[F]AIRLEE — The State Board of Education reluctantly set new eligibility criteria for a funding program for Vermont’s smallest schools Wednesday. But the board hopes state legislators will reconsider the program entirely before their new policy takes effect next July.
Under the 2015 education reform law Act 46, the board was tasked with setting up qualifying metrics for small schools grants, a decades-old funding program that supported Vermont’s smallest schools — defined as having average grade sizes of 20 students or fewer.
The law encourages districts to merge, on the premise that larger districts would have lower costs through the consolidation of staff, infrastructure and other resources.
Lawmakers asked the board to set new eligibility criteria for the grant program for those schools that did not participate in a merger by July 1 of this year. Under the criteria the board adopted Wednesday, only three of 35 schools would lose their funding.
The new grant eligibility criteria are due to take effect a year from now. But the board wants lawmakers to revisit the funding policy more broadly before then.
“We hope there would be action between now and then by the Legislature,” board Chair Krista Huling said.
After the board finalized the criteria, the members voted to send a letter asking lawmakers to reconsider how eligibility for the small schools grant program should be determined.
The board wrote that the program has historically been intended to serve small schools, regardless of other factors. Act 46 changed the program so schools would need to be either isolated or show academic excellence to qualify.
Board members noted that it is difficult to set metrics that objectively measure the criteria.
In a draft of the letter, they asked lawmakers to consider the set of criteria they put forward “a work-in-progress.”
The board determined that a small school will be defined as “isolated” if it is more than 15 miles from the nearest school that has capacity to take in students, or if 5 percent of students live further than 15 miles from the next nearest school.
To determine eligibility for academic and operational excellence, the board endorsed a system based on four factors set out by lawmakers.
The metrics take into account students’ academic proficiency, the difference in academic performance between privileged and marginalized students, the student-to-staff ratio, and the socioeconomic status of the student body.
In each category, a school can score up to four points.
The board decided that schools that have a total of at least eight points can qualify for the funding, setting a lower threshold from the one suggested by the Agency of Education.
Only three schools will not qualify for the grant based on academic excellence, if the metrics were applied to the current year. The agency declined to identify the three schools until they determined whether the data might identify individual students, which would be a privacy violation.
The agency’s suggested cutoff of nine points would have disqualified 14 schools.
The board asked the agency to redact the names of schools in the process of setting the metrics, so board members wouldn’t be influenced by biases, according to Huling. The agency was unable to provide the names of the three schools Thursday.
Over the course of the hours-long meeting, board members argued different positions on the grant system.
Awarding schools funding simply because they are small, even if they are in affluent areas, is a “broken system,” board member John O’Keefe said.
William Mathis argued that the small school grant program was intended to help schools manage the challenges that come with being small — not as a reward or bonus.
After the meeting, Huling said members of the board hope the metrics they approved Wednesday would be “refined and revisited” before they take effect a year from now.
The law required the board to set eligibility criteria within narrow parameters, which are not the ones the board would necessarily have chosen, she said.
Board members were unhappy with the task set out in Act 46 for a range of reasons, some based on philosophical concerns other on the logistical restrictions, she said.
“There are many different board members disappointed in the process for different reasons,” Huling said.
The impact of losing the funding would be different for different schools, depending on the size of the grant they get and the portion of their total budget it represents, according to Huling.
The average grant size for districts is $92,088, according to AOE. The largest grant, $474,113, goes to Addison Central Unified School District. Lincoln has the smallest grant, at $17,393.
The meeting drew about a dozen spectators. During a public comment section, former Democratic Lt. Gov. Doug Racine raised concerns about changing the grant program eligibility.
“It’s going to close a lot of small schools, and if the Legislature wants to close small schools, than the direction should be very clear,” Racine said in an interview.
Racine said he felt it was an appropriate response for the board to ask the Legislature to revisit the issue.
The board’s decision to lower the threshold for schools’ eligibility based on academic excellence may leave some school boards with some heartburn, according to Nicole Mace of the Vermont School Boards Association.
The possibility of losing a small school grant was a factor in some districts’ decision to merge, according to Mace. She said the association has advocated keeping the rules of Act 46 consistent.
“I think there may be some board members out there that question whether or not that constitutes a changing of the understanding that people had about the potential loss of small school grants,” Mace said.
However, she said the board walked a line balancing many interests around the criteria.
“And at the end of the day we have a shared interest in preserving public schools in rural communities,” she said.
