By the Lake Champlain Chamber
The most difficult matter at hand in this legislative session is the financial cliff over which our education fund is heading. If nothing is done, all property taxpayers will see substantial property tax bills, with non-homestead ratepayers (businesses and renters) seeing the majority of the increase.
The Background
It’s helpful to have a quick history refresher on why Vermont’s education spending is the way it is.
In 1997, in Brigham v. State, the Vermont Supreme Court concluded the state’s education funding system, which relied heavily on local property taxes, violated the common benefits clause of the Vermont Constitution by creating significant disparities in educational resources and opportunities between school districts.
The Legislature responded with the implementation of Act 60 in 1997 and Act 68 in 2003, which introduced a statewide education property tax and a funding formula aimed at reducing disparities in education spending between school districts.
The Legislature revisited the system with Act 127 in 2022 to create per-pupil weighting, a mechanism that adjusts for variations in the cost of educating students involving assigning different student weights based on their needs or circumstances, which then influences a school district’s tax rates.
Some communities would see a dramatic shift in the effective number of students enrolled with the new weighting factors and thus would see a dramatic change in tax rates.
To counter this, legislators created a temporary cap on tax rates of 5% so long as a district’s spending did not increase by more than 10%. This is where the unintended consequences start.
Where We Are Today:
As if Vermont’s education funding system wasn’t complicated enough, Act 127 has given everyone a perverse incentive to spend with abandon.
Districts read Act 127 and saw an opportunity to follow a perverse incentive and make new investments, so long as they stay in the sweet spot of that cap outlined above.
In what can be described as a tragedy of the commons, if everyone makes use of this loophole, it means that all collective spending increases, and with a statewide system, everyone needs to make up the difference, driving the statewide rate up.
On Friday, the Agency of Education will have the combined cost of all the warned budgets, which are estimated to be as high as $275 million.
What can most easily be described as a circuit breaker in the property tax system means that, at a certain point, non-homestead property taxpayers pick up the bulk of the increase in taxes.
Business groups sent a memo to the chairs of the committees of jurisdiction this week pushing back on their members being the potential solution to this mess and urging legislators to take the initial step of clarifying legislative intent in the Budget Adjustment Act.
Other Factors Contributing to the Cost of Education:
There are also many factors that increase cost of education in the state.
Many districts used one-time, pandemic-era ESSR funds for positions in schools that they are now seeking to retain.
As an employer, you are well aware that healthcare costs are climbing for everyone, including the large education workforce.
As we’ve covered numerous times, capital construction is slated to be about a $6 billion (that’s a b) commitment over the next decade to renovate many schools.
Flood relief is a component of this as well, as S.160 reimburses municipalities for certain state education property tax payments if the municipality grants state education property tax abatements to property owners for damage caused by severe storms and flooding in 2023. This comes at an estimated cost of $1 million.
It’s worth noting that all of this is at a time when our state’s student population is shrinking, and we have only about 5,000 first graders.
More broadly, the tragedy of the commons we are experiencing due to the unintended consequences of Act 127 is emblematic of the legacy of the Brigham decision in that local voters’ decisions are not directly felt, be those decisions to spend more, not grow their grand list, or forgo efficiencies.
Republished from January 26 Week 4 Advocacy Update of the Lake Champlain Chamber.
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Categories: News Analysis
Education has become this bloated, insatiable, pulsing and pumping blob in which the more it consumes, the more it needs to consume. The administrative industrial complex is more concerned about its own appetite than any “educational” reaponsibility: kids are just a smokescreen for the trough. The covid funds are especially perverse, in that they knew it was a one-time windfall, yet now bleat that the new positions (almost all adminsterial) are suddenly “essential.”
The fact that your kid can’t read at grade level is mere collateral damage.
God help us if we keep these leeches in power!!
Why is education funding headed for a cliff? For one reason. And, as usual, that reason, not mentioned in this missive, is that there are no alternatives to the public-school monopoly, except for the few who can afford an alternative, or who happen to live in the right zip code, at least for the time being. H.634, proposed by Laura Sibilia and Rebecca Holcombe, socialists extraordinaire, is intended to eliminate even this vestige of an educational free market.
But it is just that, an educational free market, that will save us from being the lemmings rushing to meet our doom. As it is, the public-school monopoly, and complicit independent schools, have become a classic racket, circumventing every anti-trust law prohibiting anti-competitive agreements and unilateral conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize its relevant market. And dwelling on the details put forth here by the Lake Champlain Chamber is but a diversion.
We can avoid this cliff in one fell swoop of rational behavior. It’s called H.405.
Subject: Education; school choice; elementary education; secondary education.
“Statement of purpose of bill as introduced: This bill proposes to allow all Vermont students to attend the school of the student’s choice, paid for by a School Choice Grant issued by the Agency of Education. The School Choice Grant would be paid from the Education Fund payment otherwise due to the student’s school district of residence. This bill also proposes to require the Joint Fiscal Office to issue a report with recommendations for the integration of the school choice program into Vermont’s current education funding structure.”
