No firm data yet on new likely school tax increase, centrist group calls for voting down school budgets
By Guy Page
Last week, the Legislature passed and Phil Scott signed H.850, which supporters say brings Vermont back from the 20.5% statewide property tax cliff.
It does so – or at least supporters hope it does so – by removing a 5% tax cap granted to school districts in the most recent education reform bill. Many school districts loaded up with spending believing it was essentially ‘free money’ because other districts would be required to pay for it.
But the overspending was so widespread that the proposed statewide property tax for next year exploded to over 20%. Lawmakers hurriedly backtracked, removing the cliff and giving school districts more time to revise budgets and warn them for approval later this spring.
The situation was so dire that, the Campaign for Vermont reports, a Democratic state senator looking at a $3,000 property tax increase herself said the pre-H.850 property tax would “put people out of their homes.”
Ann Cummings (D-Washington), Chair of Senate Finance, told education union officials last week that she “wondered how “middle class people, who are the heart and sole of our communities, can afford to live here,” the Campaign for Vermont reports.
The unintended outcome of the school funding formula isn’t the only cause of this year’s unprecedented high school spending. $30 million for universal school meals, loss of one-time federal Covid-era funds, inflation, and increased health care and salary budgets all contribute.
What’s not clear, yet, is how much the statewide property tax will fall as a result of H.850 passing. VDC has reached out to key lawmakers but as yet has not received an answer.
Campaign for Vermont, a centrist public policy organization aimed at promoting affordable and high quality of life, is openly urging Vermonters to turn down their school budgets unless spending comes down. It published the following last week:
It is no secret that Vermont has a working/middle class affordability crisis.This year’s education spending increase of over $200M is adding insult to injury. But this problem is not actually new, while spending may have accelerated during Covid, Vermont schools have increased education spending by $900,000,000 over the past decade.
We have also dropped to the lowest student/teacher ratio in the country (by a mile).
Our system is over-resourced as a whole, but it is also likely that those resources are not deployed to the correct places. Act 127, in some ways, was meant to address this even though the mechanism itself is quite painful. We also have too many administrators, which consolidating Supervisory Unions could help to address (see our 2014 report).
While changing our complicated education finance system is the purview of the Legislature, the good news is that there IS something you can do. As CFV Co-Founder and state finance guru Tom Pelham stated this week in his opinion editorial, simply vote no on your school budget.
There is little justification for the current levels of spending in Vermont schools, it has not resulted in better outcomes for students. Vermonter’s have historically been supportive of their local schools (justifiably so), but this year’s drastic increase in spending is unprecedented and should give us cause to re-evaluate if this system is actually working. Surprisingly, in our polling from this past fall we found that 57% of Vermonters had a negative opinion of the quality of education being provided in our schools. That number increased to 71% for households with children… maybe that should tell the rest of us something.
This Town Meeting Day, don’t be afraid to ask your school board and school administrators tough questions. Make them justify spending increases and tell them to go back and re-evaluate their budgets if need be. Voting down a school budget may be exactly what districts need to make tough decisions that should have been made years ago. If a school budget is voted down, most districts will get one or two more chances to vote on a new budget before the default 87% budget goes into effect on July 1st (if no budget is passed, districts revert to 87% of the prior year’s budget).