Editor’s note: This commentary is by Daniel MacArthur, a longtime (on and off for almost 40 years) and current school board member in Marlboro who, along with his wife, is a business owner and farmer in Marlboro. He, his children and his children’s children all attend(ed) the same elementary school in Marlboro.
[M]any towns around Vermont are struggling with ways to interact with Vermont’s new Act 46 law. As a school board member with a long history of working on educational matters, I have some observations that might help us sort our way through this maze.
The first observation is what I perceive as a structural flaw within the law that will make education less equitable rather than more so if it is implemented in the way I see it happening in small towns around me. Act 46 visualizes that neighboring school districts with the same structure but different educational spending and tax rates will merge, evening out the educational expenditures and programs. But low-spending districts are seeking other low-spending districts with which to merge and the same is true for districts with high per-pupil costs. I have not seen one instance of a proposed merger where the districts are drastically different in their spending or tax rates (in fact, the then-board chair of one nearby district which approached my district to initiate merger talks felt harassed for exploring a merger with a higher spending district and has since resigned from the board). The Agency of Education could, according to the law, force-merge some of these districts if they have not chosen partners already so many schools are scurrying to get merged with other like-spending towns before that happens. This pattern of merging with like-minded districts codifies and perpetuates inequity rather than breaking the cycle, because once these similar districts are merged we will probably not see such changes in district makeup for many decades to come.
Related to this merge-with-similar-spending mentality is the fact that, in my opinion, districts attempting to attain alternative structure status are being held to a much higher standard of proof as to what they can accomplish than these merging districts: merge and get your articles approved and you are good to go, but petition for alternative structure and spend weeks if not months preparing a case and promising results only to see what the Board of Education will do with your school.
Secondly, a problem with hastily passed legislation of any sort: Act 46 offers districts an option to petition for an alternative structure, which means that the district can continue to operate unmerged the way that it currently does. However, many of the guidelines for this petition have not been drawn up yet so a district does not know whether its petition might be successful or not. For example, geographical isolation is mentioned in the law as being a critical factor for alternative status but is not defined. Another example: in June the State Board of Education met and sent out a document named “Guidance for Proposals by One or More Non-Merging Districts for an ‘Alternative Structure’ Under Act 46 (2015).”
This document contains the following language, making it clear that any district wishing to explore an alternative structure will need to submit its proposal a year before the final deadline for the Board of Education to complete its plans (the emphasis is mine):
“Act 46 requires the State Board of Education to develop and issue a mandatory statewide education governance plan by November 30, 2018 that, to the extent necessary to meet the Goals and to the extent ‘possible and practicable,’ merges non-merging districts and clusters them into more unified systems when necessary. Development of the statewide plan includes ‘consideration’ of proposals to be in an ‘alternative structure’ that are submitted on or before November 30, 2017 by one or more non-merging districts.”
I encourage others whose schools are growing to find ways to assess their actual growth rates because these drastically affect the projected tax rate.
Since the deadlines for deciding on whether to explore alternative structure status come before these parameters are to be defined by the state, this also is pushing districts to explore merging who might otherwise be doing a great job teaching their kids just as they are, posing the question as to whether merging, or educational quality, is the goal here.
A further complication is that the final decisions around merging and the granting of alternative status are to be made by the Board of Education, consisting of people appointed by the governor and not accountable to either the Legislature or the public. The BOE members have a mandatory six-year term limit so many of the members of the board will be changed between the passage of this law and its implementation. A cynic might think that this firewall was created intentionally to isolate the decision-makers from the voting public.
The last observation I have is to recommend that districts perform a simple calculation that I believe the Legislature should have provided: population trends in your individual school. Cost per pupil and attendant tax rate analysis done for our district has been based on the average loss of students throughout the state, which is about 2 percent fewer kids each year. However, many districts are not losing students and some are gaining students. I encourage others whose schools are growing to find ways to assess their actual growth rates because these drastically affect the projected tax rate. (Perhaps it is no irony that districts which have a reputation for providing good quality educations are actually growing in student numbers.) My school district is a part of a study committee and one of the first things the consultant recommends is to look at actual numbers, but this should have been done while the act was being contemplated, not after districts have agreed to discuss merging. Population trends are cyclical and are not necessarily indicative of actual mileage but it would have cost the state only pennies to look at individual districts and make a slightly more sophisticated analysis of their population and tax rate trends.
Here is a brief walk-through of how our district looked at student trends: we got the equalized pupil numbers for our school from the supervisory union for the last six years and plotted them out, students per year (more years would probably give a more accurate reading). We also took our own incoming kindergarten numbers for the last dozen years, these being the kids who came into our school who are now leaving high school and all students in between, and we plotted those numbers. These two graphs both show a rise in student population of about 1 percent per year rather than a decline of 2 percent, which is the statewide average.
Many of these issues are perhaps unintended consequences of the act but they are consequences anyway and I believe it is a mistake to have districts merging before the Legislature gets a chance to address these and other aspects of the law.
