Editor’s note: This commentary is by David Major, who is a member of the Westminster School Board.
[Y]es, Act 46 discourages school choice, is inflexible and seems unlikely to reduce the cost of education, but these are not the reason I believe Act 46 should be repealed. It should be repealed because Act 46 seriously undermines who we Vermonters are as a people and how we have chosen to run our society.
Perhaps I am in the minority on this issue. Perhaps because my birthday often falls on Town Meeting Day; perhaps because I have been a resident of Vermont all of my 54 years; perhaps because my father was town moderator and my mother the town’s first kindergarten teacher — perhaps because of these things I care more about our town meeting form of government than many others. But I am not so sure. I hear reports of barely functional or failed democratic institutions around the world, of violent elections, inaccessible city halls and polarized legislative bodies, and I think how fortunate we are in Vermont to have our town meetings — a form of participatory democracy which is as true and successful a democratic institution as any since ancient Greece.
The vast majority of towns in Vermont gather together at least once a year to decide directly whether to fund a new tanker for the fire department or pick up trash throughout town or give money to the aqueduct society. And most important for most of us, we decide how to educate our children: a town preschool? a foreign language program? tuition the middle schoolers or teach them in town? The education of our students forms the biggest expenditure that we decide upon at town meeting, and the school portion of town meeting tends to draw the most people, and it certainly has the most influence on who we Vermonters are to be in 10 years, 20 years, and beyond.
The education of our students forms the biggest expenditure that we decide upon at town meeting, and the school portion of town meeting tends to draw the most people, and it certainly has the most influence on who we Vermonters are to be in 10 years, 20 years, and beyond.
With the carrot of “transition incentives” and the stick of excessive tax penalties, Act 46 is designed to take away from towns the power to make decisions about education and place that power in the hands of a regional board. It pushes towns to eliminate their school boards and eliminate the school portion of the annual town meeting in favor of a system of school governance at a multi-town district level.
The longer Act 46 stays on the books, the more towns will succumb to the pressure created by the law and eliminate their power to make decisions about their schools at their town meetings. Several towns in the state have already done so.
I believe that the elimination of the ability of town citizens to make direct, substantive decisions about the education of their children will drastically weaken our town meeting form of government: there is no point in sacrificing a day to meet if the power to effect change has been taken away. I do not know what sort of Vermont identity and local government would evolve to fill the gaps left by a disempowered town meeting, but I look across the country and see the possibility that distant, consolidated governing bodies will replace citizen involvement. Apathy and the feeling being disenfranchised may well increase.
There are many paths. It seems to me that many of the 20th century advantages of consolidation have vanished in the 21st century of instantaneous information and communication. These days some of the best and least costly educational outcomes can result from the least consolidated of choices — like homeschooling. Let us — the citizens, school boards, Legislature and administration — work together to make our schools affordable and of the highest quality without dismantling our tradition of participatory democracy.
