or that's what they were saying in the news in the beginning and then some time passed and all of a sudden they were saying that the school

consolidation bill was really about equal opportunity for all Vermont kids.

Well the truth is it wasn't really clear how it would do either of these things, but since everyone

was fed up being cold and paying taxes, the bill passed.

And here we are.

It's nearly a year later, and there's still plenty of mystery about how or whether this legislation

will lower our taxes, how it will improve education for our kids,

and by whose standards,

and there are even some pending lawsuits about the constitutionality

of some parts of this legislation.

But that's not what today's show is about.

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