Editor’s note: This commentary is by David F. Kelley, an attorney and a board member of the Vermont Wildlife Coalition. He is co-founder of Project Harmony (now PH International) and a former member of the Hazen Union School Board. The views expressed are his own.
A classroom of students in Hardwick is different from a classroom of students in Shelburne. One difference is that at Hazen Union in Hardwick, 80% of the students are on free and reduced lunch. In Shelburne, 12% of the students are on free and reduced lunch.
Underneath those numbers lurks a more complicated difference. In some ways, they are not just different towns, but two very different worlds. It isn’t just about free lunches. It is explained more fully by different numbers: numbers about alcoholism, drug abuse and incarceration rates, divorces, substandard housing, and relief from abuse petitions, not to mention the more mundane differences like the numbers of internet connections and home computers.
More than two decades ago, our Supreme Court decided that wide disparities in per pupil spending throughout Vermont rendered our educational funding formula unconstitutional. Our General Assembly responded with a statewide property tax that purportedly equalized spending, if not opportunity, and since then we have bandied about the word “equity” without any serious consideration of what we were talking about.
This year that may finally change. A group of representatives has introduced H.54. The bill recognizes that, for more than 20 years, many of Vermont’s smaller and poorer school districts have been overtaxed and underfunded.
Comparing teaching in Hardwick, Lowell, Richford, Coventry and Glover to teaching in Shelburne, Williston and Charlotte is a little like comparing triage to an annual checkup. In many Northeast Kingdom schools, the best teachers aren’t just teachers. They are social workers, caretakers, trauma therapists and, in some cases, de facto parents.
In Lowell, Richford, Coventry, Glover and countless other small rural communities throughout the Northeast Kingdom, the challenges and the salaries in our schools are turned upside down. The average teacher’s salary in towns like South Burlington and Colchester now exceeds $80,000. The average teacher’s salary at the Richford Middle School and High School is $49,629 while the statewide average is about $61,000.
But teachers’ salaries are only one piece of a much more complex mosaic. In some corners of rural Vermont, poverty has become generational, and in many ways is being worsened by bad public policies.
We recently began a process in some areas of closing our small, rural schools. In the process, we will be sending some of our most disadvantaged students to schools farther from their homes, with longer bus rides, with less opportunity to participate in extracurricular activities, and with even less opportunity for working parents to participate in parent-teacher conferences. If Addison Central Unified Union (ironically, one of the more affluent districts in the State) is any harbinger of things to come, then we will also be spending more, not on teaching, but on more busing, more bricks and mortar and eventually more administrators. In terms of “equity,” we would be hard put to design a more regressive formula for at risk students.
H.54 isn’t perfect. It makes the funding formula even more unfathomable for voters and school boards. But most importantly, H.54 finally begins to take into account some of the extra challenges and costs associated with teaching in economically disadvantaged and sparsely populated communities. It is a proposal that is about 20 years overdue.
Progress is rarely linear, and it is usually measured in millimeters, not miles. H.54 will not solve every challenge confronting small, rural schools, and it certainly won’t solve every problem facing our neediest students. Meaningful jobs, decent housing, and more genuine opportunity is a taller order than this legislative session is going to fill.
But H.54 is one small step toward making educational funding more “equitable,” making smaller, poorer school districts more sustainable, and hopefully giving more disadvantaged students a greater chance at the education they need and deserve.
