Smith asked Vermonters to submit ideas on the public education debate now playing out at the Statehouse by New Year’s Eve.
“The proposals had a wide range of ideas, some of them workable, some of them not,” Smith said Monday. “But I thought there were some really interesting thoughts there, moving health insurance costs out of the Education Fund, ways to address student-staff ratios, and ideas around special education costs.”
Smith said the responses included helpful ideas about staff-to-student ratios, special education and teacher health insurance.
Smith has made finding solutions to rising property taxes and decreasing student populations a priority for lawmakers this session. The declining student enrollment trend is expected to continue through at least 2030.
Legislation last year in H.883 proposed reducing the number of school districts in the state from 362 to about 60.
Last week, the House Education Committee started work on a draft bill that would again seek to form larger Regional Education Districts, combining smaller districts into larger units in place of having nearly 300 distinct districts, which are now joined only at the supervisory level.
The draft bill would permit alternative governance proposals for districts whose local boards study merging but then deem that joining a larger district would be “inadvisable.”
Under the proposal, the districts seeking to not join a larger district could create union districts, or propose some other solution to creating efficiencies and better opportunities for students, but they must obtain both local voter approval and approval at the State Board of Education level to be permitted to do something different.
The working language in the yet-to-be-proposed bill would also phase out the hold-harmless provision that has created so-called “phantom” students for districts who have seen enrollment declines. That program has cushioned the financial blow of declining enrollment through a state formula that gives schools credit for more students than are actually in chairs.
Districts now receiving small schools grants would see that support remain indefinitely, but be funnel through the new larger supervisory districts.
“They generally fell into a couple categories: larger school districts, and fund students according to some calculation of an adequate amount of money,” said Rep. David Sharpe, chair of the House Education Committee.
The ideas
Sean-Marie N. Oller of Bennington, a 20-year local and supervisory union level school board member, suggested the idea of enlarged school districts as opposed to supervisory unions.
“The idea behind turning SU’s into SD’s is that folks in the supervisory unions (board members, citizens, teachers district personnel …) are familiar with one another and they have the same superintendent,” stated Oller.
Oller touched on one of the arguments that has come up over and over to push small schools to look to work with their neighbors to reduce costs.
“Another issue for me is the small schools grant allocation. In one breath the state is saying: think about sharing services, think about if your school is too small and in the next breath the state is giving out $7.5 million to sustain small schools,” Oller said. “I believe this is a mixed message.”
Another of the responses to Smith came from Andrew Pond of Bolton, chair of his local elementary school board, which has just undergone a move to join a larger modified unified school district, the Mount Mansfield District, with other towns.
Pond said, “My opinions around Education Reform are largely based on my experience as chair of the board of a small school that joined the first Modified Union in Vermont. Our school struggled with declining enrollment, skyrocketing taxes, and a recurring town meeting question: ‘how small is too small?’”
“Our experience may provide some information useful to the statewide consolidation discussions. Some believe that combining school districts will result in significant cost savings,” Pond said. “Others fear that consolidation will eliminate local control. We found neither of these convictions to be pragmatically accurate. But we can do better for our students, taxpayers, and communities by merging some districts.”
Richard Raubertas of East Montpelier said in his letter to the speaker: “The problem is too much spending, not too little revenue. The fact that spending is increasing rapidly while enrollment is going down is one sign that spending is the problem.”
“The people who decide spending have to be the same people who pay the taxes to fund it!” stated Raubertas. “Otherwise there is no incentive to balance spending against costs. If spending is decided locally, then taxes must be raised locally (basically the current property tax system).
“My proposal is that the state should set a per student spending rate … and raise that amount by a combination of statewide property tax and income tax. Any school district that wanted to spend more would have to raise the extra money from an additional local property tax.”
Are they listening?
Some of the citizen proposals may find their way into the bill the House Education Committee is beginning to form lawmakers say.
Rep. Tim Jerman, D-Essex Junction, a member of the House Education Committee, asked if parts of the citizen proposals on education finance and governance might be considered for the bill.
“If some of us like some of the things we saw in those requests, we could propose those as amendments?” asked Rep. Ann Manwaring, D-Wilmington, who was told that was definitely possible.
Smith thanked all of those who chose to respond.
“I really appreciated the variety of ideas and the level of thought that was put into them,” he said.
