[V]ermont education has a size problem.
While declining enrollment and classroom size have long been on the docket for lawmakers, Rebecca Holcombe, secretary of the Agency of Education, is shifting the debate to school size.
Vermont is an outlier nationally when it comes to school size. In other states, a small school typically has 200 to 300 students. The average number of students enrolled in a Vermont school is 285. A third of Vermont’s schools have fewer than 100 students; 18 districts have under 50.
“What is small?” Holcombe said. “The economics of a school at 200 or 300 are fundamentally different than a school of 15 to 50.”
In many corners of the state, Holcombe testified, small schools are a “source of pride, source of community identity and often are the largest employer in those towns.” That said, she wanted the committee to have a sense of “what it means to be a small town, and how we relate to our schools.”
Holcombe said Vermont has “an incredibly complex system” with more than a dozen types of governance.
In addition to governance and financial challenges, education is also changing very quickly as a result of technology and globalization. The goal of the agency is “to provide stability and continuity in a very dynamic environment,” Holcombe said.
Holcombe showed the committee how declining enrollments have impacted the school and the education tax rate in the town of Isle La Motte, a kindergarten through 6th grade elementary school with 57 students enrolled as of December and 4.87 teachers.
Soaring tax rates there have become unsustainable. In fiscal year 2010 Isle La Motte’s school tax rate was $1.28; by fiscal year 2015 the rate was $2.21. The district is eligible for a phantom student subsidy, which cushions the impact of declining enrollments on tax rates. Without the subsidy, the rate in the town would have been $2.31 in fiscal year 2015.
The education spending per equalized pupil went up 41.2 percent for Isle La Motte from fiscal year 2011 to 2015, Holcombe said.
“This is a town that we are supporting while it tries to work through this transition,” said Holcombe. “These are real people who are trying to take seriously how to teach our children.”
In the course of her testimony, Holcombe laid out the key issues facing the committee in the months ahead.
Holcombe touched briefly on the federal No Child Left Behind Act, and said one thing it has “challenged us to really look at sub-groups and look at who we aren’t serving well.”
Boys from low-income backgrounds are a group the state is consistently seeing are struggling, Holcombe told lawmakers.
She said boys from low-income families “are having trouble connecting what they learned in school … to what they want to do in their life.” That disconnect, she said, “is something that starts way back in kindergarten. If you come in and what you really want to do is still play with trucks, you might think that school is not for you.”
Hands-on teaching methods for reaching “the diversity of learnings that we have,” Holcombe says is critical, “to keep them in the game so that they’ll hang in there and persist.”
The House Education Committee will begin to consider the Shumlin administration’s proposal for reforming education next week, according to Rep. David Sharpe, D-Bristol, the committee’s chair.
Of the more than 70 proposals on education reform from the public, Sharpe said, “About half the proposals have to do with changing the size of the governance one way or another, so I think we’re going to have to understand that better … the suggested range from completely voluntary to completely mandatory. We have to sort of figure out and discern where on that spectrum we are willing to come down as a committee and recommend to the House.”
Rep. Scott Beck, R-St. Johnsbury, a teacher at St. Johnsbury Academy, said the testimony the committee had heard up to this point leads “to the conclusion that the small and the micro schools are not economically sustainable in the 21st century.”
“Is there anybody out there that speaks to the sustainability of these schools … that they can be economically viable? If there is, we may want to hear from that person,” Beck said.
CORRECTION: Isle La Motte has 57 students, not 32, as originally stated.
