This commentary is by Floyd Nease of Jericho. He served in the Vermont House as a Democrat from 2002 to 2010, including two terms as the House majority leader. Trained as a mental health clinician, Nease led several nonprofit human services agencies in Vermont, including an alternative school for children and adolescents who were unable to thrive in public education settings.
Not unexpectedly, Vermont has once again hit a brick wall in public education funding. It’s nothing new. In fact, the wall was built and reinforced over decades by legislators, governors and school boards who jointly avoided addressing the root causes of our dilemma.
Simply put, the underlying structural problems in Vermont’s education system are threefold:
- Vermont has too many school buildings, too many staff and too few students.
- That the funding is not well spent is evidenced by the fact that despite being second in the country in per-pupil spending ($23,299), pupil performance is in the middle of the pack, below many states spending much less.
- It’s reasonable to wonder what might be possible if we were to invest that funding more effectively and efficiently in programming for students instead of on redundant infrastructure and staffing.
There have been promising temporary efforts over the years (Act 60, Act 68 and most recently, Act 46) that showed real promise toward addressing underlying structural challenges.
But every time, when the conjoined specters of closed schools and laid-off staff arose, legislators, governors and school boards — assailed by constituents and special interests — backed off, making exceptions where they shouldn’t (Stowe and Ripton come to mind), thereby defeating any potential for real reform.
The challenges faced this year come from not addressing underlying problems, not, as has been said, because pay raises and health care costs have exploded. They have, of course, but those costs have exploded everywhere, every year. They are a factor, but not the root cause. Our relative performance continues to be middling at best, and our per pupil cost continues to rise far beyond what payroll and health care inflation require.
The cycle of increased costs and declining results is made worse by postponed maintenance, repair and replacement of too many aging buildings, most often in a misguided effort to forestall staff reductions. The combination of too many staff, too many aging buildings and too few students is a toxic feedback loop. It forces misspending on redundancy and unneeded space instead of investing in excellence.
The response from the Legislature this session is familiar: tweak the formula (increase the yield, look for revenue — any revenue) to get through the immediate funding crisis.
Tweaking always fails to address chronic underlying structural problems. It guarantees the “immediate” budget crisis will reappear — with Groundhog Day certainty — next year, the year after and the year after that.
Property taxes — which pay for more than 60% of school spending — will continue to increase by thousands this year and next — ad infinitum. This makes Vermont even less affordable for the young families we say we want to attract.
Already, postponed decisions to close schools and lay off staff have metastasized into an obstacle that impacts everything we hold dear in Vermont.
Every funding decision made by the Legislature or the governor is overshadowed by the unsustainable school funding problem. Addressing Vermont’s other very real immediate needs — housing, environment, agriculture, municipal and economic development et al, requires that it be addressed. School spending must become predictable, sustainable and equitable, or the whole economy grinds to a halt.
We’ve been here before. In the ‘70s, after much bloodletting and political angst, Vermont consolidated many village high schools into regional “union” schools, where students gained access to a richer array of academic and extra-curricular choices. Cries of “you’re killing our community” faded as communities adjusted to the new realities and learned to take advantage of them.
On the federal level, in 1988, Congress and the administration recognized that too many aging military bases were not adding value to changing military needs. Predictably, efforts to close redundant bases were stymied by unsurmountable political impediments.
Their solution created Base Realignment and Closure, known as BRAC, described by the Department of Defense as “…the congressionally authorized process DoD has used to reorganize its base structure to more efficiently and effectively support our forces, increase operational readiness and facilitate new ways of doing business.”
Nearby Plattsburgh Air Force Base was repurposed through the program. BRAC removed most political and emotional considerations by anchoring decisions in objective criteria agreed to by a wide range of interests.
Vermont can no longer wait to realign education spending. We must prioritize educational enrichment and equity for students as well as long-term economic viability for taxpayers, over short-term parochial considerations.
By not addressing the triple threat of too many aging schools, too many staff and too few students, the economic impacts of that indecision have grown over time and are crashing over us, drowning other emergent needs in a tsunami of school misspending.
Vermonters must take a cold-blooded look at what we want Vermont’s education system to accomplish — and how it can be accomplished sustainably — over time.
It’s time to authorize a BRAC-like process for Vermont’s future that would reorganize the state’s education system — yes, by repurposing schools, reducing staff and investing in excellence — to (echoing BRAC) “…more efficiently and effectively support our students, increase student readiness for post-secondary education and training and facilitate new ways of doing business.”
It can be done, but it will take political courage to do it.
