Editor’s note: This commentary is by Steve May, who is a licensed clinical social worker and a Democratic candidate for the state Senate in the Chittenden District.
[T]he governor has served up some red herring. His argument for cutting school staff is not governed by concerns over delivering quality education to Vermont students. There has been precious little mentioned by the administration as part of its efforts to comply with the structural requirements under the Brigham case. Rather, the administration is engaged in a search for the political equivalent of a lowest common denominator. A baser concept for a basic way to express that education spending doesn’t deserve to appeal to the better angels of men.
The budget standoff that we all were subjected to this spring between the legislative Democrats and Phil Scott’s administration was supposed to have been about “the governor’s affordability agenda” and education funding. That’s what the news media told the public and that is what the administration screamed from the hilltops. But let’s all be clear: This was less a negotiation and more a hostage taking. The governor, for the second year in a row, played chicken with the budget, and again in doing so made the rest of us his collateral damage. Lest we forget, last year, the governor drove all of us to the brink while he sought to torch the collective bargaining rights of the teachers union over their health care benefits.
There are legitimate points of concern over education in our state. Special education is most definitely a cost driver, which affects every district across our state, and ensuring that students get a constitutionally guaranteed adequate education isn’t cheap. That having been said, the Legislature rightly addressed special education reforms in last year’s session.
District consolidation by way of Act 46 will attempt to cap overhead costs (though they need to expand). Consolidation means that there will be fewer total overall administrators, because there will be fewer districts and fewer districts should mean fewer personnel needs. Act 46 continues, but the tax incentives have worked to incentivize towns to merge to provide better educational options. Both Act 46 and special education reforms will be works in progress but have provided meaningful changes to the delivery of education in Vermont. And now, this year was supposed to have been about how to fund education. There actually were serious efforts made in both the House and Senate to change the education funding formula.
Janet Ancel led the House Appropriations Committee which spent much of this session attempting to address a fairer funding system by relying upon more income sensitivity. On the Senate side, Chris Pearson and Anthony Pollina have legislation that would move the entire school funding system over to the income tax. These are serious proposals by serious people. And the governor wanted no part of either of these proposals. Instead, he chose to rail against the teachers union and the individual staffing models of each school. The Republican Party in Vermont, dating back to the days of George Aiken and Robert Stafford, had been the party of local control. But, instead of restraint, this spring has seen Vermonters treated to bureaucratic paternalism, as time and time again, the governor and his staff went to great lengths telling the public that they didn’t understand what was happening with their own town’s budgets. Local control means empowering people closest to the problem to seek their own best solutions. Just because you don’t agree with their choices, Governor, doesn’t mean it’s wrong. When towns vote to keep staff because they value small class sizes, they have made a conscious decision. The school boards that spend months working on budgets are quite capable. They in turn launch conversations in their communities which culminate in a vote on Town Meeting Day. Someone who doesn’t vote on Town Meeting Day for a school budget has made a choice to abstain from the process. Governor, inaction is action. Not voting is a choice. Telling the people of our state that they are too stupid to understand their political obligations, or rather, the financial magnitude of the choices being made by their neighbors represents the kind of nanny-state paternalism that you used to rail against.
Instead, let’s call this what it is. Governor, you have declared war on the state’s teachers because you think it’s good politics. Mr. Scott, you believe fewer teachers equal fewer Democratic voters. Your behavior to that end has been nothing short of crass and partisan. Your rationale for maintaining fewer staff is that there are just fewer kids. That may be true, there are in fact fewer kids, but there are more services being rendered to those students, because we are asking more and more of the professionals and paraprofessionals responsible for them in our place during the school day. In general, this generation of school kids seems to be much needier than past generations and any additional staff reflects greater utilization of those already existing school services.
The governor spends a lot of time talking about his affordability agenda, but he often forgets about making investments in human capital. Spending on Vermont kids is, and has always been, a smart investment. We will either ultimately wind up spending to pay for textbooks or jail cells. Not every kid will make bad choices if they are not the recipient of more state largess, but the kids who do receive that extra touch from the staff in their schools do better. Fewer kids fall through the cracks.
Ultimately those kids who grow into healthy productive taxpayers who ultimately pay in to the system are worth the couple thousand dollars extra across their school lives. When the state skimps on its investments on the front end, we all pay on the back end. Voters seem clear that they would much rather pay for education than corrections, the 2-3 percent year-to-year rise in property taxes that most of us witness is on par with the rate of inflation. From my experience, most folks build that rise into their financial expectations annually. Buying down property tax rates will only have a “whack-a-mole effect” with people having financial outrage next year when they see their tax bill in the second year without having had to pay the increases this year. Insulating the public from the routine rise in property tax is designed to foment a tax crisis in the out years. There is nothing altruistic about this. This approach is just plain vulgar. Playing with the public in this way fails the most basic test of leadership. Vermonters deserve leadership — not just some red herrings
