By Guy Page
The Education Finance subcommittee of Vermont’s Commission on the Future of Public Education met Monday, October 1 to review where school revenue comes from and brainstorm on how to cut spending.
Editor Shawn Cunningham of The Chester Telegraph – one of Vermont’s strong online community newspapers – has been regularly reporting on the work of the commission, which was created in the final days of the 2024 legislature to find a path out of Vermont’s school spending morass.
In today’s post, Cunningham shares a State of Vermont pie chart of the FY2024 $2.1 billion school revenue sources:
- Non-homestead property tax $792 million
- Sales & use tax $595 million
- Homestead property tax $508 million
- Miscellaneous others
As noted in the October 2 VDC, both enrollment and test scores are down this year compared to last year. Vermont has the highest staff-to-student ratio (4.4: 1) in the country. Gov. Phil Scott has said property owners will likely be looking at another double-digit property tax increase next year, over and above this year’s average 14% homestead property tax hike.
The Telegraph story listed the ‘brainstorming’ ideas for controlling school spending solicited by the chair from (anonymous) commission members, published below verbatim:
- Control employee health-care costs, including returning bargaining to local districts
- Look at ways to control tuition costs – especially out-of-state tuition
- Find optimal sizes of schools and classes and close small schools
- Make adjustments at AOE to cut administrative costs at the district level
- Base education financing on the income tax and tax high earners more
- Find ways to reduce special education costs including more support for younger students to avoid the need later
- Look at the needs for construction and upkeep of facilities
- Make the education fund for education only by moving services schools are obliged to provide to other agencies.
None of these recommendations specifically raise the lowest-in-the-nation staff/student radio, although ‘find optimal sizes of school and classes’ at least suggests the possibility of larger class sizes.