But such increases may happen anyway. Beware and be forewarned. This is
not a problem caused by school boards and administrators. It is not the
fault of the schools, the teachers, the students or the Vermont-NEA.
The problem lies solely in the laps of Vermont's legislators who have
for far too long put off any meaningful reform of how education funding
is structured in Vermont.
Act 60 was designed to create substantially equal education
opportunities for all students in Vermont -- a laudable goal. Where it
failed was in the execution. First it created gold towns and non-gold
towns, where "gold towns" (those with some hard-to-understand
percentage of grand list wealth per pupil compared to the rest of the
state) were penalized for spending above a very unrealistic state per
pupil average.
Money from gold towns went into a shark pool for redistribution to non-gold towns.
Then came Act 68, which attempted to modify the gold town disadvantage
by linking each town's statewide education tax rate to per pupil
spending and each town's CLA. The CLA is the common level of appraisal,
an indicator of how recently a town has reappraised its property and
what percentage of fair market value each town is at. But the CLA is a
rolling three-year average which, in times like these when property
values have fallen, leaves some towns with a lower CLA (former real
value [2006 or 2007] compared to 2009 actual prices) and, hence, a
higher state education tax rate.
This complicated system is something school boards and educators have
to work with. Throughout The Valley they have worked very hard to draft
budgets that are sensitive to today's economic climate and don't
compromise educational opportunities.
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