By Michael Bielawski
Vermont’s Education Secretary Zoie Saunders told VDC on Friday that having larger districts – the governor is proposing five large districts down from the current 119 – would enable more equal distribution of resources.
“In these decisions, the Brigham Decision [declaring that education spending must be equally available to all communities] comes front and center in making sure that there is parity in property tax wealth meaning that communities have an equal opportunity to raise additional dollars,” Saunders said to VDC’s editor Guy Page in a 27-minute interview on Friday.
The governor’s proposal would be a major overhaul. She said, “The proposal moves us from 119 school districts to five school districts and that’s largely intended to achieve scale so that we can really bring in additional resources and support for our schools.”
She said that compliance with federal standards is one example of a regular administrative task that could benefit from a larger scale of operation.
Foundation funding
She got into how having a foundation-funding formula will help ensure equal distribution of resources.
“The rationale for that is to ensure that students that have similar needs receive similar resources regardless of where they live or the wealth of their community,” she said. “Right now we can’t say that is happening in practice right now we see great variability in terms of spending across communities.”
Foundation funding means each school gets a state-approved block grant and then if an individual community votes to spend more, the cost would still be socialized but there could be more limits on what projects the state will approve, potentially a spending cap.
“We do need to be thoughtful around establishing caps around that and what the state would be able to support and up to what limit,” she said.
She continued that this new system would allow them to pay more competitive salaries as well as offer new education opportunities.
Saunders has discussed in recent weeks how Vermont’s use of a shared state-wide education fund has resulted in an unintended consequence of wealthier communities feeling confident to spend more and poor communities spending less.
School closures?
Page asked if school closers were in play and she said that not initially but the state will eventually come up with some standards so that small schools serve a practical purpose.
“So in our modeling, we have assumed that we will be retaining largely our current school portfolio but making some adjustments in terms of how those are staffed and operated,” she said. “And then in time, we will be developing criteria for schools that are small by choice versus small by necessity so we have to be practical as we do this work.”
She noted there are examples of small schools that need to be that way for geographical reasons or other reasons concerning the needs of that community.
Federal dollars/religious schools
Another conversation they had was about school choice and how religious schools might fit into the equation. Saunders said when it comes to education and religion, they follow federal law.
“So there’s federal law governing how dollars are shared,” she said. “If you share public dollars for education with private schools which we refer to as independent schools within our context, so that would definitely be part of that conversation. I would say around choice there’s a lot of different discussions happening just around how does that best serve students, what type of programming do we want available.”
The author is a writer for the Vermont Daily Chronicle