The number crunchers at the Vermont Department of Education have been busily collecting data and warming up their adding machines for the Education Challenge Design Team.
The latest fodder for the Team is information regarding staff-to-student ratios and supervisory union expenditures.
Did you know, for example, that the State of Vermont spends $1 billion a year on salaries and benefits for the 19,362 (teaching and non-teaching) employees of the public educational system? Or that the average salary and benefits package for each staff member is $53,819?
Or that the student-to-staff ratio is 4.55 to 1? And finally, that if the student-to-staff ratio was increased to 4.75 to 1, and 617 employees were culled from the workforce, the savings would be $23 million?
These are the kinds of numbers the Team is analyzing in its quest to save money, though some members of the group, organized by Armando Vilaseca, commissioner of the department, openly questioned why he and others, including Stephan Morse, a member of the state Board of Education, are pursuing savings through shifts in the staff-to-student ratios. The task at hand, they argue, is to find ways to cut down on administrative and special education costs.
The Challenges for Change law enacted last month specifies that the savings for fiscal years 2011 and 2012 come from two general areas: school administration ($13.3 million) and special education ($7 million). In 2012, the state will remove an additional $40 million from school administration and $10 million from special education.
The Team’s charge is to come up with ways to restructure Vermont’s educational system and meet those target savings. On Thursday, they discussed savings goals for a mandatory reduction of the number of school districts from 280 to 49, based on the current configuration of 60 supervisory unions. The smallest supervisory unions would merge with larger ones in this scenario, and all of the unions would become unified supervisory districts with a board of representatives from member towns.
Bill Talbott, the chief financial officer for the department, said restructuring the system into supervisory districts could save the state $13 million to $17 million a year — $36 million to $40 million short of the target set in law for fiscal years 2011 and 2012.
The Team also discussed block grants for special education services, in which districts would be given chunks of money based on the new mandated reductions.
Vilaseca and Neale Lunderville, secretary of the Administration Agency, who attended yesterday’s meeting, wouldn’t say whether the $20 million that school boards cut from local education costs would count toward this year’s Challenges target number. Talbott said Monday the local administrative savings that could be applied toward the Challenges goal was roughly $1 million to $2 million. Yesterday, he revised that number upward to $3.5 million – still nearly $10 million short of the target for 2011.
Tom O’Brien, superintendent of Addison Northwest Supervisory Union, questioned why the administration and the Legislature limited the focus of the Challenges to administrative and special education costs rather than the school system as a whole, particularly since it’s clear that the administrative reductions aren’t achievable.
Lunderville said the steering committee for the Challenges project wanted to stay away from politically untenable options and deemed these two areas–administrative and special education costs–as less controversial.
“I think they would have chosen a bigger target had they gone beyond administration,” Lunderville said.
Carl Mock, River Valley Technical Center director, said layers of politics and semantics were beginning to color the group’s discussion.
“On the one hand, we can’t count the full value of the savings because it’s not all administrative,” Mock said. “In the next phrase, you talk about class size, which is not within the parameters (of our charge).”
Vilaseca said the law presents conditions for them to work within, but “you don’t want to limit yourself to these.”
“Is class size off the table?” Vilaseca asked. “No, it’s not. I’m trying to get the biggest net out there.”
Also caught in that net is the state’s $240 million-a-year special education system. By law, the state is to cut spending for special education by 5 percent and 7.5 percent in 2012. One glitch the Team has yet to overcome is the federal maintenance-of-effort requirement under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The state must show that it is spending the same amount on special education each year unless it requests a waiver. In 2012, the Challenges for Change law calls for a 5 percent cut in regular education spending and a 7.5 percent reduction in special education. Under the waiver, the state must cut those costs proportionally, according to Talbott.
The special education block grant proposal the Team discussed would be based on a weighted, average daily membership (a calculation for the number of students in a school) system. Under the Team’s proposal, there would be a separate system for high-needs residential students, and classroom teachers would be required to participate in behavior intervention training.
Ellie McGarry, Rutland City SD Student Support coordinator, said her school system has replaced groups of two to five paraeducators (who provide one-on-one supports for students with learning disabilities or behavioral problems) with professional special educators. In addition, they have introduced a team-teaching model in which three teachers – two classroom teachers and a special education teacher – “co-teach” classes of 40 students.
McGarry said her district saved about 20 percent in labor costs with this approach, and “our test scores have gone up.”
Vilaseca said that one-on-one aides are necessary in some instances, but in all cases, there would be a “fading plan” or a schedule for phasing out paraeducators.
At the end of the meeting, Vilaseca put together a list of four recommendations to the Legislature for overall educational savings that the Team will discuss in more detail in the next meeting. They include: the creation of 50 unified supervisory districts; reductions in non-instructional costs for administrative functions; staff-to-student ratio levels; and block grants for special education services.
Upcoming meeting schedule:
Monday, March 22
Tuesday, March 23
Thursday, March 25
All meetings will be held 3–5 p.m. in the Education Commissioner’s Office, 120 State St., 4th Floor, (above the Department of Motor Vehicles), Montpelier.
Design Team members
1. Armando Vilaseca, Education commissioner, Design Team chair
2. Bill Talbott, DOE CFO, Design Team vice chair
3. Laurie Hodgden, Milton Middle School/High School principal
4. John Tague, BFA Fairfax math teacher
5. Tom O’Brien, Addison Northwest SU superintendent
6. Marilyn Frederick, Lamoille North SU business manager
7. Carl Mock, River Valley Technical Center director
8. John Hollar, Montpelier School Board chair
9. Ellie McGarry, Rutland City SD Student Support coordinator
10. Rob Levine, Northern Vermont chapter of the American Red Cross executive director
11. Stephan Morse, state Board of Education representative.
