White River Junction
The Scott administration acknowledged on Wednesday that the changes will be difficult to implement, but maintained that swift legislative action would make it possible.
“The timing’s awful,” said Bruce Labs, speaking from the Royalton central offices of the 10-town White River Valley Supervisory Union, where he is superintendent. There, the various school boards within the supervisory union have spent the last three months crafting budgets to place on warnings for Town Meetings in March.
“Seven of the 10 budgets have already been sent in for printing,” Labs said. “Three will be sent in by Friday.”
Labs said the plan, which Scott described to legislators at the Statehouse in his budget address on Tuesday, essentially asks school districts across the state to scrap their budgets and begin the whole process anew.
“It’s caused a lot of confusion,” Labs said.” I’ve got town clerks calling me asking me to stop the presses, and saying, ‘What do we do?’ ”
Scott wants school districts to level-fund budgets because of shrinking enrollment statewide and to require teachers to pay 20 percent of their health insurance costs, roughly a 5 percentage point increase but on par with what state employees pay in Vermont. Savings from those measures would be offset by new funding for pre-K and college programs.
During his address, Scott said the plan will take “courage and compromise,” but is possible. “We can make more transformative changes to our education system this year.”
But officials from other school districts echoed Labs’ concerns.
“We’re supposed to sign the warrant tonight for our budget, and it’s not flat-budgeted” Hartford School Board Chairwoman Lori Dickerson said. “It’s more than a 2 percent increase.”
Dickerson said that, given a mandate in Hartford’s town charter to sign a warning well in advance of Town Meeting, district staff were scrambling to get advice from state officials and legal counsel on what their options were.
“I just don’t know what to do,” she said. “We have a town charter. We have to vote.”
During his address to legislators, Scott anticipated the objection.
“I also know how difficult it will be to adjust to level funding in advance of voting on Town Meeting Day,” he said. “That’s why I’m proposing to set May 23 as a special statewide election on local school budgets. This gives local school boards three additional months to develop level-funded budgets.”
He asked the Legislature to approve the plan quickly, so that school boards would have time to make the changes.
Scott spokeswoman Rebecca Kelley pointed to a bill introduced by three Senate Republicans on Wednesday that would grant that extension.
“We’re asking (lawmakers) to take action on this by Feb. 5, because we know that’s the warning date for some districts,” she said.
Under Vermont law, school boards are legally required to post warnings at least 30 days in advance of Town Meeting, according to the Vermont secretary of state website. Many towns have Town Meetings scheduled for the first week of March, as is the case for Weathersfield and Thetford, which have scheduled their Town Meetings for March 4.
School boards are required to vote to approve a warning’s specific language, and then send them to a printer before they are posted.
Asked how it would be possible for school boards in towns like Thetford to legally wait until after Feb. 5 to approve warning language, Kelley said that each school board had to make its own decision.
“We understand this is a tough position,” Kelley said. A short while later, Kelley sent an email response.
“School boards have to follow current law, but there is legislation that’s been introduced to extend the date to May 23,” she wrote. “The administration has requested swift action in the Legislature on this matter, and hopes they work quickly to extend the date.”
Geo Honigford, a member of the Royalton School Board and president of the Vermont School Boards Association, said even if the voting date could be switched legally, that would trigger a whole host of other consequences that would need to be addressed.
“Every union contract in the state has a date by which we have to notify teachers that they have a job the next year. The typical date is April,” he said. “So we as boards are now going to be in violation of our contracts because we won’t even have a budget.”
Honigford said he could only see one way to meet the new timeline, and that it would be drastic.
“The logical thing to do is to pink slip everybody. We announce to all the teachers, ‘You may lose your job.’ That covers us. No one thought through this,” Honigford said.
Labs said that, absent action by the Legislature, he saw no way to position White River Valley Supervisory Union’s districts to carry out Scott’s vision.
“It’s a speech,” he said. “It’s a direction statement right now. We don’t function by speeches. We function by laws and rules being made.”
Honigford said school districts are already scrambling to comply with Act 46, the 2015 education reform law that sought to control costs with a mixture of short-term spending caps and long-term mergers of school districts.
At least 10 mergers are in the process of coming before voters in March, according to the state Agency of Education.
“We haven’t even allowed that to play out,” Hongiford said.
“It further complicates an already complicated situation,” Sarah Stewart Taylor, one of four Hartland representatives on the Act 46 Study Committee for the Windsor Southeast Supervisory Union, said in an email. “For districts that would see increased spending with a merger, like ours, it really makes things murky.”
Honigford and Dave Eddy, chairman of the Bethel School Board, which has already voted to approve a roughly 1.2 percent increase to its budget for the 2017-18 school year, said mandating flat funding across the board is unfair to districts that have been fiscally prudent in recent years.
“My own personal feeling is that we have been very, very cautious with our increases for years,” Eddy said. “Other schools have not been so cautious. And we’re all going to be put under the same microscope.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.