Gov. Phil Scott has promised a major education reform proposal that would transform Vermont’s public education system.
“The bottom line is our system is out of scale and very expensive. And as obvious as these challenges are, we haven’t been able to fix it,” the Republican governor told lawmakers in his inaugural address earlier this month.
For now, the specifics remain murky. But the broad strokes have begun to come to light, and the Legislature expects to hear a more complete plan in a joint briefing on Wednesday.
The inaugural speech itself hinted at the major areas of proposed reform, including changing school district governance structures, increasing staff to student ratios, and reimagining Vermont’s education funding formula.
That means the state could see district consolidation, school closures and state-imposed budget constraints unprecedented in recent memory, all targeted at lowering the cost of Vermont’s public education system.
Sen. Scott Beck, R-Caledonia, the Senate minority leader and a teacher at St. Johnsbury Academy, has focused on education funding during his legislative tenure. While he declined to share details of the governor’s plan, he said the package would address several aspects of education funding and delivery.
“It’s a very big reform bill, probably the biggest proposal that this Legislature has seen in 50 years,” Beck said.
The call for reform arrives after education property taxes rose an average of 13.8% last year, driven by a roughly $180 million increase in education spending. This year, the tax department has predicted a 5.9% increase in property taxes, though Scott has said his plan would bring that number to zero.
Democratic legislative leaders have expressed support for the active role Scott’s team has taken in developing new policies, acknowledging a need to make the cost of education more affordable.
Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, said this week that Democrats would take the governor’s plan and “marry it with our own ideas” in an attempt to find compromise.
But the state’s teacher’s union, the Vermont-NEA, is among those wary of any plan that reduces the number of teachers or limits services to students.
“We’re already seeing many positions being eliminated in our schools,” Don Tinney, the union’s president, said in an interview. “We will never support a plan that doesn’t put students first.”
A foundation formula
Scott’s plan will propose shifting the state’s education funding formula to what’s called a “foundation formula,” a system used in 36 states across the country, according to analysis from the Education Commission of the States.
Currently, local school boards have near complete discretion to build their budgets in Vermont’s idiosyncratic school funding landscape.
In a foundation formula, districts are provided a base amount of money per student. That base amount can vary significantly from state to state and is arguably the biggest policy decision inherent to the formula.
A foundation formula may also account for students who are more expensive to teach, like English language learners or students from impoverished homes, by “weighting” those students to count for more than one student. Or, the state could account for those additional expenses in another way, such as through separate grants. Vermont’s current system already utilizes student weights.
It’s unclear whether districts might be able to raise more money than the foundation provides, and if so, how. If that money is allowed to be raised locally, lawmakers worry it would exacerbate inequities between communities based on wealth. Possibly, a foundation formula could create a statewide pool for the additional money, more closely mirroring the current system.
Central to the discussion of a new funding formula is the Vermont Supreme Court’s 1997 Brigham case. The court determined that the state’s previous funding system — a form of a foundation formula — was unconstitutional, and that the state needed to provide equal educational opportunity by giving districts the ability to fund their schools regardless of local property values.
“The idea that a wealthy community could raise a bunch of money on top of a block grant at a much easier level than a poorer community, you know, not only is that from a principal point of view a no go, but it probably wouldn’t survive a Brigham test,” Rep. Peter Conlon, D-Cornwall, House Education Committee chair, said in an interview.
Beck, the Republican senate leader, argued the state could comply with Brigham without pooling property tax revenue through a statewide grand list. A town’s “grand list” is the listed value of the property in that town.
“It’s a decision point, right?” he asked. “Do you have a statewide grand list on top, or do you have a local grand list on top with some sort of mechanism to account for Brigham?”
No matter how the state might pivot back to a foundation formula, lawmakers would likely diminish in some way local control over school budgets.
That change concerns Tinney of the NEA.
“People brush it off as some sort of quaint (idea),” Tinney said of local control. But, he argued, local communities know best the needs of local students.
“That’s the problem with decisions being made in the state capital rather than decisions being made in the community,” Tinney said.
A change in formula alone does not specifically address the factors driving school spending, like the increasing costs associated with staff health care benefits, students’ mental health needs, inflation and staff salaries. But a change may make it more expensive for local districts to spend more, using that economic pressure to reduce budgets.
‘More efficient delivery’
With the exact details unknown, Scott’s plan will include what Beck called “more efficient delivery” — fewer school districts and supervisory unions, and with them, fewer superintendents.
In Vermont, supervisory unions typically consist of multiple school boards and districts that share administrators. But colloquially, “supervisory union” and “school district” are often used interchangeably.
How exactly new district boundaries could be drawn is an open question certain to roil local communities, as it did when Act 46 catalyzed a similar process almost a decade ago.
“If you take diminishing the number of supervisory unions from 52 to a dozen or maybe along county lines, that has pretty significant implications,” Conlon said.
Conlon expects other cost-saving ideas to be on the table as well, such as “minimum class sizes” and “prescriptive” staff-to-student ratios.
Both initiatives would target Vermont’s lowest in the nation staff-to-student ratios, a likely necessity for lowering spending. Personnel account for about 80% of education costs.
Tinney, the teachers’ union president, said teachers around Vermont are already receiving reduction-in-force notices, including at Spaulding High School in Barre.
“Policymakers should spend a week working in a public school. They should ride the school buses, work as a substitute teacher, work in a cafeteria,” he said. “They can all get together on a Friday afternoon and decide where the extra services are.”
Tinney and the state teacher’s union are offering parallel ideas to decrease education spending. He argued the state should strengthen the community organizations that provide social services to shift some of the student support burdens out of schools. He also suggested moving teacher pension contributions out of the education fund, and using an income tax to pay for education — something the union says will benefit the middle class.
“Our members are also taxpayers,” Tinney said, “so they’re feeling the burden of the property tax as well and want a different approach.”
Once announced in detail, the administration’s education reform package will absorb the time and attention of the Legislature’s education and money committees over the following weeks. So far, lawmakers haven’t indicated how exactly they’ll take on the proposal.
The process will bring top administration officials to the fore, including Tax Commissioner Craig Bolio and Secretary of Education Zoie Saunders.
In an interview, Saunders acknowledged all the work that lies ahead.
“I expect to live at the Statehouse,” she said, smiling.
Read the story on VTDigger here: What’s likely to be included in Gov. Phil Scott’s education reform package?.