The House proposed a temporary 2.95 percent limit on school spending in an education reform bill that passed last month. The Senate is expected to draw up tax provisions for education spending in the next few days.
Robert Gensburg successfully argued the Brigham case before the Vermont Supreme Court in 1997, and he is often called on to testify when changes are proposed to the Act 60/68 education funding formula that went into place shortly after the court ruling. Last week he testified before the Senate Finance Committee.
“Any system, including the one that is in H.361 as it passed the House, that has a cap, a spending limitation based on the district’s prior year’s expenditures, probably is going to run afoul of the Brigham principle, the principle being that children have equal access to education funds,” Gensburg said in an interview.
Members of the House Education Committee say a spending cap would help to curb increases in education spending for a few years until school districts become part of larger integrated education systems.
Meanwhile, student enrollments have declined dramatically in Vermont as school spending continues to go up. Lawmakers are attempting to find efficiencies and improve educational opportunities for students.
This year, school budgets came in at 2.95 percent higher than last year’s spending level.
The education spending cap approved in the House version of the bill would be triggered if statewide education spending exceeded 2.95 percent in 2017. If the average rate of spending hit the limit, a 2 percent variable cap would be applied to school budgets the next year, 2018.
The same would be true for the next year, 2019, if budgets in 2018 exceeded the 2.95 percent restriction, under the two-year cap provision.
The cap would be applied either to the prior year’s school budget, or the prior year’s equalized per-pupil spending. The way the cap language is written in the House bill, districts could apply the cap either way.
Gensburg said a cap is “at least a little bit unconstitutional.”
“So if you start out with school district A that has X dollars for education spending, and school B that has 2X and apply some kind of formula to restrict their ability to raise additional money…It is contrary to Brigham,” he said.
Gensburg said he experimented with different permutations of a spending cap and his conclusion was the same. “Setting aside for the moment that the proposal is temporary, you have a built-in unequal access to education funding. I believe that would create a Brigham problem.”
Allen Gilbert, the executive director of the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Senate Education Committee that his organization has long been opposed to spending caps on school budgets “absent differentiation among low-spending vs. high-spending districts.”
A spending cap would penalize low-spending districts that wanted to expand education offerings to students, offerings that might already exist at a higher-spending district.
“The lower-spending district would likely have to increase spending beyond the cap, and therefore couldn’t add the program it wanted,” Gilbert continued. “Meanwhile, the high-spending district could continue offering its more expansive education program, as long as it stayed under the cap. In this manner, caps lock in inequities of program offerings between schools.”
Gilbert explained that the Brigham decision doesn’t require that schools offer an “adequate” education program. “Rather, Brigham requires all districts to have equal access to education funds, with each district deciding for itself the education programs it wishes to offer,” he said.
The Vermont School Boards Association and the Vermont-National Education Association also oppose the House spending cap proposal.