Editor’s note: This commentary is by Katherine Sims, of Craftsbury. She is director of the Northeast Kingdom Collaborative and a Democratic candidate for the Vermont House, however, this commentary represents her own views as a parent.Â
Thanks to the recently released Pupil Weighting Factors Report, we now know that Vermont’s smaller towns have been overtaxed and their schools underfunded for more than 20 years. As a parent, I am shocked and saddened.
The study of current school funding legislation issued by the Vermont secretary of education found that Vermont’s education funding formula has led to inequities for some of the state’s vulnerable children. The weighting calculations in question are part of the state’s education funding system, commonly referred to as Act 60. The legislation went into effect in 1997 after the state Supreme Court ruled that Vermont’s education funding system denied students equal access to educational opportunities.
Over the years, I’ve seen our school boards work hard to do the very best they could with inequitable access to resources. We all know that different schools and different communities have different needs. We can’t spend the same amount per pupil everywhere and expect the same outcomes.
Clearly legislators understood this when they created Act 60 and built weights into the student funding formula. Now we learn that those weights have, according to the report, “weak ties, if any, with evidence describing differences in the costs for educating students …” We owe it to our children to ensure that our funding formulas are not just hollow gestures at reducing inequality, that they reflect the reality of what our teachers and administrators face on the ground.
In the Northeast Kingdom, schools are faced with the increased costs associated with serving high-poverty, rural communities. That means increased social emotional, mental health, behavioral, and academic support needs — all a part of larger systemic inequities in our society, along with the additional expenses associated with operating a geographically isolated school.
Tending to these basic needs for students has stretched budgets to an extreme and left little for other important priorities like caring for our buildings or providing programming opportunities. Staff across the region deal every day with septic problems, failing boilers, ventilation concerns, mold, and old roofs compromised by heavy snow loads. Children are turned away from pre-k programs because of a lack of space. Students don’t have access to as many language courses, advanced placement, or foreign travel opportunities as some larger districts.
As parents, we are tired of seeing vital school programs cut, enrollments decline, and property taxes go up. I want my children, and all Vermont children, to have an equal opportunity to thrive. No matter where they live.
These are the long-standing problems that the Brigham decision called out and that Act 60 was meant to address. But it did not. This report makes clear that what we actually achieved was more uniformity in taxation for education. But we have not come close to giving districts access to the resources necessary to create equal educational opportunities. Not by a long shot.
The state has a legal and moral obligation to adjust how it calculates the cost of educating students and there is still time for the Legislature to take action this session.
My children and my neighbors’ children deserve to go to a school with a functioning boiler, where they get to eat lunch in a cafeteria instead of at their desk, where music is held in a classroom not a closet, and where the roof doesn’t leak. They deserve art classes, STEM programs, and foreign travel. They deserve the resources they need to be successful. They deserve those resources today.
For too long, our most vulnerable students — those who need the most support — have been shortchanged. We must respond with a sense of urgency to restore equitable resources for all.
We can’t keep failing our kids. To overcome over 20 years of inequity in school resources impacting our most vulnerable students, I urge the General Assembly to take action this session to implement the weighting recommendations contained in the Pupil Weighting Factors Report.