Editor’s note: This commentary is by Phil Taylor, a school board director for the Twin Valley School System in Wilmington and Whitingham, a preK-12 school system that has successfully undertaken a school consolidation process. He lives in Wilmington with his wife and three children.
Trust. It’s the most valuable currency that you can have as a school board member. It’s not easy to come by, but incredibly important when it comes time to approve a school budget or make major changes such as school consolidation. Trust is especially elusive with voters when school systems, budgets and state laws are incredibly complex and difficult to understand. It takes communication, energy and, most importantly, relationships to earn significant trust of the voters for their approval of change. I have little faith that regional board members proposed under the H.883 governance bill will be able to earn such a trust.
Trust was something my fellow board members and I had to earn over a period of 15 years to convince voters of the need for consolidating our schools here in Wilmington and Whitingham. But we did it. This fall we will have completed the renovation and expansions to the Twin Valley Middle High School in Whitingham, after completing the same for the elementary school in Wilmington last year. The year-to-year savings comes to about a half a million dollars — all of which is going to pay the bond. Even so, our taxpayers had to take on a significant tax increase for those first few years of higher bond payments.
The result of this consolidation is a two-school system with one board focused on one Pre-K-12 system. We were fortunate. We had three schools in two towns and could give up a school while keeping a school presence in each town. By eliminating a building, we became eligible for the state construction aid we couldn’t have done without. Town Meeting Day came along, we stuck closely to our numbers, and our budgets passed. We made promises and we were accountable.
One might think that I am an ardent supporter of school district and building consolidations, but I am not. I had thoroughly studied consolidation before we made this decision for our schools. This study led me to some very interesting observations.
I learned there is no right answer to the question “should we consolidate our schools?” In some schools it works, in others there are no benefits. It depends so much on the type of school, the enrollments, existing facilities and the specific nature of that school and community to determine if consolidation makes educational and financial sense. Most importantly, you need to know those outcomes as best you can before you make such a decision.
What was more striking was the finding that many states had implemented statewide consolidation programs with disastrous results and very little cost reductions. It became clear they had tried and failed because of a one-size-fits-all approach to school consolidation and it just doesn’t work. State legislators appeared doomed to a uniform approach using 20th century solutions for very complex 21st century problems.
When our board presented the choice of consolidation to the voters, we never said to them, like our Legislature with H.883, that this “may save you money.” We would have been jeered out of the informational meetings. We told them our expected savings upfront, before the vote, because we knew we would be held accountable. Hell, we even low-balled the savings numbers, because we knew we could be off and we knew the consequences had we been off.
Knowing full well the relationship between consolidation savings, school operational costs and construction costs, I know many smaller, surrounding elementary schools in our area could not produce enough savings from building consolidation to effectively pay for construction costs. You can actually be too small to consolidate. It makes more financial sense and lower costs not to consolidate — it doesn’t work for them. Never mind the soul-wrenching decision to give up your only school. Unless the state is able to offer near 100 percent construction funding and significant personnel support, the possibility of small schools successfully consolidating is out of reach. The Legislature will readily move to end small school grants, but never take the time to calculate whether it is a cheaper and better outcome to change the funding mechanism for small schools rather than force them into a more expensive consolidation option.
If Gov. Shumlin and the Legislature wish to earn the trust of Vermonters with the big decision of regionalized education governance then they better earn our trust.
Our two-town school boards now meet as one board. We focus on one Pre-K-12 curriculum in one school system. The House Legislature proposes to take this focus away from us — where we will have one regional board focused on more than 12 schools — most of which will be smaller elementary schools with school choice for secondary schools. How can I reasonably expect such a board to have any understanding of how a middle high school operates when only a few of have any such experience or loyalties?
Do we have any evidence or data to support that regionalized boards do a better job than localized boards? When I asked our business manager about how much less work it is going from two boards to one — it was not significant. In fact, as far as I can tell, the only reason that our supervisory union has a higher per pupil operating cost than other supervisory unions is that these larger supervisory unions have more students to spread the cost with. Recently we have looked into supervisory union consolidation, not surprisingly, none of the larger supervisory unions were interested in such arrangements because the fact is, sharing services evenly means their cost will go up and ours will go down. I hear legislators talk of the idea of “sharing services” and laugh — it’s been done — and is done all the time — for the simple reason that small schools had to find ways to reduce costs long ago.
But let’s just suppose through H.883 we did consolidate with this larger supervisory union and went to one board. Does that mean that every school and every supervisory union will have all the same services as the larger supervisory unions and districts? For example, we do not have a curriculum coordinator, a tech coordinator, nor someone from the supervisory union to manage our construction project — we can’t afford those positions. In governance consolidation, you will begin to see the real contrast of supposed equitable services throughout Vermont — and expect to pay more to equalize those services.
In many cases, our board members, administrators or staff pick up this extra work. Both of our school construction projects were managed by board members because we did not have the supervisory union resources. This has been an exhausting experience. We had to be directly involved because the construction funding was limited — we borrowed based on how much savings would fund bond payments.
Ten years ago, we had an architectural proposal for a new high school that would have cost $22 million — just for a high school. In our current consolidation project we renovated and expanded an elementary school and a middle high school for $14 million — and that has been due to some incredibly dedicated board members. Would a large regional board be this dedicated to school consolidation and cost containment. Would such a board ever be that resourceful? Doubtful. The fact is this type of involvement is what you get in many one-board schools and it is the reason why small schools can be the models of efficiency, practically and outcomes. You will lose this with regional school boards.
Perhaps the most outrageous myth in the discussion of school consolidation is the erroneous belief that small schools are responsible for the dramatic increase in school spending since the changes from Act 60 and 68. How is it possible that small schools, which account for 5 percent of total state education spending are driving up the state spending?
There is only one reasonable, statistical explanation for the rising costs of education — larger schools benefit tremendously from a funding system that does not recognize economies of scale, nor keeps their spending in check. Just think for a moment, by consolidating our three schools into two, we saved half a million dollars — we are still relatively small. Our middle high school will be about 275 students, if there is cost savings for a school that size, shouldn’t a high school of say 1,200 students be able to operate for much less cost than us? You would think so, but a 40-minute drive over to a neighboring high school with that many students, we find that they have the exact same per pupil cost as our high school.
And this is the reality of Vermont’s school funding formula. It’s one size fits all. Never mind the hypocrisy of forcing small schools to consolidate and never holding the larger schools accountable to be more efficient due to their size. This is why the vote on H.883 fell largely along the lines of big town vs. small town representatives.
Two years ago I was grateful to be appointed by the Speaker of the House to a working group studying the measurement of equal educational opportunities. The main concern that I represented in this group was the need to come up with a reasonable data collection system that can comparatively show how the funding system provides equity of core services in each school. However, to my frustration, most of the group wanted to talk more about “educational outcomes” rather than measuring what we are buying in each school or talk about money.
Repeatedly I spoke to the importance of having manageable data collection systems that could measure key indicators of equitable services and salaries — information that would help guide policy and inform legislators. Most importantly, I felt that there was an urgent need to move to a uniform accounting system and code. Ironically, I kept hearing that this was a technical challenge and would require significant work and frustrate many local schools and business offices, and yet the Legislature can propose a massive statewide consolidation of school boards — something far more invasive, yet so much further from the real issue of understanding what is driving education cost and what leads to educational efficiencies.
If Gov. Shumlin and the Legislature wish to earn the trust of Vermonters with the big decision of regionalized education governance then they better earn our trust. Vermonters expect our leaders to live by the same standards of accountability that many local school boards do by demonstrating clearly how such massive changes would increase opportunity, educational outcomes and lower costs before they enact the law.
