The Burlington Free Press from Burlington, Vermont • Page 11

Deaths 2B Money 7B Monday, November 1 6, 1.98 1 South Burlington Considers Closing Elementary School Disappearance Of Essex Man Still a Mystery 1) v. wry i if I V'J (P IB I By JODIE PECK fret Prjj Staff Writer The, South Burlington School Board lVgrappling with facts and figures an enrollment trends and school buildings and will decide by Dec. 23 whether to close one of the three elementary schools next year. Enrollment in kindergarten through grade 5 has dropped from 1,032 in 1976 to about 760 this year. School administrators recommended last March that the board study whether to close a school because of declining enrollment and the increasing cost of energy.

The board began its study in September. If the rate of migration into the city remains steady and the birth rate stays the same as in 1980, the number of elementary school students will drop by 65 by 1983, but overall there will be a gain of 83 students by 1988, according to the study by researcher Ruth Olsen Stedman. If fewer people with school-age children move into the city, enrollment will drop to 668 by 1988, and if more children move into the district and the projected 1982 birth rate is used, there could be as many as 1,152 students in the elementary schools by 1988, according to the study. H. Charles Hill, chairman of the School Board, said the problem the board faces is which assumption to use in making plans.

Three committees made up of board members, teachers, administrators and residents have studied financial, educational and community implications of any change in distribution of students among the schools, but have come to no conclusions. According to the education committee report, the current enrollment could not be absorbed into Orchard and Chamberlin schools if Central school were closed because there is not enough room. The schools also would be near capacity if either of the others were closed, the report states. The committee also studied moving grade 5 to the Middle School and creating two elementary schools with grades K-4, or two elementary schools with grades K-2 and 3-4. Hill said the numbers were examined in each of the alternatives, but other implications were not.

He said changing the configuration of grade levels would "require more advanced planning time than we have. Some details and possible options haven't been worked on in great deal. The actual question of how the fifth grade would be accommodated within the Middle School has been raised repeatedly." Because there is not time for more study of the option of moving grade 5 student to the Middle School, it is not likely to be the one adopted, he said. Another possibility the board is studying is redisricting to even out the population at the schools. Central School on Williston Road is at 74 percent of capacity Turn to SCHOOL, Page 2B exact amount has not been made public, but the Kings and police say it is substantial.

Yandow said the investigation has been slowed by the lack of cooperation from Diane King. Two of her three children have refused to talk to police, on her advice, Yandow said. Mrs. King has refused to take a lie detector test, Yandow said. She told a reporter, however, that she "would take' one if they wanted me to." "They asked me a long time ago, but not lately," she said.

Mrs. King told the Free Press she knows nothing about her husband's disappearance. She said her husband changed considerably after the car accident. "I just think he got depressed. was just a different person after the accident.

His personality changed altogether and I was not living with him at the time he disappeared." King's parents said they feared for their son's safety because of what they considered threats by other people. They said they insisted that he always go out with somebody, usually his oldest son, Joey. The key to his disappearance could be a phone call he received two hours before he dropped from sight. King insisted that afternoon he could not go out because he had to wait for the call, his parents said. Who called and what was said remain a mystery, according to Yandow and the Kings.

King went hunting behind his Pictured above, from left, Michael, Diane, Butch and Angela Marie King. By MIKE DONOGHUE Free Presi Staff Writer ESSEX Wilfred and Lillian King Jr. sat in their kitchen last week and talked frankly about their son, Wilfred F. King III, who has been missing more than a' year. They are convinced he was killed.

And they are frustrated because they believe the person or persons responsible for his death will never be caught Diane King, 35, the missing man's estranged wife, said she has no idea what happened to her husband, "Butch." On a Friday night Oct. 24, 1980 King, 37, left his home at 114 Jericho Road. He was never seen again by anyone who will admit it, Essex Lt. Robert G. Yandow said.

King's blood-stained crutches were found a few days later off Middle Road in Colchester by two hunters. King had used crutches after being struck by a car in front of his home April 18, 1978. Another hunter found King's four-wheel-drive vehicle three weeks after his disappearance neaf a gravel pit off West Oak Hill Road in Willistou. Yandow said Essex police have traced numerous leads and interviewed dozens of persons, and at least six have been brought into court to give sworn testimony during inquests. Five searches of land have been made, he said.

King's parents have agreed to offer a cash reward for information leading to a conviction. The ij 1- k' house, came in, cleaned up and left the house at 7 p.m., supposedly to visit one of three friends, his parents said. Yandow said the friends say they never saw him that night. 1 His mother had encouraged King to take Joey with him, but he "The police say it is premeditated," the elder King said. 0 Democratic Reins Handed to Granai A 4 72 Yandow was more reserved, saying there is a "very good possibility of foul play." He said there is nothing to substantiate that King disappeared on his own.

