[S]chools that opted out of Act 46 — choosing not to merge with other schools — now risk losing access to state grants that for the last 20 years have supported some of the state’s smallest schools, most of which were located in rural districts, with high levels of poverty.
The state Board of Education, at its May meeting last week, discussed how to comply with new requirements of Act 46, in determining which schools will be eligible for “small school” grants in the future.
The grant program was created in response to a 1998 study that found that the state’s smaller — and generally more rural — schools cost more to operate. Intended for schools having 20 or fewer students per grade, the grants were to ensure that students in the state’s most rural, and often its poorest, schools would have access to the same educational opportunities as students in larger schools.
Vermont’s student population has continued to decline over the years. And focus on economies of scale has increased — in particular the disproportionately high cost per pupil of educating children in the state’s small, rural schools.
Act 46, enacted in 2015, was an attempt by lawmakers to encourage districts to merge, on the grounds that fewer, larger school districts would be more cost effective and better run.
About 40 of the state’s school districts chose not to merge and now they are in danger of losing their small school grants. After July 2019, and every year thereafter, each district will have to reapply for the grants on a yearly basis.
In addition, schools will have to meet new, stricter criteria for eligibility, including providing evidence that the school is a “center of academic and fiscal excellence,” and/or that the school is “geographically isolated.”
By law, the state Board of Education must come up with ways to measure geographic isolation, and academic and financial excellence, by July.
Among those attending the meeting was John Castle, superintendent of North Country Supervisory Union, which is based in Newport, and encompasses the towns of Charleston, Coventry, Lowell and Troy, who urged board members to consider the important role of schools in rural communities.
Eight schools in the North Country Supervisory Union are recipients of small school grants, Castle said. The grants total more than $600,000 per year, which while it may not be a big draw on the state’s education fund, it is vital to the schools receiving the grants — amounting to between 7 and 10 percent of their revenues.
North Country schools will be among those that, under Act 46, now have to apply annually for the small school grant and starting in July also will be held to a new standard.
Castle asked the board to “be predisposed to extend these funds to school districts and not make the threshold for distributing funds so high that it serves as a punitive measure for non-compliance with governance consolidation.”
At the previous legislative session, lawmakers had added a twist to Act 46, asking the state board to come up with an interim determination of geographic isolation — in hopes of pushing undecided school districts toward merging.
At its September 2017 meeting, the board members made a “preliminary decision” that any school more than a 15-minute drive from another school would be considered geographically isolated. This reduced the number of schools eligible for the small school grant to seven.
Members of the public who spoke at last week’s meeting called the decision punitive and expressed hope the board would reconsider it.
Judy Normandeau, from Dummerston, reminded the board that the state’s schools increasingly are attending to more than their students’ educational needs. “Schools are sometimes the only place where children get fed and/or get their emotional needs cared for,” she said. A withdrawal of state support, she said, would add to inequality in the state’s schools.
A focus of discussion also was on the metric requiring schools to show how they’re providing students “high-quality” educational opportunities, meeting or exceeding state educational quality standards, while also operating efficiently – including lowering student to staff ratios. Also to be taken into consideration was whether the district took part in a merger study and submitted a report to the state board.
The state Agency of Education suggested the board rely on the annual “snapshot” that schools will be submitting, showing they’re meeting federal requirements under the Every Student Succeeds Act. The state will begin using the snapshot in December.
The agency suggested that to be eligible for the small school grants the school’s students would need to show performance equal to or better than the statewide average on the snapshots.
Some board members said whether a school district took part in merger discussions should not be among the criteria for small school grants.
“It is like combining apples to zebras,” board member John Carroll said.
The board is considering including poverty as one of the considerations, to provide extra help to small schools dealing with more low-income students than the statewide average.
“It is a good faith effort to reflect the poverty challenges some schools have and also the absence of poverty in some of these schools, some are in very wealthy communities and they shouldn’t be rewarded for dealing with an easy population,” Carroll said.
Once the board sets the process for evaluating a school applying for the grant it will be up to the Agency of Education to do the annual checks and approvals.
