Stop giving it more money!

by Rob Roper

As Vermonters gear up for Town Meeting Day and prepare to vote on the local school budgets that will determine our statewide property tax bill, please consider that the post Act 60 public school system we have created is destroying our state. It has become a money-sucking vortex of incompetence eating away at other key governmental priorities, sapping household budgets, and failing by greater and greater degrees to give the majority our children a decent education.

Please…. Don’t give these greedy, ineffectual, boobs ANY MORE MONEY. We can’t afford it, the state can’t afford it, and they don’t deserve it! Even Governor Scott at his February 25^th press conference declared even he is voting “NO!” on his local school budget because the property taxes are too damn high.

My friend John McClaughry accurately coined the nickname “The Blob” for the Vermont public school bureaucracy comprised of the VTNEA (teachers’ union), the Superintendents Association, the Principals’ Association, and the School Boards’ Association because it grows bigger and bigger by destroying and consuming everything in its path. At present, public education devours all of the 6 percent state sales tax revenue, one third of the vehicle sales and use tax, a quarter of the 9 percent rooms and meals tax, all of the state lottery money, the new 3 percent surcharge on short term rentals, the new “cloud tax” on internet based services, some Medicaid funds, for the past few years most or all of any General Fund surplus we might find, the new $100 million a year payroll tax to pay for pre-k, and, or course all of the statewide property tax.

All told the 2026-2027 school year looks like it will cost Vermonters between $2.5 and $2.6 BILLION dollars. $30,000 per child. This means The Blob will be spending nearly 60 percent more than it did in 2018 – to serve fewer students. Poorly.

Since Act 60 passed in 1997, and spending has exploded, the Vermont k-12 public school population has declined by around 30 percent from 105,000 students to around 75,000. When the kids show up. Truancy rates are now at an alarming rate with 25 percent of students considered “chronically absent.” This is pathetic.

As I have repeatedly mentioned in these pages, the student outcomes Vermont’s public school system has been producing over the last fifteen years have dropped faster than any other state in the union. Where we were once a top ten, and even a top five performer on national tests, now we are 39^th, and nearly dead last when adjusting for demographics. Formerly-thank-God-for-Mississippi kids are now outperforming ours in both math and literacy, and they spend less than half the amount per pupil we do. Mississippi!

So, yes, there is plenty of evidence that schools can do better with less money – and less staff. Vermont has by far the highest staff to student ratio in the country at less than 4 to 1, and the highest teacher to student ratio of less than 10 to 1. The Blob is bloated. Cut it back.

And this broken, bloated system is bringing down other aspects of state and local government. The excessive taxing and spending on schools is driving up property taxes beyond what Vermonters can afford, robbing other state agencies of revenue, and putting pressure on municipal budgets. This is at the heart of our state’s economic death spiral.

Our roads are in bad shape? The Blob is consuming over $50 million worth of the vehicle purchase and use tax that should be going to the Transportation fund. In 2019 Vermont transferred all of the sales tax revenue (up from a third) to the Education Fund in order to lower property taxes instead of lowering the sales tax to help struggling retail businesses. It didn’t work did it! The blob consumed the sales tax AND got their higher property revenue to boot. So now the General Fund has $600 to $650 million LESS per year to spend on name your crisis – substance abuse, homelessness, hunger, healthcare, or my favorite, providing working people with some relief from our third highest in the nation tax burden.

The quarter of the rooms and meals tax going to the Education Fund makes it more expensive to go out to eat, more difficult to run a restaurant, and makes us less competitive in attracting tourists.

Our demographic crisis? If Vermonters can’t afford the property taxes on our homes, we can’t afford to live here. The result: Vermont is one of only three states to see a population decline last year. And when the school are graduating students without the academic skills to compete successfully in the work force it impacts the size and quality of our labor force, also in crisis.

So, in conclusion, if you want to see property tax relief in the future (and better roads, etcetera), join Governor Scott in voting down your school budget. The system already has more money than it needs and more staff than it needs to do a superior job of educating 75,000 students – if competently managed. That’s the issue. Giving The Blob more money will not make it more competent. Decades of shoveling more and more money into their coffers proves the point. It’s time for voters to hold The Blob accountable.

Rob Roper is a freelance writer with 25 years of experience in Vermont politics including three years service as chair of the Vermont Republican Party and nine years as President of the Ethan Allen Institute, Vermont’s free market think tank.