The House and Senate education committees got right to work on Tuesday, the opening day of the 2016 legislative session.
Spending thresholds in last year’s landmark education law, Act 46, were the first item on the agenda for the House Committee on Education, while at the other end of the Statehouse, the Secretary of Education reviewed Act 46 successes with the Senate Committee on Education.
The law sought to cap school spending increases across the board at 2 percent. The threshold is variable by district, based on prior year spending. If a district trips over that line they trigger a double tax on each extra dollar spent. For every $100 a community goes over, a penny is added to every $100 of assessed property value, according to Brad James at the Agency of Education.
What legislators didn’t expect was that health care costs would rise by 7.9 percent for school employees. In addition, many districts had previously negotiated a 3.5 percent boost in pay. These two items are pushing some districts to consider cuts to academic programs in order to hold the line.
The House panel zeroed in on ways to accommodate health care costs while keeping spending controls in the law. The governor and the Senate are proposing delaying the thresholds for a year or repealing them.
The challenge will be to come up with a compromise between the two chambers and the executive in time for school boards to finalize their budgets.
Last week the House Committee on Education heard testimony on how the spending thresholds were playing out in school districts. Many members of the House panel remain committed to the AGP mechanism and Chairman David Sharpe said that more and more House members are siding with them.
“The House still believes it is important to respond to taxpayers who were saying we need some downward pressure on spending,” said Sharpe.
Sharpe drafted a bill that would increase the allowable growth rate across all districts by 0.9 percent. “Health care costs are killing us in our budgets across the state,” said Sharpe. “Taking that piece off the table would be the fair thing to do.”
A rough estimate provided by Mark Perrault, from the joint fiscal office shows that under the current law, roughly 127 school districts will fail to stay below their threshold and will be penalized, but that will keep taxes down statewide.
“This provision does not bring any additional money into the education fund statewide only from those districts that exceed the the threshold and those monies are used to pay for the tax incentives – it comes in and goes back out to everybody,” Perrault said.
Allowing for the 0.9 increase will likely help districts such as Weybridge who are not allowed to grow at all under the Allowable Growth Percentage, but it won’t help most districts that expect to exceed the threshold.
Repealing the AGP would mean reverting back to the old spending threshold which is 121 percent of average per pupil spending or $16,905 per pupil. Only a handful of school districts would spend more and pay fines, and the result would be slightly higher statewide property taxes.
Jeff Francis, executive director of the Vermont Superintendents Association said finds it frustrating that the cap issue is garnering so much attention. “It was a product both of a rushed process at the end of the session last year and now we are rushing to address it this year.”
As for the 0.9 proposal, Francis said it isn’t clear yet how it would work, but it seems like it might “exacerbate the discrepancies in the effects of the AGP rather than mediate them. Our preference would be to delay implementation and focus everybody on the other provisions of Act 46 where a lot of good work is going on.”
The Senate Committee on Education has also been taking testimony on it this week, but senators remain unconvinced that AGP can be fixed and are more interested in a repeal or delay. And Gov. Peter Shumlin used his State of the State address to urge lawmakers to repeal or delay the spending caps in time for school boards to fix their budgets for Town Meeting Day.
The pressure is on and a fix of some kind has to be decided by the end of next week.
Sharpe’s counterpart in the Senate, Ann Cummings, said the Senate never really liked the House proposed AGP but agreed to it because it was supposed to be less “punitive.” She wants to decide on AGP as soon as possible. “There are two bills in this committee that I know of to do away with the caps and one of them is mine!” she said.
Once Act 46 is dealt with, both House and Senate committee chairs will turn their attention to special education spending. David Sharpe, the chair of the House committee plans to also look into teacher licensing at independent schools and the way career and technical education is governed. For now, it will be Act 46 all day, every day until the problem with the allowable growth percentage, or AGP is settled.
More Tweaks?
Cummings said she wants to see if any other tweaks to Act 46 are necessary.
“We knew before we left here we would be hearing from folks on the front-lines,” she said. Cummings is making a list of areas where the law is working and where it is not to determine if any more changes are warranted right now.
“We know that you don’t do something this large and this complex without having to do some fine tuning,” Cummings said.
Act 46 was meant to incentivize voluntary mergers between school districts. Early on, some districts that offered school choice in some or all grades were dismayed to learn that they couldn’t be combined with districts that operate schools in the same grades. While Cummings recognizes there are constitutional reasons for this separation, she said, “If there is something we have done that is preventing that [voluntary unification], I think we need to take a look at it.”
Sharpe, on the other hand, has no intention of making any additional changes to Act 46. The law is working “extraordinarily well” and he is pleased with the public’s response. “We see really good work being done resulting in lower tax rates and saving small schools around the state. It is all we could have hoped for in terms of positive outcomes for school children.”
Special Education Dollars
Once Act 46 is dealt with, both House and Senate committee chairs would like to turn their attention to special education spending.
“There are some real problems with how we do special education in this state,” Sharpe said.
There are issues with how special education reimbursement payments are made and there are cost savings to be found in pilot programs that focus on prevention. The proliferation of paraeducators is also a concern to lawmakers.
There are three different pots of money associated with special education – a block grant based on the number of special education students or (ADM) and a 90 percent state subsidy for students that need intensive support and cost more than $50,000. Those are the two extremes, in between is a reimbursement system that forces schools to document every cent spent – it is the smallest pot of cash, and yet the most labor intensive.
