Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
[G]ov. Phil Scott’s administration unveiled Tuesday a plan to hold down future spending on public education by compelling small towns to close their schools.
No, of course that’s not how they put it.
But – credit them with candor – neither did they deny that one likely result of their insistence on reducing the number of teachers and teaching assistants over the next few years would be the disappearance of some small schools.
“It very well could be,” Administration Secretary Susanne Young said, when asked whether achieving a “better staff-to-student ratio” would convince local districts to shut down smaller schools.
“It’s likely already happening,” said Heather Bouchey, the acting secretary of the Agency of Education. Bouchey said school officials are debating “what the optimal (school) size is for education,” and increasingly believe that small schools can’t provide “the same opportunities” as larger ones.
For years, Vermont officials in both parties have been talking about cutting the number of public school employees to match the decline in the number of students. The problem has been that nobody knew exactly how to do it.
Now the Scott administration is pushing the idea harder than ever, and this time … it doesn’t know how to do it, either. Instead, it proposes setting up a “task force” which will spend this summer “helping school boards plan for and strategize in the coming five-year period.”
This plan is a bit of a concession. Last week officials were talking about some kind of “mandate” that would require local school districts to reduce their staff per student ratio.
“There doesn’t seem to be an appetite for that,” Young said, which is one way of noting that it had no chance of being approved by the Legislature.
Hence the task force idea, rather than a “one size fits all” mandate, Young said. The administration’s proposal said “it is the local education agencies that can best decide what strategies will work for them.”
But at the end of the process, the plan “assumes that in (Fiscal year 2020) a ratio of 1-to-5.40 will be achieved, saving $32 million in that year alone.”
The word used was “assumes,” But in context, it sounded very much like “requires.”
So it turns out to be something of a mandate after all. One way or another, school districts would be expected to change their staff-to-student ratio from the present 1 to 4.25. Last week, officials were discussing a system in which property taxes would go up in districts that did not meet their ratio goals. That penalty was not mentioned in the plan released Tuesday. Instead, the plan substitutes a different but comparable penalty.
Administration officials called their plan bipartisan. It does include some ideas advanced by the Democratic-controlled Legislature, and there is bipartisan agreement that school costs have to be reined in.
In fact, they are being reined in. Thanks to Act 46, passed three years ago, the number of school districts has gone down, and it is about to go down more. This summer, said Brad James, the finance manager at the Agency of Education (via email), “88 school districts will merge into 19 unified union school districts and 2 modified union school districts for a net reduction of 67 school districts.”
That “can lead to savings or cost reductions,” James said, but “there are too many variables” to allow anyone to estimate the extent of those savings.
The Legislature is also in the process of revising how the state provides special education, which is expected to hold down spending, as are other tweaks in school financing now under consideration.
So why do Scott and his aides insist on setting arbitrary staff-to-student ratios?
Perhaps because they think it’s good politics. They might be right. Under their plan, property tax rates would hold steady through fiscal year 2024. Property taxpayers, most of whom are also voters (and most voters are property taxpayers) can’t help but be pleased.
Just as they are likely to be pleased by the other major proposal Scott’s aides announced yesterday: the details on how to find $58 million in “one-time money” to transfer to the education fund, thereby avoiding a 5 to 7 cent property tax increase in the budget now before the Legislature.
The money is there, Senate president Pro Tem Tim Ashe agreed. He and House Speaker Mitzi Johnson said they would rather spend some of it elsewhere. For instance, Johnson said, paying down some of the state’s unfunded pension obligations could save taxpayers far more money over the next several years than using all of it to prevent even the smallest property tax increase this year.
But from a political perspective, Ashe agreed, he and his fellow Democrats have been presented with “a classic case of instant gratification versus fiscal conservatism.”
In America, instant gratification wins almost every time.
But the Democrats might have one advantage in this end-of-session game of chicken they are playing with the governor. When he first suggested using “one-time money” to stave off a property tax increase, Scott said he would agree to it only if the Legislature also adopted his ideas for holding down future school costs.
Tuesday’s statement did say that “policymakers must implement a plan that recognizes the continued decline in student enrollment.”
But that fell far short of demanding approval of his staff-per-pupil ratios. That seems to mean that if lawmakers approve enough “one-time money” to prevent a tax hike this year, they could pass their own version of how to restrain future school spending. Or maybe even no version. After all, future school spending is being restrained.
