Editor’s note: This commentary is by Rama Schneider, who was until recently a member of the Paine Mountain School District Board, and currently is an appointed Williamstown representative to the Central Vermont Internet Communications Union District.
[A] highlight from the last 10 years of my life has been spending time on the Williamstown school board. This gift from the community placed me in a circumstance where I could delve into public education, Vermont law and other legal nuisances, public policy, municipal governance and finance, open government, introspection, personal and professional relationships, politics, and more. This last decade has certainly been one of my better ones for learning experiences.
Among my lessons learned was that one of the, if not absolutely the, predominant policy pushes in Vermont’s Statehouse and administration during my school board tenure has been the merging of school districts. And there is a set of numbers that has and is following that merger discussion and law making, and these numbers are: As the student count in Vermont’s public school system has declined, there has been little to no change in the supporting physical infrastructure or the personnel numbers.
These are extremely difficult numbers to manage. The loss of a single student in a class of 22, for example, does not allow for a reduction in teaching staff much less school building. However that “one here, one there” decline across the state creates a set of troublesome questions for state level policy. The difficulty of these statistics does not involve only the number of teachers. The difficulties and opportunities extend to school buildings and buses and food service and after school programming and more.
The now well-known Act 46 process that is currently winding down to one or more ends has been about these numbers. School districts were being instructed to deal with those numbers, and they were even told the preferred method. But Act 46 of 2015 was only one more school district merger related piece of legislation in a string that started in 2010 with Act 153. In the decade prior to that, there was open pro-merger discussion at the State Board of Education and in the Statehouse and administration. The legislative and administrative drive for fewer school districts was underway well before Act 46, and Act 46 will not be the last legislative push before the merger drive has finished its course. For example the Scott administration has already publicly presented the concept of even more mergers, and my listening experience tells me this idea has plenty of “leg” in the Legislature. The current trend of state mandated mergers should, in my view, be expected to continue unabated unless there is serious political intervention. The start of that political intervention is us, you and I, and how we view that set of statistics that shows student count declining while physical infrastructure and personnel numbers hold steady.
One could reasonably argue that these statistics wonderfully explain the current money question. Why does spending increase while student count decreases? One can quite logically posit that the problem is that nothing else has changed but the number of students. However these numbers have other meanings too, and Act 46 brought them to the forefront.
Smaller and more numerous school buildings may drive some costs up, but they provide for smart localized transportation systems that can reliably respond to weather and other circumstances and save on the busing mileage and fossil fuels. Also, children in the pre-K through 5 grades benefit from the most parental involvement in near-to-home buildings, and this can save tremendous amounts of money as social supports can be provided by community volunteers instead of well-paid professionals.
The non-reduction in staffing number has done the most to drive up costs to the education fund, but the requirements from the state’s Legislature and administration for programs such as multiple pathways actually cements in much of the need for that very non-reduction. The desirability of keeping our youngest children close to home and thus in smaller buildings may require some changes in the expectations around financial efficiency and what that means.
Without presenting complete enumerations, my point is that the set of numbers describing student count, physical infrastructure, and personnel count will have to be viewed as a multifaceted tangle of needs, wants, values, visions, practicalities and I’m sure more.
A lesson isn’t fully learned until the new knowledge is put into action. The action in the here and now, and well before legislative pen is put to the next merger proposal, is to determine how that set of numbers is viewed. That set of numbers will drive the next Vermont school district merger discussion which is a coming attraction … again.
I think a lot of folks from all around Vermont have taken advantage of the current climate around school district merging and have thought about priorities in public education. Our statewide plan for public education doesn’t have to be pro-merger or anti-merger or maybe-merger, but it does have to be thoughtful. The thoughtful path forward is to think about the relationship between student count, physical infrastructure, and staff numbers.
