At Tuesday afternoon’s caucus of the House Democrats, two of the speakers put the spotlight on what’s already in the spotlight: the call for change in the state’s educational landscape.
Rep. Tony Klein, D-East Montpelier, had the floor for what was supposed to be 30 seconds, but said he needed a minute, and took it.
After serving on local school boards for 17 years, Klein said he knows a thing or two about the issues facing schools in Vermont, and he has an idea for a statewide solution to be considered as the debate gets underway in both the House and Senate on what may work statewide to both cut costs and improve outcomes and opportunities for students.
“It’s a really simple bill,” began Klein, taking the floor, and a ripple of laughter was heard in Room 11 at the Statehouse.
Klein went on, “I have spent 17 years on school boards, so I have some knowledge. This is an education spending bill and I’m coming at it from my opinion that we do have a spending challenge and that we do have a property tax issue, so the bill will simply change the paradigm from the schools telling us how much they want to spend to the paradigm of the state telling the schools how much they have to spend.”
The legislation would set a per pupil spending amount that would be tied to the statewide property tax, Klein said. The forthcoming bill would meet the Brigham litmus test.
The rate, Klein went on, “will have an annual inflation rate,” and the amount would be predictable from year to year. “The school board will no longer have budgets that voters will vote on,” he said.
The bill does not change the tax structure, said Klein, and, “We don’t tell schools to consolidate, we don’t tell schools to change their student-to-teacher ratio … I look at it like a starting point for discussion,” he told his colleagues. “It’s simple, it’s easy to understand,” he said, and with that, he asked his colleagues to help him out and get behind the bill, “If you have the nerve to sign up!”
A fellow legislator yelled out, “And in 17 years, you could be an expert witness!”
Klein was one of several legislators to pitch bills to their fellow House members for which they are seeking support in the way of cosigners. Rep. Ann Manwaring, D-Wilmington, has a bill to seek a moratorium “on any legislation that puts any pressure on the property tax.”
Manwaring said she had the bill in the works before the governor’s budget address last week, which also called for a moratorium on unfunded mandates.
Rep. Sarah Copeland-Hanzas, D-Bradford, invited Rep. David Sharpe, D-Bristol, the chairman of the House Education Committee, to give an update about the committee’s big task at the start of the session.
“It’s a little early to ask them to articulate … but we are all eager to know what the process is that they will use to get there,” she said of the committee’s charge and how it will “tackle the questions before it with education funding.”
Sharpe took a few minutes to share what the committee is doing, and in a short history of the state’s education funding and structure in Vermont said some practices in place go back to the 1700s.
“It’s often been said there’s nothing new under the sun, and it might be true with regard to education,” said Sharpe. He said the committee has heard from the proponents of “some of the larger” proposals that are on the table — dozens of them — “and we’ll hear from some more of them.” He said he is categorizing those reports and there are some which call for “the larger school district concept … basically talking about changing student-to-staff ratio and providing greater opportunities for kids,” and others calling for a change to the way education is funded, whether it is equitable, and more.
Local control is an issue, and there is — and will be — tension around those discussions, Sharpe said.
Some states have the term adequacy defined for their public education laws, while in Vermont, the state’s constitution focuses on equity, noted Sharpe.
“So there is tension between adequacy and equity,” too, said Sharpe. The committee will consider what is an adequate education and how money for education can be spent equitably, he told his fellow House Democrats.
Too, there are those that say, “We spend enough … I just want someone else to pay … to shift responsibility from one group of taxpayers to another.”
Sharpe said the committee is hard at work trying “to define the problem we’re trying to solve … there are a couple of dozen problems,” he told them.
In every corner of Vermont there are differing opinions on what the problems are, exactly, and how to solve them, “which makes our task a little difficult if we’re trying to solve 150 different problems with a single bill,” Sharpe said.
“It is our hope that we produce a comprehensive ed bill for your consideration,” said Sharpe. “It may be a two-year process. We will have to deal with property tax rates this year.”