Letter to the Editor,
Say no to the proposed education budget unless it’s less than a four percent tax increase. The gross dollar number is meaningless, seven percent is unconscionable.
Elimination of $2 million dollars is not going to reduce the ever-increasing tax burden. And what about next year? Don’t they get it? Every time we increase our budget, we put more money into the state’s wasteful, unregulated boondoggle fund.
Our school tax problem as well as the town taxes and public safety problems for most of the towns in Vermont cannot be solved under the current system of government and town boundaries. The problem, which many of us learned about, is the lack of economy of scale.
In our case we have too many schools trying to do the same thing. We almost made the correct decision when we consolidated our schools. All we did was consolidate the school boards and kept the status quo. That cannot work.
The thought process should have started with we are already driving kids to school either in buses or our cars. The Valley has four buildings, three within five miles of each other, two buildings within nine miles, and one twelve miles from another building. Each of the four buildings have energy and maintenance costs, not to mention replicated services in each.
What if, all the town lines were erased, and we faced the same issues? How about we force our legislators to change the whole school funding system.
Some ideas:
Exclude any town or city with a population of 10,000 or more from Act 60/68. It wasn’t intended to
help them; in fact, the legal case was for the rest of us to come up to their level of education – not fund theirs.
Consolidate towns with populations of less than 5,000.
Develop actual standards for what equal education is - not dollar signs – we know that’s failing.
Only fund basic education, including special education
The Department of Education audits each districts budget to ensure the money is being used to support basic education.
Gene Bifano,
Warren
