[T]he State Board of Education has again changed the metrics for deciding which small schools will get extra financial support next year because the state still doesn’t have the data it thought it would by now.
According to the new small schools grant criteria adopted by the board Wednesday, four schools could see their funding cut next year – Bakersfield, Canaan, Peacham and Holland, although Holland’s residents voted this summer to close the town’s lone school anyway at the end of this school year.
Those four schools won’t necessarily lose their grants – while they don’t qualify under the board’s amended criteria for “academic excellence and operational efficiency,” they might still receive the money if they’re considered to be geographically isolated enough.
Uncertainty concerning the grants – which can account for close to 10 percent of some schools’ total revenues – has caused considerable anxiety for superintendents and business managers this year. The grants have been a given in the state’s smallest schools for the last two decades, but Act 46 changed the program, making schools in districts that didn’t consolidate voluntarily apply for the grants, starting this year, using stricter criteria to be developed by the board.
The board adopted new metrics this June, but local school officials, who are concluding their budgeting for next year now, have complained for several months now that they hadn’t been able to apply for the funds or get confirmation from the Agency of Education that they would qualify for the money under the new criteria.
North Country Supervisory Union Superintendent John Castle said his districts, several of which receive small schools grants, ultimately assumed the revenue was coming when they crafted next year’s budgets based on tentative information from the agency. Holland was the only NCSU district that ultimately didn’t qualify.
“We had a little bit of a leap of faith in our budget process,” he said.
On Wednesday, agency staff told the board that the delay was tied to problems with the rollout of the state’s new data collection system. The Statewide Longitudinal Data System was supposed to streamline data collection from local school districts to the state, but its implementation has been beset by problems, and pushed back the release of school-by-school test scores from this spring.
Without that test score data, which might not be released for several more months, agency attorney Emily Simmons told the board they couldn’t award the grants. Agency officials asked – and board members ultimately agreed – to change grant criteria to use test score data from the 2016-17 school year instead of last year’s results.
“Continuing to develop budgets, to finalize budgets, with that amount of uncertainty is really untenable. So it’s good that a conclusion to this process has been reached. But it’s also the second or third example that I’m aware of of the SLDS issues interfering with the budget process,” said Nicole Mace, the executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association.
The state board’s latest action likely won’t be the last word on small schools grants. When board members initially – and reluctantly – set the program’s new criteria in June, they also wrote to the Legislature to ask legislators to reconsider their decision to restrict eligibility for the funds. And one of the lawsuits challenging forced school district mergers under Act 46 also argues the change to the program was illegal.
