I appreciate The Valley Reporter’s efforts to make readers aware of the problems we face with school funding choices and budgets. I think it is time to be frank and upfront with voters. Not all school districts which are reconsidering their school budgets will be treated equally. Our district is powerless to have a meaningful impact on property tax rates unless the board chooses to make extremely harmful budget cuts.
Without a change to the funding formula this exercise in rethinking the school budget is futile. Taxpayers need to understand why this is. This is a starting point for the discussion that is needed in the Legislature to get that body to agree to stop trying to fix the harms of Act 60 and its many progeny (Act 127 being the most recent) and start from the beginning with a new, clear vision of what they hope to accomplish.
SCHOOLS DIFFERENT IN 1997
I start with the year 1997, the year Act 60 was enacted. The schools were very different in 1997 from the schools of today and their needs were different. Act 60 may have been a reasonable solution to the problem in 1997. In 1997, with the Brigham decision, the Vermont Supreme Court decided that the Vermont Constitution required that every student (every school) be provided substantially equitable educational opportunity. Today there are no significant funding disparities in providing a basic, quality education.
In 2024 schools are being asked to do much more than provide a basic quality education. Today a school district is expected to provide special education services, preschool day care, after school programs, health services, nutritious meals, social guidance, mental health counseling, drug awareness programing, English language instruction for recent immigrant families and more.
Today a basic education appears to be secondary to everything else that the schools are called on to provide. The 1997 Brigham ruling made a decision about school funding that has no bearing on the needs of schools today. The huge sums of money that are being spent in the school districts across the state are to provide services and programs to students that were never contemplated in 1997. In addition, in 1997, our Supreme Court could not have realized how dramatically costs would increase for teacher salary and retention, teacher's health insurance, the growth of the state education bureaucracy and the costs of maintaining schools which are not close to being full.
NOT PROBLEMS OF EDUCATION
These problems are not problems of education. If society wishes to bear all of these costs, we must find ways to fund them equitably. Property tax is a very inefficient source of funding. School funding does not track inflation and the cost of education does not track inflation but the source of funding either tracks inflation or falls short of tracking inflation. If costs increase by a rate greater than inflation, then property tax has to increase at an artificially inflated rate in order to maintain level funding.
And this does not account for the expansion of the education systems remit -- a British word that is very appropriate in this context. Remit -- the task or area of activity officially assigned to an individual or organization. The school’s remit has expanded dramatically in the last 10 years and in ways never contemplated in 1997. The Brigham decision on school funding was a useful decision to fund schools in 1997 whose remit was simple -- provide a basic, quality education on an equal basis to every child in Vermont. Applying this decision to the school system as it exists in 2024 will not work. It defies the laws of economics, taxation, and fairness.
BIG PROBLEM
The real problem, the big problem facing the voters and taxpayers today is the governing philosophy of the dominant party in Vermont -- the combined liberal Democrat/Progressive party with its inherent bias towards increased taxes and new spending – which has pushed aside reason and common sense. There does not appear to be any limiting principles to the reach of the government. New programs are not subject to any cost/benefit analysis. This is true in Montpelier and true in Washington. The party of tax and spend is looking for additional programs to fund, like paid leave, expanded child care, elder care and employing more recent college graduates who identify as social activists. Or environmentalists. No one in the dominant governing party ever asks the question: How do we pay for this? Can we actually afford to meet every need of every person residing in the state?
I think the readers of this newspaper can understand that the property tax system was not designed to support all the nonessential to basic education funding and that the weight of this burden could break the economy.
The dominant political class in Vermont wants to continue to spend money and is not interested in cutting spending and ending wasteful programs. As the editor of this paper wrote two weeks ago, the system created by the Legislature to fund education in Vermont has devolved into a game of voodoo mathematics, grotesquely convoluted and impenetrable by the voting citizens. The voodoo serves a purpose. The public is spellbound by this game of smoke and mirrors and may withdraw in despair with a not inconsiderable number leaving the state. The politicians win by default and nothing changes.
Vermont voters must fight back. Vermont Strong. God Bless America and God Bless Vermont.
Lobel lives in Warren.
