ANGELO LYNN

This Thursday, May 15, the Senate Finance Committee is expected to give H.454, the legislature’s revised school funding bill, a final review, and send it to conference committee. House and Senate members will confer, finetune and are expected to reach enough of a consensus to send a bill to Gov. Scott.

That’s no small feat. The 160-page bill reworks how education is funded in Vermont. It also puts in place measures that will force school consolidations and, it is hoped, enough cost savings to make the pain worthwhile.

We phrase the argument like that because there will be much pain, and there’s little to suggest H.454 will make Vermont’s school system better for students, or for parents. Students will spend more times on buses, small communities will be weaker; tight-knit schools will be closed.

The legislation, however, will likely make school funding less expensive, and if that is the primary goal, this bill will likely be successful and applauded by a majority of the state’s taxpayers.

That’s a harsh reality (to parents of students) that reflects the times, though it doesn’t demonstrate much hope for the state’s future.

If the bill has flaws, and they all do, the biggest flaw in this legislation is the lack of faith in the state’s small, rural communities. That’s stated directly in measures that set (in the House version) class-size minimums for grades K-12, including 12 students for kindergarten, 15 for grades 1-4, and 18 for grades 5-12.  Grades can be combined, but not more than two grades for any one class. Furthermore, schools operating grades 6-12, or any subset of those grades, would be required to have a minimum enrollment of 450 students. (In 2023, 180 schools in Vermont would not have met that minimum enrollment; and hundreds of elementary schools in the state would have to consolidate to meet the class-size minimums.)

Those proposed consolidations were mild compared to Gov. Phil Scott’s initial recommendation to consolidate the state’s 119 school districts to just five, including consolidating all schools in Addison, Chittenden and Franklin counties into one district with 34,000 students. The legislature’s proposal would ask experts to propose district lines that would seek to have 4,000 students each.

Any sentimentality to smallness and the power of community, however, is met with irrefutable facts.

As Rep. Peter Conlon, D-Cornwall, who is chairman of the House Education Committee, says in an op-ed in today’s Addison Independent on page 5A, the state’s changing demographics tell the story. Vermont has 40,000 fewer students in our schools compared to the mid-1980s and the economics of scale does matter. Moreover, Vermont has put off this reckoning for the past two decades, partially in the hopes that Vermont’s quality of life would draw enough young parents to turn those demographics around.

That hasn’t happened for other stark reasons: our astronomical health care costs drive young families away, as does the lack of affordable and available housing. Nor does our job market always appeal to a younger generation at wages that are competitive throughout the region. If Vermont were just average on any of those three metrics, we would attract more young families, but we’re far from average — we’re at the high end on the expense side of things and on the low end with career opportunities. In short, until Vermont solves its health care and housing crises, our demographics aren’t likely to improve.

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That said, the Senate version of the bill removes the class-size stipulations for good reason. As Sen. Steve Heffernan said at a Vergennes forum on May 10, the Senate’s thinking “is that we have to look after the small schools that are efficient and able to work within the budget they’re given.”

That’s an opening to suggest there’s more than one way to tackle the issue.

Nor is H.454 the cat’s meow.

In a community forum penned by 19 former Vermont legislators, many of whom worked on and passed Act 60 (and Acts 68 and 46), they appealed to Vermont legislators to reject H.454 and instead work within the current system to make it better.

“Vermont’s (current) education funding system is committed both to fair taxation and local decision making, and we can strengthen both of those. Instead, H.454… weakens them… (and) would repeal the law’s current provision allowing residents to pay some or all of their school taxes based on their income, which 70% of Vermont homeowners do. Instead, H.454 recommits the state to regressive property taxes that hit low- and middle-income residents the hardest…

“None of the sweeping changes in H.454, the associated risks, nor the hassles to school districts are necessary… And while the governor likes to say the message from the election was that schools are spending too much, that’s not the case. School spending in Vermont as a percentage of the state’s economy has been a stable 5.5% to 6% for decades.

“… (H. 454) in reaching for elusive ‘efficiencies,’ with promises of better education, the bill doubles down on school consolidation, which many Vermonters have rejected; that will alienate more citizens by taking budgetary decision-making out of communities’ hands.

“There are immediate, affordable changes to the existing law that would make the system fairer for the Vermonters hurt last year. Instead of rushing to new and unproven… financing mechanisms and an unprecedented move away from local control, the Legislature should adopt those changes.”

It’s a legitimate point, though the authors didn’t suggest what changes they were talking about, nor did those alleged “changes” make it through the committee process, which was surely tried.

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Still, a better bill would provide more options for communities with small schools but big hearts — and the wherewithal to make their school viable. We like the Senate’s version that omits class-size limits because it doesn’t hamstring schools that can think outside the box. It allows for creativity and innovation. That’s a start.

The challenge from there is to craft legislation that allows for such small-school/big-heart exceptions, while still meeting the constitutional mandate to provide education equanimity to all students. If done well, the bill would be that much better, even if the savings are a fraction less.

Angelo Lynn