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$15K per-pupil spending part of bill going to full Legislature Monday
By Guy Page
The House and Senate conference committee agreed Friday on a bill to restructure Vermont’s public school education and governance.
This draft will now go before the Legislature Monday, June 16. At his press conference Friday afternoon at 3 PM – delayed from noon while lawmakers finalized the deal – Gov. Phil Scott also low-key backed the latest draft, saying it probably won’t satisfy all lawmakers of all parties, but also saying it should result in savings of school spending.
The final draft, posted at 2:07 PM Friday on the Legislative website, includes these key agreements:
New, larger school district boundaries will be set July 1, 2026, take effect July 1 2028. Transition details include:
- A School District Redistricting Task Force is established to propose up to three options for these new boundaries by December 1, 2025. These proposed districts are expected to have an average daily membership of approximately 4,000 to 8,000 preK-12 students.
- A School District Voting Ward Working Group will create voting wards within the new school districts to ensure substantially equal weighting of votes for school board members.
- The first school board member elections within these newly created districts are scheduled for a special election in November 2027. The General Assembly intends for the new, larger school districts to assume responsibility for the education of all resident students on July 1, 2028.
Independent schools will be eligible for public school tuition, subject to a lengthy list of eligibility guidelines.
New average class size minimums will be 10 students for first grade, 12 for grades 2-5, 15 for grades 6-8 in required content areas, and 18 for grades 9-12 in required content areas.
Education spending: the “base amount” for the per-pupil foundation formula is set at $15,033, to be adjusted for inflation annually. That figure matches the higher House proposal over lower figures proposed by the Senate and Gov. Scott. It is not clear whether the new proposed per-pupil spending will keep property taxes flat, or even at a reduced rate, when it takes effect.
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Categories: Legislation
And the legislature STILL thinks it doesn’t spend enough per pupil when it exceeds that of college students. Go figure.
Re: “Independent schools will be eligible for public school tuition, subject to a lengthy list of eligibility guidelines.”
Okay. So what? The public-school monopoly still thrives. Parents will still be prohibited from choosing an independent school, if the district in which they live maintains a public school.
If Vermont citizens and voters can’t recognize the fabricated nonsense in this legislation, its failure to solve any of the three primary problems it’s intended to solve (high costs/taxes, the continued decline in student outcomes, and the forfeiture of family control), they deserve everything they get. Especially when a proven solution, Tuitioned School Choice, is staring them in the face.
Apparently it’s true – while you can lead the horse to water, you can’t make it drink.
I am curious as to what the “lengthy list of eligibility guidelines” will be for independent schools to be eligible? Several of those proposed “guidelines” that were publicly kicked around were unacceptable to StJ Academy and Lyndon Institute. One of them was restrictive licensure requirements.
Here are recent Vermont updates to Independent School Rules.
https://legislature.vermont.gov/Documents/2024/WorkGroups/House%20Education/School%20Governance/Rulemaking/W~Jennifer%20Samuelson~Updates%20to%20Rule%202200%20Series~1-18-2023.pdf
For the most part, it’s all ‘word salad’ stuff. And, like any governmental regulatory capture scheme, it’s intended to support the evermore expensive, one-size-fits-all, methodology that created what is arguably the most expensive per student education system in the world (that’s right – ‘in the world’) while holding our personal property hostage and creating a dysfunctional generation of citizens.
“In politics, regulatory capture is a form of corruption of authority that occurs when a political entity, policymaker, or regulator is co-opted to serve the commercial, ideological, or political interests of a minor constituency, such as a particular geographic area, industry, profession, or ideological group. When regulatory capture occurs, a special interest is prioritized over the general interests of the public, leading to a net loss for society.”
Welcome to Vermont.
That knife in the back, surely doesn’t feel good. This is how they run. Word salad equals a lie….and while we disagree, they are, in my opinion, most certainly scamming the Vermont populace with the aid and assistance of propagandists, who won’ t even let commentators on their sites.
You plan was over the target, hence the knife. If your plans and suggestions would not have worked, they would have incorporated them. Consider the highest form of compliment.
The solution of trying to fix a problem through arbitrarily applying more money.
So, with the buildings and associated staff, we will be paying more than $30k per kid in the Twin Valley system. This is not a decrease!
This is just the way this system works, whether by design or whether the unions see to it there are no savings, there will be no savings here, for reasons stated or unstated and/or hidden.
I am 84 years old and I have lived through more promises of savings if we do this or that, in all the years collectively there is no savings. There will not be here either, as Mr Eshelmann points out. Puttings masks over our heads and making us think there are savings in store is like driving down the road with a blindfold on.
Social Security people don’t get adequate “inflation raise” in their yearly “adjustments” presented by the Government. Sanders doesn’t want you to get interest on your money the Gov confiscates–free money for the Gov. And if paid into SS many years and die before age 62 for reimbursement, it’s confiscated by the Gov. In the meantime Sanders has become a multimillionaire off the taxpayer. Sure is a friend of Seniors.
