Editor’s note: This oped is by John McClaughry, vice president of the Ethan Allen Institute.
With education finance increasingly under state control and legislators seeking ways to curb state spending to avoid enormous deficits, the issue of school district regionalization is once again on center stage in the State House.
The House Education Committee has reported a clever bill (H.782) that offers incentives for neighboring school districts to voluntarily form Unified Union School Districts (UUSDs).
There are presently five unified districts: Waits River Valley, Blue Mountain, Miller’s Run, Twinfield, and the newly formed Addison West. In a unified district there is one elected district school board, one residential property tax rate, and one electorate, replacing those of the component towns.
For half a century the arguments for such regionalization have been to eliminate tiny inefficient districts, unify curriculum among schools feeding one high school, and ease the considerable supervisory burden. There is always the thought that this will result in taxpayer-friendly cost effectiveness, but even the Education Commissioner’s Transformation Policy Commission did not dare to offer regionalization as a cost-saving measure. Why not? Because there is no evidence to believe that it will, and considerable evidence from other states that expanding bureaucratic and transportation costs quickly override modest savings.
A crucial issue in the regionalization debate is the prospect for parental choice. Commissioner Vilaseca says that pupils in the new larger districts could choose any public school in the district, instead of being assigned to the public school in their town of residence. That’s good.
But what of the pupils in the present 90 tuition towns, where parents have the choice of any approved non-sectarian public or independent school, in or out of the state? Would those pupils now be stuck with the limited choices among public schools within the unified districts?
The House bill attempts to deal with this by providing that the voters within the proposed unified district could vote – once – to allow such choice for the new district’s pupils – or not. If the resulting unified district’s plan denied the choices of the current tuition town pupils to attend public or approved independent schools, the unified district would have to include a “process” to pay tuition to the school chosen by the parents, even if the UUSD’s policies did not allow tuition payments to that school.
This appears to be a reasonable example of “local control”. In operation, it is highly likely to be a lingering death sentence for parental choice in the present tuition towns.
Consider a hypothetical five town unified district, centered on a large town and its public K-12 system. The voters in the five towns vote – once – on whether to allow expanded choice. If pupils exit the UUSD, its cost per pupil will likely be higher, and thus the residential property tax rate throughout the five-town district will be higher.
Thus voters concerned about property taxes – especially those without children under 18 – are likely to vote not to allow any pupils to escape the UUSD’s schools. So will everyone working in and for those public schools. Their interest is in preserving a monopoly.
Ah, but the bill says that if the UUSD’s plan would reduce choices for current tuition town pupils, the UUSD must create a “process” for paying tuition for pupils who are enrolled in non-district schools at the time of merger. (It disturbingly does not say “shall pay” – only “shall include a process”.)
Thus tuition town pupils as of the date of voter-approved unification would be allowed to continue at their current choice of school until they graduate. If they graduate from an independent K-8 school and want to go on to an independent high school, tough luck. If a pupil is beginning school next year, it will be public school only.
The upshot of this “local control” provision is that unified district voters are unlikely to approve present tuition town choice at the risk of fewer public school pupils and higher property tax rates. If they make that decision, then the pupils currently enjoying tuition town choice can continue until they finish the school where they are enrolled, and then they will have to attend a public school within the district.
The likely result is that by the eighth year after unification, no pupil in the unified district will have a choice of anything but a public school, or publicly-designated independent high school, within the unified district.
This proposal, voluntary and democratic as it seems, may not have been designed to extinguish parental choice in Vermont. Or maybe it was. Whatever the motivation, it will over a decade or so almost certainly produce that baneful and reactionary result.
