HANCOCK, Vt. (AP) – Residents in Hancock and Granville have voted to keep their shared school, reversing a Town Meeting Day decision to close it.

The Village School has two campuses – formerly separate schools in each of the two towns. The towns joined educational forces to share the responsibility of educating kids from preschool through sixth grade. Older students go out of town to other schools.

Concerned about declining enrollment – the combined school has just 39 students this year – voters decided at Town Meeting in March to close it and send children of all ages out of town. But supporters of the local school collected enough signatures on a petition to put the matter before voters again.

“I am fabulously glad about that,” Mary Sue Crowley, lead teacher at the school’s Hancock campus, said of this week’s vote to open the school again in September.

“I think that we have got a great chance to show some out-of-the-box thinking.”

Voters approved a new, lower budget for the school, which will require cutting Spanish instruction and dropping a winter ski program.

Crowley said new committees have been formed to raise money from donations and grants to support the school’s finances.