This commentary is by Liz Edsell of Winooski. She is a parent of two kids and has been active in state and local efforts to build grassroots support for issues including climate action, approving the capital bond for Winooski school district improvements and expanding voting access to all legal residents in Winooski city elections. She is associate director at VPIRG.
To my elected officials and school district leaders:
I live in Winooski. Our schools are not just the hub of public education, but also where our diverse community comes together and invests in one another. With the passage of Act 127, our school district is finally getting the share of public education funds for our kids to have equal educational opportunities to kids who live in wealthier towns.
The law brings our distribution of resources into alignment with the ruling of the Vermont Supreme Court in the Brigham decision. And our school is thriving.
At the same time, my property taxes, like so many others, skyrocketed last year. It’s rough. I still voted for our school and city budgets, but I can understand why many folks felt they could not.
I can understand our leaders’ sense of urgency to address taxpayers’ concerns. But what I see the governor and Senate doing now is repeating the mistakes of past reforms — where you made major changes without fully understanding the consequences.
As a taxpayer, homeowner and parent, I beg our leaders to take a page from what we teach our kids. Do your homework. When you’re making an important decision, pause and consider the impacts of your decision. If other people are impacted, make sure they have a chance to understand what change means and have an opportunity to weigh in.
The future of our public school system is too important for radical, sweeping and rapid education reforms without us all truly understanding the impacts and whether these changes will actually fix the problem of rising property taxes.
On education reform, please pause. Here is some homework.
- Convene a joint hearing of the House and Senate where you present the details of your reforms and invite superintendents, school board members, parents, students and taxpayers to weigh in.
- Share the many and varied factors that contributed to property tax hikes.
- Study the unintended consequences of Act 127 that did impact many districts’ school budgets.
- Delay action on major education reforms until the consequences are fully understood and communicated to district leaders, parents and taxpayers, and feedback is offered.
- Commit to a statewide listening, learning and information-gathering tour.
- Your work could/should include:
- Conducting a statewide tour of school districts with delegates from the House and Senate Education, Finance and Appropriations Committees, and the secretary of education.
- Presenting more than one course of possible action to the problem of rising property taxes and the potential pros and cons of these approaches.
- Pursuing reforms to property taxes that will help families, such as addressing income “cliffs” in state funding support.
- Prioritizing addressing the double-digit health insurance premium hikes that have driven up the personnel costs for our schools. I’ll note that this would also help small businesses and nonprofit organizations that are also struggling to keep up with the rising costs of health care.
- Sharing a plan for building more affordable housing to stem the skyrocketing housing costs and attracting more families and children to live in or stay in Vermont.
Your stalemates and political threats have lost sight of what matters — providing equitable, high-quality public education to all of Vermont’s children regardless of race, class, disability, family circumstances, language of origin, gender and more.
Take a break from Montpelier. Come to Winooski. Meet with the educators and families your decisions impact before casting a vote on major reform.
If Gov. Scott is not willing to pause, then I urge him and the secretary of education to engage constructively with lawmakers and Vermont’s local districts in this process.
We’re getting enough top-down threats and upsetting sweeping changes from D.C. This style of slashing public funding and dismantling institutions is not, I believe, the approach Vermonters were looking for when asking for property tax relief.
