Editor’s note: This op-ed is by John Zenie, a former lawmaker from Colchester. Parts of the following article are taken from Zenie’s testimony to the Vermont Senate Finance Committee on Feb. 16, 2011.
The most recent approaches to address education finance issues have been legislation that required voluntary spending cuts and voluntary consolidation. Most observers would agree that these actions are good but have not done enough to ease the financial issues faced by our schools. We need a new approach that partners state government with the local school districts. It is this partnership that can forge the necessary changes to yield a more financially sound educational system. It is this partnership that will produce agreements rather than mandates.
Many people subscribe to the idea that the silver bullet to save money is to consolidate school districts and the opponents of school consolidation have a fear of small districts being swallowed up by larger districts in that they would lose control of their schools with their children. Studies are inconclusive that consolidation saves money, but these studies also show that we do have savings opportunities if we consolidated some functions at the state level. The state could take over functions such as purchasing, accounting/auditing, cash/debit management and personnel recruiting and selection support. This type of consolidation would save money through efficiencies without the angst of total governance consolidation.
The state could take over functions such as purchasing, accounting/auditing, cash/debit management and personnel recruiting and selection support. This type of consolidation would save money through efficiencies without the angst of total governance consolidation.
Another huge area for consolidation has to do with administration of teacher contracts. Several bills have been introduced this year that include having a statewide teacher contract. This type of legislation has been introduced many times before and I offer the following thoughts to help add fuel to the importance of this idea along with some thoughts on how to make it more palatable to opponents.
Some benefits of a statewide contract would be that (1) teacher salaries would be negotiated by the same entity as the state teacher retirement system, (2) reducing the number of contracts from over 200 would be a savings to school spending, (3) centralized contract negotiation would yield the best and most consistent agreements for all, and (4) allows the state to control the quantitative issues while school boards focus on school quality.
The main arguments that I have heard against a statewide contract are (a) it would cost too much to transition salaries statewide and (b) some districts want to maintain control of their contracts.
Essentially there would be no additional transition costs if locality pay is instituted over a three to five year period. Locality pay would standardize salaries based on the local cost of living. The federal government and private national and international companies like IBM have been doing locality pay successfully for years.
Some thoughts that might help districts who want to negotiate their own contracts:
• Make inclusion into a statewide contract as a consortium where districts voluntarily join so those districts that want to stay on their own can.
• A statewide or consortium contract could just be for compensation and benefits with the rest locally negotiated since there are local agreements that are best left there.
• Statewide consortium contract should be negotiated out of the Department of Education. This would coincide with the recent controlled spending authority given to this department.
Statewide contracts could benefit the Vermont-NEA in the following ways:
• Reduces their costs of negotiating over 200 contracts.
• Allows for easier comparisons of Vermont teacher compensation and benefits to other states.
• Could reduce the disparity between teacher salaries within the state by locality based pay.
Some needed follow-up work needs to be done to find the true costs of negotiating contracts for both Vermont-NEA and school districts. We also need to find out how many school boards would be interested in joining a consortium for contract negotiations.
State and local government partnership is the best way to address the education spending issue.
