Editor’s note: This commentary is by Lisa Manning Floyd, of Bethel, who teaches at Randolph Union High School and is a member of the Bethel School Board and the White River Valley Union District board.
[L]ast week communities in Vermont overwhelmingly approved budgets that have over the past several years been trimmed to the bone. Months ago, the governor asked Vermonters to bring in budgets that were essentially level funded, and boards all over the state of Vermont complied. As a school board member and teacher I can tell you that many of our costs are non-negotiable. Our students deserve schools that are adequately maintained, heated and staffed. They also deserve an education that will help them be competitive in the job market once they complete their education.
My son is 14 years old, and over the course of his lifetime I have witnessed a decline in student population as well as shrinking course catalogs at the schools around me. I have seen teachers and administrators look at ways to creatively offer diverse courses with fewer and fewer staff members and still meet the demands of educating an increasingly needy population. I have also seen communities struggle to meet the demands of Act 46 only to see the state change the rules around the tax incentives they have been offered. This is not a way that a state should treat its own citizens and the citizens that will one day become taxpayers.
One of the things that I find frustrating about the national political scene is the us vs. them mentality. In Vermont, for most of my life, I have seen people communicate with one another and respectfully work together regardless of whether it’s after a major storm or disaster or when it comes to legislation. It seems as if this type of civility is being threatened here in Vermont, too. When looking at debate about education funding, gun control and human services, increasingly conversations devolve to a “my way or no way” mentality and we become gridlocked and oppositional.
From his very first State of the State speech Gov. Phil Scott targeted education and he continues to speak about it in a way that makes it seem less as a necessity that we are all responsible for funding and more as a luxury that we can continue to cut. Teachers, including special educators who work with the students who need more expertise and care to educate, become the enemy. It is easy for this governor to forget that teachers are a large part of the workforce; in 2013 there were 8,403 teachers in Vermont. They are people who live here, pay taxes to our communities and state and who raise children locally. Without them our state coffers would be emptier still.
Now, communities that have already passed budgets that came in on average at an increase of 1.5 percent, a full percent lower than the original requested decrease, are being asked for additional, deeper cuts at the local level. While the governor purports to believe that creating a stronger educational system will attract families and jobs, he continues to ask for the systems in place to be trimmed deeper still. We cannot continue to cut and cut and still expect things to be as good as we need them to be. We cannot continue to put changes in place that are not funded and supported at the state level and then ask teachers to work with students with far fewer resources. This is not fair to our children or to the professionals who work to educate students.
Teachers are on the front lines of the opiate crisis; they educate students who come from homes where they have witnessed substance abuse, overdoses and violence, in addition to dozens of other traumas. Schools, along with hospitals, are doing the hard work every day of holding the fabric of our communities together. Now is not a time to play a shell game with cuts to their budgets.
If the governor wanted to get serious about job growth and youth flight, he would look at ways to reduce the cost of college education, perhaps loan forgiveness for college graduates who are educated in-state and then agree to work in-state for a decade after their graduation, filling vital jobs in our communities. He would look at affordable housing and ways to educate the workforce when changing careers. He would also continue to pursue avenues to hold medical professionals accountable for overprescribing opiates and work toward stemming the tide of addiction.
We live in challenging times. Times when it would often be easier to look the other way and deny our shared responsibility for these issues, but that would not stay true to the values of the state I love. Now is the time for us to dig in and work together for creative solutions to these issues.
Gov. Scott asked boards to level fund and communities complied, overwhelmingly. Now, is the time to look for solutions that do not further harm our communities. Tom Brokaw wrote these words that I take comfort in: “There is a place in America to take a stand: it is public education. It is the underpinning of our cultural and political system. It is the great common ground. Public education after all is the engine that moves us as a society toward a common destiny. … It is in public education that the American dream begins to take shape.”
If we are ever to again perceive the American dream as attainable it will have to be through public education. This is the place where children come together to learn about each other and themselves and push themselves to learn and grow. There is a lot of promise in acts that our Legislature has put in place. Act 46 and Act 77 are shaping education in Vermont in ways that should yield positive results for decades to come. But continuing to shift expectations before these pieces of legislation can come to fruition is poor practice. If state government believes in the work they have already done through these acts then they need to take a step back and look for savings in other places through other means.
