Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Rama Schneider of Williamstown.
Is it time for a walk-out by our for-now local schools that still enjoy a local board and local input? North Bennington may have provided the leadership that we all need. Voters there chose to take the North Bennington Graded School into the realm of “independent” school in response to the recent waves of laws mandating or threatening to mandate consolidation of our schools and the governing structures that oversee them.
The Vermont General Assembly is on the verge of passing a bill that will take our semi-autonomous Vermont Department of Education and turn that department into a wholly owned subsidiary of the governor’s office (you know — make it an agency).
This is happening despite nobody being able to answer a simple question: What is it about the education of our daughters and sons that will improve by this radical change in school governance? I’ve been able to ask that very question of Gov. Shumlin three separate times, and each time the governor has responded by telling me his personal great ideas for what our kids should be doing and how Vermonters elected him to run everything else — so he should be in charge of the education system too! Like other legislators I’ve talked to, the governor has no education-based rationale for this move.
We’re already being forced into consolidation of our schools by Section 9 of Act 153 (2010). This is the bill that mandates (yeah, top-down demand) local boards surrender some of the most important, not to mention expensive, parts of our schools (curriculum, staffing, special education) to supervisory union boards. We’re told, of course, that if we at the local level can prove to somebody in Montpelier that we can do better and less expensive we can possibly regain those authorities; but not one single supervisory union board will have to prove the same to wrest control from the local boards.
Further, the Senate is pushing for — and conversations on the House side imply the House is receptive to — drastically reducing the number of these newly empowered super supervisory unions from the current approximately 60 to as few as 15 or 16. Of course this comes down the pike only after we’ve been told to start the mandated consolidation mentioned in the previous paragraph.
A bill going through the House will require school boards surrender a negotiating tool — the agency fee. This despite the fact that it is state law that mandates we negotiate with the unions in the first place. Like unions or not, this has nothing to do with education — instead it has to do with politics and control. (By the way I like the unions — but if we’re being forced into an adversarial relationship by legislative fiat let’s at least keep the playing field level.)
I’m thinking a walk-out by local schools who value local boards and local input is looking more and more attractive. Thank you, North Bennington, for showing true leadership.
