In an attempt to address the hot-button issues of school budgets and property taxes, the Vermont House of Representatives is now considering Senate Bill 220, a bill that would significantly harm our school system. Here’s what’s wrong with the bill in a nutshell:
- The bill places an extremely low limit on school spending.
- As a result, some school districts, including HUUSD, would either need to make significant program cuts or present budgets that trigger an extreme penalty if they go above the limit.
- It would lead to deeper reductions than what our community has already experienced over the past three years of budget cuts.
- Meanwhile, major cost drivers like healthcare, special education, and energy are not addressed.
In more detail, the bill reduces the allowable per-pupil spending in our district before a substantial penalty is incurred. This would lead to deep cuts in educational programs that would go beyond the past three years of cuts focused on improved efficiency and lowering operational costs. In plain English, our kids will directly see the effect of these cuts this time around, not just in terms of reduced nursing availability but also in terms of what they learn in the classroom.
The frustrating part of Senate Bill 220 is that it just doesn’t discuss the elephants in the room driving our property taxes up: health insurance costs, special ed costs, mental health costs, and transportation/energy costs.
At the district level, the Harwood School Board has been trying to contain the elephants. This year, we cut a million dollars from a level service school budget, meaning a budget with no cuts in services. The cuts from the past three years add up to a 15% reduction from a level service budget. That’s a big hit – imagine cutting your household budget by 15% in the face of rising food and fuel costs. Each cut hurts our kids’ education, and over time, we’ve had to choose cuts that hurt more and more.
Sometimes we’re asked why property taxes continue to go up if we’re cutting the budget. Just look to the elephants: our health insurance costs have gone up 33% in three years, our special ed costs are going up 21% next year alone, etc. This year’s school budget went up 5.4%. You can see that we had to absorb the costs of the elephants by making cuts in other areas.
The details of Senate Bill 220 are technical. There is one part to like: currently, if a school district issues a bond for school construction or maintenance, the added debt counts towards our per pupil cost, and so drives us closer to the penalty point. Pretty much everyone agrees that it is crazy for the state to penalize us for trying to fix our schools, and Senate Bill 220 removes this penalty.
However, as mentioned above, the bill imposes a “soft cap” on budget increases.
(Technically, this is done by reducing the excess spending threshold from the current 118% to 112% of the statewide average per-pupil spending.)
If this had been in effect this year, we would have had to double our million-dollar budget cut to almost two million. That would have been a disaster for our kids’ education.
So Senate Bill 220 gives a little on one hand, and takes away a lot on the other hand. Please write our district State Representatives (Tom Stevens, Dara Torre, Candice White, Teresa Wood) as well as the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee Emilie Kornheiser to urge them to support the removal of the bond penalty, not to lower the excess spending threshold, and to address the real issues driving up our property taxes. One email cc’d to all of them is fine, and their address follows the “first initial, last name” format, so Dara Torre is
Thanks very much for your help! Education funding is a complex issue, and complex issues don’t have simple solutions. Senate Bill 220 is one of those too simple proposals, and should be modified to reflect the tough reality of education funding.
Rosenberg is one of the Moretown representatives on the Harwood Unified Union School District board.
