Editor’s note: This article is by Matt Hongoltz-Hetling of the Valley News, in which it was first published Feb. 12, 2015.
LEBANON, N.H. — Gov. Peter Shumlin has a message for some communities with small schools that aren’t willing to consider consolidation: The cost of not taking action will be high.
“If you think you have high property taxes and a low student population right now, look at where you’ll be in five years, look at where you’ll be in 10 years,” Shumlin said during an editorial board meeting with the Valley News on Wednesday.
Shumlin recently unveiled his education agenda for the legislative session, much of which is built around inducing communities to take dramatic action by forcing them to come to grips with those projections.
“In many cases, this is, like, eye-popping numbers,” Shumlin said. “Really, it makes your property taxes now look like an after-holiday sale: discounted.”
Shumlin said that reining in state education spending is tremendously difficult and critically important. Vermont has the highest per-student spending in the nation and a student-to-staff ratio of 4.7:1.
The governor’s education plan calls for regular state-funded reviews of all Vermont schools to measure their academic and financial performance against agreed-upon goals.
“When you give Vermonters good data, they solve problems,” Shumlin said.
Vermont Secretary of Education Rebecca Holcombe said the problem is that the education programs at many small schools are being slowly dismantled as local districts try to grapple with budgetary pressures caused by shrinking populations.
The arts, physical education, foreign languages and other programs are being slowly squeezed out of the curriculum, leaving a diminished range of opportunities for the students left in the system, she said.
“It’s the proverbial ‘frog in the pot’ dilemma. You can shave a little bit every year and then you get to a point that you’re not sure what you’re looking at is a program … you want to send your kids to anymore,” Holcombe said at the Valley News meeting.
She said the education quality reviews encourage local education officials to take a longer view of the future of their schools.
“When you put data in people’s hands, it does change the conversation,” she said. “We’re hearing them starting to talk not just about funding the program they have currently, but funding the program they’re going to have in five to 10 years.”
Such projections, she said, show that some districts are facing property tax increases of between 40 percent and 60 percent.
In most cases, the education quality review, which will include a wide range of data and on-site interviews, will result in a round of help and advice to guide the school forward.
Occasionally, the schools will be subject to more forceful action.
To augment existing powers, which allow the state to step in and assume administrative control to guide a school through a crisis, Shumlin is asking the Legislature to expand the state’s authority by allowing it to control a district’s finances.
“An example of that could be disallowing an expenditure that was fiscally indefensible after going through this process,” said Aly Richards, Shumlin’s deputy chief of staff.
And in extreme cases, the Vermont State Board of Education will exercise what Richards called “the nuclear option” by shutting down underperforming schools and forcing those towns to pay for their students to attend neighboring schools.
Shumlin’s agenda also calls for several other changes. He has asked the Legislature for a moratorium on any new legislation that adds costs to districts, the phasing out of small-schools grants, $3 million in funding to help merging districts with construction costs, a clarification of the respective roles of superintendents and principals, and more authority for the State Board of Education to redistrict in cases where a school or district is orphaned and needs to be part of a bigger union.
It would also phase out so-called “phantom student” funding, a component of state education funding formulas that compensates schools for students on a three-year average of enrollment numbers. Because student enrollment has been steadily declining in many schools over the past 20 years, the average has resulted in consistently overpaying schools for students that aren’t actually there.
In some cases, Richards said, consolidating the governance structure of schools into fewer supervisory unions could actually help small schools keep their doors open by relieving them of administrative costs.
“There’s really compelling data to show that small schools are potentially more viable in these governance unions,” she said.
Holcombe said that removing small-school grants and phantom student funding wouldn’t harm an otherwise viable school.
“I think the point of the consolidated union is that they don’t need the small grant because the efficiencies are so great,” Holcombe said.
Shumlin offered a tepid reaction to a legislative bill filed by Rep. Alison Clarkson, D-Woodstock, that would save about $5 million in education spending by prohibiting school districts from paying tuition to out-of-state schools, although some exceptions would be allowed.
Shumlin said he worried the bill could result in retaliatory policies from neighboring states.
“This is not going to be solved by one silver bullet. It’s going to be solved by a really thoughtful load of buckshot.”
“I’m always afraid that what you dish out to other states can be fed back to you on a dish that is more painful to eat,” he said. “We like our New Hampshire students. Our institutions need them. It’s not as simple as it looks.”
Shumlin said that he was eager to work with lawmakers who might have different ideas about how to solve the state’s education woes.
“My job was to put some ideas on the table that I thought would help,” Shumlin said. “… No one’s got an exclusive on solutions here. This is not going to be solved by one silver bullet. It’s going to be solved by a really thoughtful load of buckshot.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.