Sharpe says the reimbursements create a “documentation nightmare” for school districts. “They have to document every quarter hour of services they provide to a kid. And it can induce unnecessary spending. If I sent you to the grocery store and told you I was going to pay for 60 percent of your groceries your buying might be different than if you were paying for it all yourself.”
The Vermont School Boards Association passed a resolution two years ago calling for a study of the special education funding formula. Nicole Mace, the executive director of VSBA, says she remains concerned about how the state reimburses special education expenses.
Reimbursements could be a set block grant, but small schools don’t like this approach as they feel it puts them at a disadvantage. Larger districts under Act 46 could eliminate this problem.
Sharpe wants to hear more ideas and hopes to identify statutory changes that might repair the current system.
In mid-January, the Secretary of the Agency of Education is expected to report to lawmakers on a three-year special education pilot program that is based on the Schoolwide Integrated Framework for Transformation (SWIFT) model. Grand Isle Supervisory Union, Franklin Northwest Supervisory Union, Southwest Vermont Supervisory Union and Windham Southeast Supervisory Union are participating in the pilot, which focuses on less costly special education services through prevention and classroom-based intervention and that emphasizes inclusion while reducing the use of paraprofessionals.
Sharpe said this is an exciting pilot project and he would like to see it expanded in some way. He believes there is a better way of delivering special education services at lower cost.
Cummings agrees that it is time to look into this issue. “Some schools spend a lot of money and some schools don’t and quality and spending don’t necessarily correlate. There is something we can learn from the schools that do it well. We need to look at how the state clones that and models it in other places.”
The growth in the number of paraeducators is also a concern for Cummings.
Francis says paraeducators are part of the state’s high staff-to-student ratio problem. “There is a body of research that says when you are educating the neediest kids – those who need special supports – the better strategy is not to rely on instructional assistants or paraeducators. There are better ways to systematically invest our money.”
Teacher Licensing for Independent Schools
Recently, the State Board of Education began the process of reviewing the rules that govern the private school approval process. Any independent school that accepts public money tuition must be approved by the SBE. Sharpe would like to crack open the vault and shed some light on how Independent schools employ their teaching staff.
There are 134 independent schools in Vermont that range from general education schools to mission driven schools to those that are dedicated to special education. Teachers at these schools do not have to be licensed or have the same credentials as teachers in the public school system.
Independent schools have the flexibility to use a math teacher that also has some science background to teach both subjects. This can be a cost savings but it can also affect quality.
Lawmakers often hear that they should let the market place sort out best practices in schools by letting those that flourish do so and those that don’t fail, according to Sharpe. “That is fine if they are playing on a level playing field, but they are not,” he said. “Independent schools operate by vastly different rules than public schools do especially around teacher hiring and licensing and training procedures.”
A few years ago, VSBA supported legislation that would have forced independent schools, for which 30 percent of its student body are publically funded students, to meet a number of requirements including teacher licensure, according to Mace. “This is a good conversation to have to ensure the public dollars going into our education system are being used to deliver high quality education.”
Sharpe says he isn’t sure there will be time to look into this issue this session, but added that those who want to move the state toward greater choice need to consider leveling the playing field. “Which means changing how we hire and evaluate and license teachers.”
Career and Technical Education
Another topic that Sharpe thinks is important but may not have time to get to is the governance structure for the states centers for technological education, or CTEs. “They were not part of the Act 46 discussion and they are sort of hanging out there with a question mark about what their governance should look like in the future,” said Sharpe.
CTE’s operate outside of the preK-12 system although they are becoming more integral because of Vermont’s progressive education policies. Act 77 is a law that offers dual enrollment for high schoolers as well as personalized learning plans for students in 7-12 grades. Tech education is being integrated into the traditional school day.
Francis agrees with this move. “What we are trying to do through Act 46 is make a more sensible delivery system for education to provide better opportunities for kids and better cost efficiencies. I think CTE needs to be involved in that.”
No to New Initiatives; Yes to More Staff
Schools and school boards have their hands full as they attempt to put Act 77, Act 166 and now Act 46 into place. The Agency of Education and the State Board of Education are equally busy helping school districts with this work and implementing the newly adopted Education Quality Standards and the Quality Reviews that go along with the standards. Add to that the federal workload that comes with the new Every Student Succeeds Act (formerly NCLB/ESEA) passed by Congress and signed by the President this month.
For the third year in a row, the State Board of Education is asking lawmakers to refrain from passing any more new initiatives. “Please, we need to digest what we’ve got and make what we’ve got work as best we can. We don’t need anything new. General housekeeping is good but other than that we are basically hoping we don’t have any new initiatives,” said SBE Member Bill Mathis.
Mace and Francis both agreed and asked lawmakers not to consider any new education initiatives. “I don’t think our systems can withstand any new requirements at this time,” said Mace.
Since fiscal year 2008, AOE has lost 43 staff positions the majority of which focus on implementing state education initiatives.
“It is critical that the Legislature pay attention to staffing at AOE. We rely on that Agency tremendously in order to assist with implementation of all those initiatives (Acts 77,166 and 46) and they are really struggling,” said Mace. “If the state has these high expectations then they need to support the Agency responsible for helping school district’s implement them.”
Cummings said that her committee tried to add workforce in Act 46 but it was stripped out. She remains “very concerned.”
Sharpe says it is a priority of his to staff up AOE and the SBE, but ultimately, it will depend on the governor’s proposed budget. “Things that come to the House that are not in his budget become problematic for policy committees like ours to get the appropriators to add to what is already a difficult budget situation.”