Furthermore if enrolled in Medicare, they grab their “raise every time. After the SS “raise” and Medicare deduction for the year, I got $24 for each month and I’m a military vet. Seniors on SS each year is a looser. And it’s your money and in a locked box as Al Gorre stated. Ya, the Gov has the key and invests the money studying the sex life of the Tetesy Fly in Mongolia. Thanks you Congress elected state bureaucrats.
It sounds like the wards created for school board membership may cross over town lines in union school districts? How will that work??
The last sentence of this article is key: it is not clear this bill will reduce property taxes or 0% increase in property taxes. Consolidation will not take place until 2028, and they have yet another committee to determine student needs and weights. More bureaucracy = more spending. 155 page bill. This is unacceptable.
Marxist decoder ring
They are going to consolidate power.
They are going to raise taxes.
They are going to raise expenses.
They are voting for a plan that doesn’t go in place for years, because the results will be so bad an offensive, nobody would accept them today.
They had this all planned out before session.
They are an oligarch and could give a rats’ @$$ about your vote or money.
They will indoctrinate your children.
Same plan they have done over the last 30 years.
At issue will be is this bill outrageous enough to prompt consideration of getting out of the schooling business? Will they become more amenable to empowering parents to contract with teachers directly for the curriculum/services they want. Funding parents and their kids at a reduced per-pupil cost might look more attractive once folks see how this new “solution” shakes down.
A key place to look for what the curriculum goals is in the Portrait of a Graduate determined by most schools with some measure of local input. It varies from district to district what that encompasses. Some communities include a push for removal of traditional history lessons and Constitutional instruction to global governance. Truth is curriculum costs don’t generally cost much more one way or another – a major exception though has been all the new curriculum content – the DEI, SEL, Sex Education, and refocusing everyone on transgender and LGBTQ+ sensitivities. That has come with a time constraint that has made some academic progress slip away on top of the slippery downhill Covid provided.
According to the Vermont School Board Association H454 has issues due to
District Size Rules Aren’t Based on Research
The bill mandates new district sizes between 4,000 and 8,000 students, despite repeated requests for a research-based approach.
School Redistricting Group Has Too Many Legislators
Of the 11 members assigned to redraw district boundaries, only five are not lawmakers and just one may be a former school board member.
School Building Funds Are Gone
Earlier versions of the bill proposed using extra education funds to repair or build school facilities. The final version redirects that money toward lowering property taxes instead.
Intersting the Burlington High School student page had the No Kings propaganda front and center. Want to know what our students are being taught – review their student “union” pages, see the propaganda and brain warping being instructed. The kids are not all right and our tax dollars used to indoctrinate, not educate. As a nation and a State, our near future is the NWO – they have made sure of it by corrupting the youth to be indentured ideological serfs. Shameful and a disgrace.
Re: “Truth is curriculum costs don’t generally cost much more one way or another –
HHilltop, et al: A not-so-deep dive into the weeds indicates that some (i.e., most) curriculum costs are significantly higher than others. Public-school curriculum is 30% more expensive than a tuitioned independent school curriculum.
In an economic world where a one or two percent reduction of cost can make the difference between failure and success, 30% is the difference between day and night.
More importantly, no changes in education governance by the Governor and the Legislature are required to attain those savings, with the current exception that 90% of Vermont’s children don’t have State-funded access to independent schools, as do, for example, the 7th and 8th graders in my school district.
The Governor and the Legislature need only expand the choice to all parents, to send their kids to a public-school costing taxpayers $30,000+ per year, or to an independent school costing taxpayers $20,000 per year. It really is just that simple.
When I see those who deny this reality (the Governor, Legislators, and other special interest groups), I’m left with no other explanation than to assume that you understand this prospect, that your resistance to School Choice is intentional, and that the only explanation for that resistance is your authoritarian self-interest derived at the expense of the rest of us.
With all other explanations considered, try as you might, I, for one, know none of you can make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.
Can we please, please just gut the enormous layers of educrats that plague our Supervisory Unions?! I was a HS teacher and our SU had a Director of Equity (p.s. who has since sneakily changed her job title so as to avoid detection once DEI was abolished), Assistant Director of Equity, Director of Social Emotional Learning, Director of Curriculum (p.s. we had no set curriculum so no one knew what she did), Family Outreach Coordinator, and on and on and on. I can’t even name them all bc they all had long, vague titles and at the end of the day, we never saw them or even knew what they did. In the meantime back at the actual school (i.e. the real world), we didn’t have enough substitute teachers or janitors. If we were to reduce SU staff to an HR person and a payroll person, no teacher, parent or student would even know the difference and our state could free up some funds. These useless people have latched themselves on to this debacle like barnacles and it is such a tremendous waste of money. Why does no one in government see this and do something about it? Another issue I saw was that the school board members (who are basically the boss of the Superintendent) only got their information from the Superintendent and her cronies. They were fed all kinds of BS about how everything was hunky dory within our schools . And the Board blindly believed what they were told OR were bullied by the Superintendent if they dared ask any questions since, of course, she is “the expert” and what could they possibly know. Really revolting and ethically sleazy behavior.
