Editor’s note: This commentary is by David Schoales, who is clerk of the Brattleboro Town School Board and the Brattleboro Selectboard. He is the Windham Region representative of the Vermont School Boards Association.
[T]he new draft bill from the House Education Committee improves on last year’s efforts to centralize control of schools by creating an “opt-out” model instead of a “forced-in” one. Unfortunately, this will do little to reduce the cost of educating our children. The reason school budgets go up is not structural. It is because we have more children living in poverty every year.
Eighty percent of school budgets go to employees. If we don’t deal with poverty, we will need more of them. Look in your town report this year for the list of people working in the schools. You will see grade level teachers, art and music and phys ed teachers, librarians and nurses. You will also see twice as many people listed as academic support, special educator, speech pathologist, school counselor, ESOL teacher, data enterer, intensive supporter, behavior interventionist, and paraeducator. All these people provide the range of services students need to meet today’s standards. Research shows without question that the main consumers of these services are children who live in poverty. We can never reduce school costs if we continue this pattern.
In Brattleboro our elementary schools have about the same number of students year-to-year. What changes is the number of those children who are poor. This year over 60 percent of our kids live in poverty. Because there are more this year, the state is going to give us more money. That’s how equalization works. Even though our budget is down, our school taxes will go up to meet the needs of these children.
The governor and Legislature could help by forcing state agencies to address their inability to affect the cycle of poverty.
The governor and Legislature could help by forcing state agencies to address their inability to affect the cycle of poverty. We have agencies for health, education, family services, labor, and corrections and more, all work with the same families but are unable to affect meaningful improvement in their lives. Local schools provide meals and counseling and nursing services as well as education. There are hunger councils and housing trusts and youth services and mentors and recreation programs and economic developers and job trainers and wellness services and all sorts of private and non-profit contractors raising money and using public funds to help people in poverty.
The number of poor children keeps going up despite these efforts and investments. Every year the funding requests are larger, the conditions more dire. As long as all these efforts are poorly led and uncoordinated, this futility will continue. Can we really afford this? The positive effects of wrap-around services has been known for decades. Why are we so bad at it? Why is this not on any committee’s agenda?
