As the legislature races towards an attempt to reshape education in our State, largely at your behest, we wanted to take a moment to be clear and on the record on the implications of your plan for State education.
As you have undertaken to create a plan for the legislature to follow, you have created a false narrative that the enemy is the spending created by school boards. You have time and time again laid the blame for education spending directly on local school boards, so much so that it appears, in your view, imperative to dismantle that system in order to save Vermonters from the out of control spending of its locally elected school boards.
There is no question that local school boards have faced incredible pressure based on ever increasing costs. Some of those costs can and should be addressed by implementing a number of mechanisms, such as CESAs, to allow us to address costs that are within our control. To be clear, some of the greatest costs have not been under the control of local school boards, and the state — your office — has failed to address equally pressing issues such as the huge increases in health care spending that are at the heart of increasing costs and are entirely beyond the control of local school boards.
It is self-serving and irresponsible to point to the spending of school boards as the issue in order to create a scapegoat for the funding decisions that have come out of your office and the legislature. Local school boards are more readily accountable to the local electorate than you, or even members of the legislature. Year in and year out we do the hard work of putting together budgets — understanding the real costs of those budgets to our neighbors and our own pockets — and we go, willingly, in front of our neighbors to explain our budgetary decisions. Those budgetary decisions are then voted on and either approved or not by our townspeople. If there have been ever increasing budgets, the electorate itself has approved those budgetary increments. So, to the extent that you place blame on the local school boards for the increases in spending you are effectively stating, that you don’t trust the people of the State of Vermont.
We do not believe the Vermont voter is the enemy. To the contrary. We have seen thoughtful questions asked every year during town meeting by our electorate in an effort to understand what is necessary to educate its students. It has been especially disheartening for us to see and hear you advocate for the voting down of school budgets. To our board, that has been a clear indication of the lack of respect and worth you see in our local school boards. Now you want to consolidate school boards, as if somehow, magically, consolidation of school boards changes the dynamic of distrust you have created between the local voter and their local elected officials.
What is also incredibly disheartening to many of us, who understand our budgets because we spend the time year in and year out trying to understand the vicissitudes of Vermont’s funding formula, is the harm that your office and the legislature have created to our local budgets and taxes. What do we mean by that? For a number of years now there have been one time funds available out of either the general fund or the education fund. Some of those funds have been federal dollars, others have been surpluses created through the budgeting process. What has transpired is that those funds have been used, without any strategic thinking, to simply buy down the tax rate one year, thereby guaranteeing there will be even more significant increases to our tax rate the next.
You have an opportunity this year to engage and partner with local school boards and strategically map a way out of this fiscal mess. It is incredible to us that the legislature has done a better job at listening to their constituents than you have. We would urge you to put down the knife for just one moment and understand that you have incredibly rich and vibrant schools throughout the state, schools that need help but that move heaven and earth to ensure that their students receive not just an education, but a huge amount of other services that the state does not provide through any other means. We would urge you to work with those districts, many of whom want to merge, to strategically think of the future of education in our state.
This process should have been evidence-based from the start. It should have been focused on evolving our education system, not butchering it without a plan in the name of cost savings. Frustratingly, we have yet to see any concrete evidence to suggest that outcomes will be beneficial to students in the long-term. We need concrete pathways to ensure that children in especially rural communities are not subjected to long bus rides, denied time at home with family, or have little time before and after the school day to be kids.
Vermonters agree that schools are the lifeblood of our many especially rural communities, and know what happens to the communities that see their schools shuttered. Vermonters in these communities are the most knowledgeable about impacts that cannot be captured or measured in metrics; outcomes that degrade mental health also rob students of their futures and their potential. We cannot overstate the incredible importance of community-rooted value systems that produce conscientious citizens. The folk in the best position to understand how to create greater efficiencies are those on the ground who see the whole picture, not people who pass through and glimpse a snapshot of a day or two in the school year.
In closing, we ask you to listen to what Vermonters are saying about their schools and their towns. You have shown no proof, no real analysis, nor any sort of roadmap to demonstrate that what you and Secretary Saunders propose would save money and improve the education of our students.
The writers are members of the Strafford Board of School Directors.