Bingo! Supervisory Unions are an added layer of bureaucratic bs and no voter has a say how they are run or who runs them. Yet, they do have our tax dollars to push the “agenda” and teach kids nothing that will serve them in the real world. The proof is the employers who complain how inept, uninspired, and uneducted the youth are around here – the smart ones leave and never return. The underlying Truth across the country is school districts are running on fumes – too heavy on admistrators and activists paid handsome salaries and the results are dismal. The well of endless money has run dry – taxing real estate into infinity and beyond doesn’t work in a recession. Yet, the can will be kicked down the road, the lawmakers shrug, and the grifters continue to grift.
Supervisory Unions are but one of the illusions reflected on the wall of Plato’s Cave allegory. Yes, Supervisory Unions are superfluous. But so are the other various ‘unions’ flickering on the wall of our false educational reality. Break free of all of the established State sponsored ‘unions’ (there are many – teacher’s, principle’s, schoolboard’s, guidance counsellor’s, nurse’s, etc.). They are all one in the same in the realm of the public education monopoly – that great watering hole where predators stalk their prey, enticed by the false promise of enlightenment.
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1?ui=2&ik=64b3ff0f62&attid=0.1&permmsgid=msg-a:r6220848338150034714&th=1977429664d9c52d&view=fimg&fur=ip&permmsgid=msg-a:r6220848338150034714&sz=s0-l75-ft&attbid=ANGjdJ_543Ye30oJOqEYsi973MpcxM7W7iW9u2zfl0t0bF370oTkj4Y5HzuoZPciKhRSV5snPhbV3v0_L01zyqgSpVU-gEN3_wzwS8aypXNg86iwun0W2QDV6veeOm0&disp=emb&realattid=ii_mbxt4pc70&zw
There wasn’t a reply button to your earlier reply about curriculum costs. Having been 40 years in the classroom, I’ve seen curriculums built around online materials for free. However most larger school systems have staff in a curriculum study for a year reviewing contents of books and costs of supporting resources from various publishers during a specified time period. This is usually an unpaid expectation added to a teacher’s already busy schedule. However, not many school systems in Vermont would classify as a larger school system – still where textbooks are the primary educational source, somewhere a committee made the selection. Many more in Vermont do utilize online resources. Some of these are purchased, too. Others teachers have found and utilize on their own. Books last at least a 5 year cycle and some I’ve seen look like 20 year cycles. YES, there are curriculum expenses, but whether the Houghton-Mifflin, Simon and Schuster or Mac Million series those costs are often in the same ball park. YES, there are often ways of stretching a budget with less costly curriculum resources.
HHilltop, sometimes you have to reply to yourself to maintain a consistent thread…as I just did.
My point isn’t to itemize the individual costs in anyone’s choice of curriculum. I’m simply pointing out that under Vermont’s current School Choice tuitioning governance, public schools cost taxpayers in excess of $30K per student per year, while students choosing Independent schools cost taxpayers $20K per student per year.
And regardless of the public-school curriculum, be it Houghton-Mifflin, Simon and Schuster, Mac Million, or myriad others, public school costs continue to increase at an unsustainable rate while student performance continues to languish. Suffice it to say, whatever the curriculum, one size never fits all… ever.
At the very least, and regardless of student outcomes, when a Vermont student chooses an Independent school, taxpayers save $10K per student. And, with few exceptions, parental and student satisfaction with Independent schools exceed that of public-school approvals.
But my question remains unanswered. Why are the Governor and the Legislature refusing to consider expanding School Choice tuition governance? The only reason I can fathom is that they are greedy, corrupt, and don’t care about anything but increasing their cash flow.
Hi Jay,
I’m sure you are aware of this; many may not be which is why I post.
When you do a deeper dive, from a broad spectrum, high elevation view things can start to make sense, by that I mean, why do they do what they are doing. It makes no sense at the Vermont level, because we don’t see the bigger picture, the bigger plan. Coming from a we want to educate our children at a reasonable expense will never solve the problems in Vermont because we can’t see the why. When you see the why…you can’t unsee it. I’m including video links for others to view. One is about subversion, to which Vermont has much experience, the other in a link below is for the educational system and how it was taken over/run. While these videos are not short form, they are so accurate and prophetic, one has to come to the conclusion that none of this by accident and all be the plan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gnpCqsXE8g
Watching these two videos, everything makes sense on why and what they are doing….most are just “doing their jobs” unaware of the plan.
And here is the author of Dumbing Down America…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jcz9Eune7BY
Wonderful woman.
Charlotte Iserbyt
Yuri Bezmanov
School transformation deal reached?
Guy, what kind of headline is that? Nothing will change for the taxpayer or student, what is the “transformation”? It’s really more of the same, at a higher cost, coming soon.
How about this?
Montpelier uses smoke and mirrors to con Vermont populace about school change.
Feel free to use it, should you be inclined.