This commentary is by Martine Larocque Gulick, a retired educator and now a Ward 4 school commissioner for the Burlington School District.
It’s a known secret to those who work in education that there are haves and have-nots in Vermont’s education system, and it’s clear that some districts have more resources to spare than others.
As someone who has worked in Vermont school districts with relatively low needs and lives in a district with high needs, I was baffled by the discrepancies I saw in funding between various districts. I came to realize that there were library budgets 10 times larger than the library budget at Burlington High School, the district where I live.
While librarians in Burlington took care of technology integration for their schools, some schools not only had tech integration specialists but also a well-staffed IT department with an IT director. Burlington has no IT director and an understaffed IT department.
More teachers and administrators, higher pay, more office staff — all of these resources allow a district to run smoothly, create stability and retain employees, ultimately affecting outcomes.
The Senate recently passed S.287, a bill to fix these disparities across school districts. This legislation uses empirical data to update how student needs are measured across the state for the purpose of distributing education funds to school districts.
It’s the culmination of a study conducted by UVM and Rutgers in 2019, which confirmed what many of us on the ground long suspected: Vermont doesn’t accurately account for the costs of educating low-income, rural and multilingual learners, which means that our communities are forced to fill in the gaps off the backs of a typically low-income property tax base.
While the report’s recommendations were clear, this has been anything but a straight line from study to policy.
The Senate should be commended for the bill it has created. Not only have the senators recognized the varying needs across Vermont and identified the solution preferred by our high-needs district, but they were able to craft a hybrid approach to multilingual learner funding that suits the needs of both large and small multilingual learner districts.
But now, work in the House — specifically in the House Committee on Ways and Means — threatens to undo this good work.
The House Committee on Ways and Means is considering an amendment to S.287 that would eliminate the weights altogether, implementing what is being called a “cost equity” proposal. This proposal would send the exact same “cost adjustment payment” to every district for every learner they educate within a certain category of need, such as low-income or rural.
This proposal not only circumvents community budgeting decisions; it bakes in the current inequities by using current, average spending as a measure. This proposal is inequitable, and it appears to many on the ground as the death of the bill itself.
Burlington is a Refugee Resettlement City and we have many English language learners in our district. We are also a district where over 50% of our students have Free and Reduced Lunch eligibility, with some of our schools as high as 71%. Our needs are great.
Implementing the student weights would allow us and other districts across the state to finally offer our children and our communities the equitable opportunities that they deserve. If you believe that districts with high needs are still perfectly capable of making spending decisions for their schools when given equitable resources, please reach out to your House representatives ASAP and ask them to implement the weights that the Senate already approved in S.287.
