Jim Johnson has driven school buses for the Champlain Valley School District for 35 years. School support staff like himself — drivers, paraeducators and cafeteria workers — are harder and harder to find and retain, especially those who commit to long careers in education.
“The backbone of a community works in a school,” he told lawmakers in the Senate Economic Development, Housing and General Affairs Committee Thursday morning. But with low wages and difficult responsibilities, “Why would anybody choose to work in a school?” he asked.
What might help, he argued, is a benefit given to other workers with offseasons: UI, otherwise known as unemployment insurance.
While teachers and school administrators receive annual salaries, their fellow support staff do not. Some choose to have their already modest pay spread out across the year, including summer months and vacations when they’re not working. Others opt not to receive checks at all during the offseason.
School support staff who testified Thursday described a recurring problem. Their colleagues pick up second jobs during the summer, only to decide the new work is easier and better paying, abandoning their school roles. Positions like paraprofessionals then become rife with turnover — a cost in itself.
Illinois became the first state to pilot UI for school staff during the pandemic, Dave Kamper, a senior state policy strategist with the Economic Policy Institute, told lawmakers. Minnesota followed suit in 2023.
S.37, a bill three Senate Democrats have signed on to, would have Vermont join that short list.
If Vermont were to extend UI to school staff, Kamper estimated using Minnesota’s metrics that it would cost about $5.65 million in the first year, growing to $8 million in year two. Those numbers may be over-estimates, Kamper noted, because a larger proportion of unemployed people receive unemployment in Minnesota than Vermont.
Pitching an added cost to Vermont’s public education system is a hard sell in a year when lawmakers are insisting on lowering education property taxes and school spending.
But there’s an equation to consider, Sen. Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor, the committee’s chair and one of S.37’s sponsors, said. Weighing “the cost of turnover” and the cost of UI payments to the education system, she said, are the two “competing financial challenges.”
—Ethan Weinstein
In the know
Legislators and Gov. Phil Scott seem to agree Vermont needs fewer school districts. The question is, how many, and who’s grouped with who?
Enter the ‘Bongartz Plan’, a map cooked up by Sen. Seth Bongartz, D-Bennington, chair of the Senate Education Committee. The proposal calls for six supervisory districts, three supervisory unions, and Vermont’s two existing interstate school districts.
The idea, according to Bongartz, is to help accelerate the policymaking process by putting a best attempt on the table.
“One more time to people listening,” he said in committee yesterday, “I make, like, no pretense that I’ve got this map exactly right.”
—Ethan Weinstein
On the move
To-go cocktails may be in Vermont to stay.
Covid-era legislation permitting Vermont businesses to sell cocktails in to-go containers was scheduled to wind down this July. On Thursday, though, the House gave preliminary approval to H.339, a bill that would repeal that sunset clause, making takeout cocktails and curbside pickup at certain liquor stores a permanent fixture in the state.
The law was initially set to phase out in July of 2023, but lawmakers acted that year to extend the provision until this summer. Now they seem poised to enshrine the statute in state law for good.
“We’ve had four years of quote-unquote ‘trying it out,’” Rep. Chea Waters Evans, D-Charlotte, told fellow members of the House Committee on Government Operations and Military Affairs last week. “It seems like it could be something that just exists now. That’s my position — we just keep it.”
—Habib Sabet
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On the hill
A virtual town hall hosted by U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Peter Welch, D-Vt., and Congresswoman Becca Balint, D-Vt., drew roughly 34,000 participants Wednesday night as uncertainty over the future of federal programs took center stage.
The livestreamed meeting featured a blend of pre-submitted questions — over 1,400 — and live call-ins from residents eager to voice their concerns.
While only a tiny fraction of the questions were answered due to the 90-minute time limit, Balint, Sanders and Welch responded to a wide array of inquiries on topics that included the potential slashing of Medicaid and Medicare, the impact of cuts to veterans’ health care, and the future of Social Security.
Read more about the event here.
— Klara Bauters
Read the story on VTDigger here: Final Reading: Unsalaried school support staff want to be eligible for unemployment insurance.