[T]he California-based team hired by the state to study what it would take to provide an education that makes sure all Vermont’s students graduate from high school ready to work or go onto college is holding forums with educators and members of the public Tuesday and Wednesday.
Vermont is a top spender when it comes to education and lots of people want to know if the state is spending too much or not enough. In the hope of finding an answer, lawmakers provided $300,000 to fund an evidence-based study on the cost of an adequate education when they passed Act 46. The Agency of Education says Vermont spent $14,008 per equalized pupil in 2015.
“The percent of personal income that is devoted to K-12 education in Vermont is the highest by a big bit,” said Larry Picus of Picus, Odden & Associates, the firm performing the study.
Vermonters believe in and work at providing good learning opportunities to children, he said. “The school funding system makes great efforts at equity and achieves it at much higher levels than other states,” he said.
While he didn’t know exactly why Vermont’s per pupil costs are so high, he surmised it is likely a combination of factors, one of them being the state’s “system that enables voters to make choices on their budget each year for their schools. We found that the way the tax system works there are some taxpayers who can elect to increase spending at a very low cost to themselves because of the way equalization works so that may drive up the costs a bit.”
But, Picus quickly added, “I would never tell you it is bad to spend more on schools; that is a decision for the individual communities.”
Salaries tend to make up about 80 percent of the cost of education. And Vermont is lower in administrator, staff and teacher to student ratios than any other state in the country, according to Jeff Francis, executive director of the Vermont Superintendents Association. Cutting positions, pay increases or decreases and health care can become emotional decisions when made at the local level.
“We are providing an analytical tool to help people make difficult choices,” Picus said.
The evidence-based model used by Picus and Odden is one of only four in use across the nation. Their method has been used in more states than any other in recent years, according to Picus.
With a firm grip on education research into what works to improve student learning, Picus and Odden’s team will develop a prototypical Vermont school that has the resources needed to get all students to that level of education. They get a base amount and then add modifications that account for Vermont’s circumstances, the size of the school, the needs of the children and other variables. “We total it up and get a number for each school, each school district and then the state,” Picus explained.
This tool will also help identify costs and savings among school districts that are considering voluntary mergers under the new education law.
“What we are planning to build into the capacity of it is the ability for a group of districts to build an alternative district and estimate the cost if all those schools were combined into a larger size district,” he said.
Vermont has the smallest average school size of any state and it has relatively small student enrollments, according to Picus. Vermont is also different from other states because of the way decisions are made, he said. “The vast majority of [Vermont] school districts are a single school district, particularly at the elementary level, and you build up to this supervisory level to help build economies of scale,” he added. The biggest Vermont district is around 4,000 students while in Wyoming, a state with about the same amount of students, there are only 48 school districts and they are three times the size – around 9,000 to 12,000 students, according to Picus.
Yet Picus wouldn’t go as far as saying that merging districts will end up cutting costs. “Vermont is small — close together — so it makes sense that building economies of scale will possibly help, but I would be reluctant and irresponsible to say that it does save money.”
The draft report does not provide recommendations yet. It is a description of the Picus-Odden model with modifications for Vermont. The forums this week will gather public input on the methods that will be used and what will be measured. Then this winter the full report will be presented to the Legislature including recommendations for the state to pursue. The tool is still being built to meet Vermont’s specific challenges. It will be released with the report and it will be up to the Legislature and the Joint Fiscal Office as to when it will be made available to the public, Picus said.
