Editor’s note: This commentary is by David F. Kelley, who is an attorney and a co-founder of Project Harmony (now PH International) and a former member of the Hazen Union School Board.
To begin to overcome over 20 years of inequity in school resources the General Assembly has a moral duty to take action this session to implement the weighting recommendations contained in the Pupil Weighting Factors Report commissioned pursuant to Act 173 of 2018.
For the better part of 30 years I have lived and practiced law in the Northeast Kingdom. I have done countless bankruptcies, divorces, emergency guardianships, relief from abuse petitions, workers comp and Social Security Disability claims. I have come to know poverty and its consequences upfront and personal.
In the Northeast Kingdom poverty is now generational. It is an acquired sense of helplessness where people have largely given up. It is three children living with their grandmother, their mother and her brother in a trailer, with bare wiring, holes in the wall, and almost no furniture except a television. It is children who share their bedrooms with rodents. It is students who come to school wearing sneakers with no socks in February — not because they are making a fashion statement, but because their parents either can’t or won’t provide anything better. It is 13-year-old girls who are molested by so-called stepfathers.
Like it or not, the classroom is the last, best hope for many of these children. In many cases, especially in small, rural schools, teachers know these students better than their own parents know them. In some cases teachers feed these students, clothe these students and even do their laundry.
In schools with high levels of trauma and poverty, teachers aren’t just teachers. They are social workers, mental health counselors and in some cases they are acting parents. Being able to teach English and math is not enough. Our classrooms require enhanced professional development and trauma informed teaching staff and there needs to be the resources to pay for it.
In schools with high levels of trauma and poverty, high quality principals and superintendents are essential. Unfortunately schools in regions with high levels of poverty are also schools with the lowest salaries. It is natural for top flight teachers and leaders to gravitate to higher paying jobs in communities like Middlebury, South Burlington and Montpelier. That has to be reversed. The greatest needs are in Barton, Lowell and Glover — and we need to be able to offer salaries that can attract and retain the best.
We have an enormous bureaucracy that should be supporting our teachers and administrators, but my experience with that bureaucracy has been, to put it politely, disappointing. The Department for Children and Families is, too often, missing in action. They should have offices in schools with high rates of poverty, not in faraway office buildings, and DCF should strive to provide liaison between classrooms and homes.
At the high school I am most familiar with we have two school-based clinicians from our local mental health agency with a sisyphean caseload.
A careful review of the simulated tax rates, produced by the Joint Fiscal Office, using FY20 spending and recommendations from this study reveals that small, rural schools with high rates of poverty have been getting the dirty end of the fiscal stick for over 20 years and that fundamental premises of Act 46 were completely wrong.
Among other things, Act 46 guaranteed small school grants in perpetuity to some of the wealthiest districts in Vermont. Some of the most poverty-stricken districts, like Orleans Southwest, can now be denied that funding simply because they filed Section 9 proposals and were forced to merge.
Worse, if Act 46 continues on the path it now seems clearly headed down, it will drive us to even worsened poverty in rural Vermont. Young entrepreneurs with children won’t move to towns where they have to put 6- and 7-year-old children on long bus rides. Putting more children from poverty on longer bus rides to bigger schools with less community engagement only increases the likelihood of another generation with an acquired sense of helplessness and hopelessness.
The recommendations of the Pupil Weighting Factors Report can help reverse these damages. The General Assembly wouldn’t delay the forced mergers of Act 46. It would be shameful if it now delays these recommendations that are so long overdue.
