by Guy Page
Voters in the Northeast Kingdom East supervisory union and St. Johnsbury schools yesterday joined the growing number of school systems to have rejected a school budget twice this year.
Georgia and South Burlington also have rejected proposed school budgets – first at Town Meeting on March 5, and then more recently on revotes with reduced budgets. Both votes were rejected narrowly. Hartford voters narrowly approved the budget they rejected on Town Meeting Day.
NEK East includes Lyndon, Lyndonville, Burke, Wheelock, and surrounding towns.
30 school systems voted no on March 5, in response to a likely 20% increase in property taxes resulting from a ‘perfect storm’ of increased payroll and insurance costs, loss of pandemic-era school funding, an equity-based state aid to education formula that rewarded big spending by ‘socializing’ local costs among all school districts.
“The good news is they have something on the table acknowledging we have a severe structural problem with our education system,” Gov. Phil Scott said at a press conference today. “The concerning thing is it doesn’t do anything about property taxes this year…..Vermonters need relief now, today.”
VDC hopes to publish a more complete update of revotes in upcoming issues. Meanwhile, legislative leadership in the State House is considering a plan that would provide a ‘foundation’ of basic educational costs to all school districts, and leave extra spending the discretion and financial responsibility of local school districts and supervisory unions.
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Categories: Education
chittenden county – please vote “no” on your school budgets on April 16!
Keep it up, even Vermonters can see the light.
It’s about time ! Let the games (tax revolt) bedin !!!!
beGin
Long time coming. The government schools are a bad investment. Why would they expect the investors to continue investing in an over-priced, failed product. We have had enough.
This might change when (if) – the still under the indoctrination spell, 16 and 17 year olds get to vote.
My kid’s 8th grade class is full of resilient, strong patriots that know exactly what is happening and aren’t buying it. They push back daily. They give me great hope.
“With weeks to go, could lawmakers radically reimagine Vermont’s education finance system? The [Vermont House] tax committee is looking at potentially wresting considerable power away from local voters… The current version of the bill would impose what’s known as a cloud tax… ‘We put a bunch of big ideas out into the world,’ Kornheiser said Wednesday morning, telling her colleagues that the committee would continue ‘puzzling through’ the bill. ‘It’s fairly intense,’ she said.”
– VT Digger: 4-10-24
Good Lord, please, please, stop this nonsense. The level of hubris demonstrated by our legislator’s contrivances can’t be exaggerated… as though they can possibly come up with better solutions than does a ‘free market’.
They’ve been failing now for decades. And still, they persist. Vermont’s children are less and less well educated, their physical and mental well-being is deteriorating at an alarming rate … and the legislature is financially bankrupting us in the process. Just stop.
This ‘tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies…” – C.S. Lewis
“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” – T.S. Eliot
Vermonters: Just say no!
When Act 127 was passed last year to “reform” education spending the creators put verbiage in the bill exempting school districts from existing laws and or penalties for submitting an inflated annual budget for funding. As a result A LOT of schools submitted budgets at COVID level spending. Simple as that, and our Progressive lawmakers are to blame as they knew exactly what they were doing!