A lot of things do not fit, according to the Kings, and the police agree. They have a 2-inch-thick file as proof. Turn to ESSEX, Page 2B housed 11 court-committed boys. Later, the school also admitted girls. By the second year, because school trustees reported receiving "numerous applications" from parents or guardians who wished to commit their unruly children, the state broadened its acceptance standards.

It became home, not just for convicted offenders, but also for "boys on the road to ruin whose course might be arrested by tme-ly commitment to reform school." The school population quickly soared. In the trustees' first annual report the governor, school officials remarked on the necessity of giving the boys not only a school education, but a "family and industrial education" as well. "Idleness Is everywhere the fruitful parent of misery and crime," the report charged. "The habits of idleness which brought Turn to VERMONT'S, Page 2B ail lit! 1 Gov. Madeleine Kunin will win the governor's chair and Kaplan "will make -a very strong congressional candidate." The report that the Democrats are just about out of debt was an historic moment.

Money woes have been synonymous with the Democrats for more than a decade. Every year since at least 1970 the Democrats have unveiled ambitious plans to pay off the party's debt, but each has fallen short of its goal. Some pf the ideas were a bit unusual, like the 1973 plan to hand out donkey banks piggy banks with pictures of donkeys on them to thousands of Democrats, asking that they each put a nickle a day into the bank for six months. Former party chairmen Philip Hoff and Carolyn Adler both made it a top priority to wipe the red off the books, but it was not until Kaplan took over that progress was made. One of the biggest efforts un-' der Kaplan came from Hoff and Thomas Salmon, both former governors, who undertook a personal campaign to raise money.

But it was one of the Democratic Party's oldest friends. Sen. Ed-Turn to GRANAI, Page 2B Tht Atiociottd Prtii i r) By CHRISTOPHER GRAFF The Associated Press Former state Rep. Edwin Granai of Burlington took control of a virtually debt-free Democratic Party Sunday, becoming the first chairman in years to assume the office without assuming monumental money problems. The Demo- GRANAI crats, meeting in White River Junction, postponed action on a resolution that would put the party on record against the construction of high-voltage power lines in the Northeast Kingdom.

Granai was elected without opposition, replacing Sen. Mark Kaplan, D-Chittenden, who is preparing a campaign for the U.S. House. Granai, the Democrat's unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate in 1978, pledged to put money and muscle behind the party's candidates in the 1982 elections. The manager of University Mall in South Burlington said he is bullish on 1982, predicting Lt.

a Darro Fire v. The Waterbury Reform school, 'above, was built in 1866. The photo is on loan from Ward Knapp of Montpelier. A Glance Into the Past State's 1st Reform School Embodied Education; Correction Pi i 4 ii fCl Cl lO. 1 Dillingham, decided steps had to be taken to house and reform the growing number of boys convicted each year for recurring crimes of "larceny, breach of peace, Intoxication, arson and vagrancy." A special committee was established to visit other New England state reformatories and report to the House of Representatives.

The committee's report suggested that "the existence of redeeming qualities In every youthful offender should be assumed," and that the state had a responsi-Bility to "do justice to these qualities and give the offender an interest in developing them." Moreover, the committee rec-, ognlzed that since the boys were "often more sinned against than sinning, unfortunate more than gUNty, and victims of crime more than criminals," a school for "reform, education and correction" was the only remedy. "We should hold over them not the sword of vengeance," the re By SALLY CAVANAGH Frw Pran Corrpondnt Gathering dust within Vermont's historical archives is the almost forgotten record of the state's first, perhaps most successful, experiment in juvenile reform. In Waterbury, not far from where street banners waved this year protesting location of a juvenile detention center in the village, there once stood a massive brick building that housed more than 100 juvenile offenders. Located at the heart of a 160-acre tract of farmland, the building, surrounded by barns, shops and sheds, was Vermont's answer to Juvenile reform in 1866. The Waterbury Reform School, for the eight years before It was consumed by flames one December night, served as home, school and Industrial training ground for tty state's wayward young.

In 1863, the Vermont Legislature, at the urging of Gov. Paul port concluded, "but the rod of parental correction." Accordingly, the Legislature set put to purchase a large farm, of not less than 200 acres, including roughly equal parts of "tillage, meadow, pasture and woodland." The farm, officials decided, "should be all in sight of the house and be taken in at a glance from any point within it" so that "the boys wherever at work on the farm, are never out of sight or hearing." In addition, the farm had to be as near as possible to a thriving village, so as not to be "cut off from human society and neighborhoods, easy access of friends and visitors, and from the free, warm and strong pulsation of the great social heart." Waterbury was the chosen site; although other municipalities throughout the state bid for the privilege of having the work farm. Also called the State Farm or Industrial School, the Waterbury Reform School In Its first year A mechanical bull is virtually the only thing left standing inside Lucifer's, a Barre nightspot destroyed by fire Sunday. Story on Pago.