This bill specifically references 16 V.S.A. §822 – and under current governance, will provide a Grant (i.e., a tuition voucher) equaling the Agency of Education’s Average Announced Tuition for parents to choose the education program they believe best meets the needs of their children. Nearly 90 Vermont school districts already have this alternative. And the cost per student in these programs is just a bit more than half the cost per student to which taxpayers are about to be subjected in the current monopolized public-school behemoth. It’s little wonder that socialists like Sibilia and Holcombe are so intent on destroying this option with H.634.
But its more than cost. Drug overdoses have quadrupled in the last ten years. Suicides for kids aged 15 to 24 doubled last year alone. Only 46% of Vermont’s graduating seniors meet minimum grade level standards in reading, writing, math, and science. And, as reported here on VDC over and again, parental control over their children’s well-being is disappearing. The public-school monopoly is destroying the traditional family unit. And now we’re about to spend more than $30 thousand per student for the ‘privilege’ of educational equity.
Is it any wonder our young people are bailing out of Vermont as fast as they can?
School Choice, folks. Most of you know I’ve been harping on School Choice for as long as you can remember. At this point, what do you have to lose in asking your legislators to enact H.405.
I’ll tell you what you have to lose… your children.
I am someone who graduated from public school last year. I am glad to be gone because it would just suck. I would dread it like I did.
It is clear money is not the issue. Quality of what is being taught is along with an unsafe environment. The school I graduated from had drug dealing on camera. The customer gets expelled yet the dealer gets a slap on the wrist.
You have a good point. Throwing more money isn’t doing good. It’s just corruption in public schools.
Typically, money never solves the real issue. Not sure why that is such a hard concept to grasp. But obviously, no one does….
And most often, it makes it worse.
When did education and the funding steer toward the cliff? Decades ago? Is it a cliff or brick wall by design? Is it just part and parcel of the corporation ponzi scheme implemented many years go? The dumber and more ignorant the populace, the easier to control and manipulate? More gadgets, more convenience, more bread and circuses, more false idols, more communication in 40 characters or less? The cliff spoken of is society, aka lemmings, dumbed down and hurtling headlong into self-destruction – all by design. Drop a match and start over. The questions being: who is holding said match, when will it be dropped, and is it for good or evil? Stay tuned…
I don’t mind investing larger sums if money into schools. We need better facilities snd top notch teachers.
HOWEVER, there MUST be results! If a sports team is losing, they replace the coaches and managers. And there is enough funding to attract top talent. We need that attitude with schools.
If you actually want what’s best for the children, the only way to get good results is for there to be incentive to providing what has value. In education, if you want it to be “community funded”, the best results would come if you let the parents spend that money on what they believe best for their children, rather than have a bunch of unqualified centralized decision makers spend that money on waste and wealth destruction. At the very least the spending should be for each line item of what is needed, rather than having a “budget”. Obviously they will always spend all of the budget, and you are going to get extreme waste. I have witnessed it first hand, and I don’t want to get into it because it’s disgusting and makes me angry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Riw6Gqus3k
Also, traditional education is defunct in the age of the internet. You can get an MIT level education for free!
As my 91 year old dad says ” school budgets always pass” ( with a few exceptions).
Why would the legislators do anything different.
We are in an abusive relationship with our government.
Vermont school is trash, only ever qualified by statistics and meaningless data. The sooner the system crashes the better. Our society, despite what all the boomers tell us (both left and right wing), does not need more scientists, mathematicians or engineers. We are suffering under the bloated weight of unreasonable expectations, squandering resources (that could be going to future generations), on a failing status-quo. “Education” is a misnomer – the vast majority of children filtered through the public school system leave hating the concept. The failure is apparent, to all but the players involved. Let it go. Give up the ghost. You fought long and hard and it was all pointless. No one wants to grow up to be like YOU. The future hates your imprudence and lack of wisdom, it hates your institutions and it hates your petty aspirations. The future will care about clean air, water and food. It will not care about graduation rates or tax caps. If you are a policy maker or any way involved in the system; zoom out, think bigger, consider the future weight of your decisions and not just your own career. You are making a future no one wants.
It is time to consider having one School District for the State. Think about it.
… and then there’s the relationship between non-homestead/commercial property tax rates and the cost of rent that only makes the housing shortage worse. There are several ironies here: among them that the state continues to shoot itself in the foot with contradictory policy/legislation AND that communities with a high proportion of renters will vote for anything because the school boards convince them that “somebody else” ( aka the villain landlords) will pay for it. And on it goes because the legislature doesn’t want you to understand how the education funding formula works.
Government is the only system that continuously rewards failure with more money. The more a system fails, the more money it gets. Why would anyone want to succeed in such an environment?
It’s like when I was a kid and I noticed the kids that caused trouble would get a special prize from the teachers desk when they behaved. So naturally to get the prize, I had to misbehave enough to become a prize winner. If I behaved too much I would no longer be a contestant. So I keep the cycle going and be sure to collect my prize.