As the state Legislature and the governor jostle over the future of education in Vermont, our local school boards in the White River Valley Supervisory Union have found themselves between a rock and a hard place. With the passage of Act 73 (H.454), local school boards await the work of a map-making task force currently assigned the almost impossible task of completely reshaping the state’s school governance model, in just four months. Their proposed maps will ultimately determine a new school funding formula, which will impact all of us.
The WRVSU Board believes it is not in the best interest of our children and our towns to stand silent as this process unfolds. We have been actively engaged in this conversation for many months now, trying to ensure that our supervisory union model remains a viable option and that the real cost drivers impacting our taxes are addressed.
To that end, the WRVSU board invited two local members of the map-making task force, Rep. Rebecca Holcombe and retired superintendent Jay Badams, to our Sept. 23 meeting for a briefing.
Act 73 calls for the creation of districts or supervisory unions of no less than 4,000 students, grades K-12. There is only one district in the entire state that currently meets that threshold. In order to come even close to meeting that goal, WRVSU would need to be part of a district that extends from exit 2 to exit 5 on I-89. Imagine as well that it was governed by a single board of a yet-undefined number of people.
The WRVSU board has long maintained that the suggested cost savings in the law are unfounded and that any efforts to consolidate school districts or change a governance structure should be designed to contain property taxes and improve student outcomes. In our letters to the House and Senate Education Committees and the full House and Senate we clearly underscored the state’s need to demonstrate cost savings and/or performance improvement from any consolidation proposal; this need was never met.
In short, WRVSU’s position on Act 73 is that the level of consolidation the governor and legislature are looking for:
Does not save money (see research by Rural School Community Alliance)
Eliminates local voice and control by abolishing local school boards
Contributes to population decline in small towns, and
Forces the closure of small rural schools, putting young children on buses for long periods of time.
The real cost drivers to education are:
Health care benefits, which are being poorly negotiated by the state, and have resulted in a 50% increase in just the last five years
A shift in mental health care spending to the education fund at a time in which those needs are ever-increasing
Rapidly increasing costs for both transportation and special education, and
The growth of a second-home owner community in Vermont which further dilutes our tax base.
To be clear, consolidation of our schools will not result in decreased costs without the abovementioned issues being addressed. Recent research has shown that last year, supervisory unions such as ours spent up to $1,000 less per pupil than those in the merged district model that the legislation proposes.
We still have an opportunity to remind members of the legislative task force of these issues. We encourage you to email your concerns to the task force at this email address: ADM.Redistricting@vermont.gov
Please feel free to include your local school board representatives. We’ll update you as the task force moves further along in their work.
This letter, originally addressed to residents of the 10-town White River Valley Supervisory Union, was signed by the six members of the supervisory union’s board.