AboutTale of Two Districts
What has the legislature done?
Several years ago the Vermont legislature passed now notorious Act 127 which made major changes in how state funding for education is raised and allocated. The act didn’t come into effect until this budget year (FY 2025) and its effective date coincided with both high inflation and an end to federal COVID relief dollars for education. The terms of Act 127 encouraged districts to maintain positions added during the pandemic and to increase other expenditures. Some districts (see Winooski below) received huge bumps in per student funding. The only source of extra money for the ed fund under current law is property taxes and it looked like they were going to go up as much as 20%, enough to make even tax-accustomed Vermonters think about electing new legislators (I hope). The legislature has tried to disguise the immediate property tax pain by raising other taxes and short-term gimmicks. It passed a bill which will make the average educational tax increase only about 14%. It did nothing about the long-term problem of extraordinarily high education expenses and substandard educational results in Vermont except to set up a study committee which won’t even report back in time to make a difference in school budgeting for next year. Governor Scott will almost certainly veto that bill and the legislature will come back on June 23 for a veto override session.
It is up to us between now and June 23 to try to convince our legislators to compromise with the Governor on a bill which both lowers the burden this year and starts to solve our long-term problem of over-funded and under-performing schools. In the meantime, we should be looking for legislative candidates for November who demonstrate an understanding of the problems and a willingness to address them. Doesn’t matter what party they come from. Does matter that they understand that our education funding and delivery system is badly broken.
For the sake of these discussions, consider the examples of the Winooski and Elmore-Morristown districts below. Winooski easily passed a hugely increased budget which will not increase local taxes. Their schools achieve relatively poor results despite consistently high funding. Elmore-Morristown, whose schools achieve better results than the statewide average, has so far turned down two relatively moderate budgets and will be voting on a third attempt with more drastic cuts tomorrow (May 21).
Winooski Expenditures
The slide below is from the Winooski School District budget presentation to voters. Caution: as the footnotes explain, almost none of the numbers are real.
The top line number is real. Thanks to a state aid formula which hugely tipped in its favor, Winooski is planning to increase its school budget by a whopping 26%!
The next line is nonsense. Winooski is not adding 1267 students this year. Its student population is declining to an estimated 783 actual students. The “weighted pupil” is a mythical construct of the legislature used to disguise the huge disparity in education funding awarded to various districts and also to obscure how much more Vermont spends per student than the rest of the country in order to achieve at best mediocre educational results.
The spending per pupil, since it is arrived at by dividing the mythical number of pupils (2167) into the real budget ($31,970,907), is also fantasy. Winooski spending per actual student (remember there are only 783 of them) is over $40,000! It isn’t declining from 2024 (as the footnote partially explains); it is going up more than 26%. For comparison, statewide Vermont is planning to spend $22,769 per actual publicly-educated precollege student. Winooski will be spending almost twice as much. US average spending last year is estimated at $15,633 per student.
Did Winooski voters approve this huge increase? You betcha. The fourth line above exaggerates the tax decrease they are going to see thanks to the further mysteries of appraisal and the common level of adjustment (too much detail for this post); but most Winooski homeowners will see their property tax go down despite the huge budget increase. The burden will be borne by property taxpayers in other districts.
According to the Winooski budget presentation:
According to an article in Seven Days:
“The district's seven multilingual liaisons provide a critical bridge between home and school — assisting refugee families with interpretation services, helping them fill out paperwork, and accompanying them to appointments or grocery shopping….”
“At the heart of the district's newly renovated K-12 campus is a spacious atrium with a community health center and the Necessity Store, where students and their families [emphasis mine] can pick up free food, clothing and toiletries. The building boasts modernized classrooms, sleek common spaces, and a new performing arts center and gymnasium. The upgrades were funded by a $57.8-million bond that voters approved in 2019. In the bond proposal to the community, the school district pointed to projections that enrollment would grow by 15.2 percent in the next decade. [nb: the school budget pays back these bonds].
“But since then, the district has lost approximately 100 students, and projections now indicate Winooski will likely lose upwards of 100 more in the next decade…”
The Winooski school district does need (and has gotten) extra money to deal with the educational needs of a relatively large immigrant population for whom English is a second language. However, it appears that the huge amount of educational support the district receives from the state is being used to cover welfare and housing needs far removed from what an educational budget should contain. Why not, from Winooski’s PoV, these expenses are being paid for by all the property taxpayers in the state.
Winooski results
According to the school budget report, Winooski students in every grade perform well under the state average in standardized testing for proficiency in every grade and in every subject! You could argue that means even more money is needed; some will. Or you could argue that a flood of money without accountability and without cost to locals is not effective in helping Winooski students gain the skills they need. Maybe the multilingual liaisons should concentrate on teaching English and other subjects to the students, for example.
Elmore-Morristown Expenditures (3d budget vote)
The partial slide below is from the presentation by the Elmore-Morristown school district to its voters. The district has about the same number of actual students as Winooski.
Line 3, with its total of $15,523,902 and a 4.18% increase from last year, is comparable to Winooski’s total of $31,970,907 with a 26% increase.
The equalized pupil line is the legislature’s fantasy number. Elmore-Moristown has 772 actual students.
Spending per equalized student is also a fantasy number. The district is proposing to spend $20,109 per actual student, about half as much as Winooski does. If this budget passes, residential property taxes in Morristown will go up about 5% and 11% in Elmore. Note that their taxes will go up by more than the amount of the budget increase because they are paying into the statewide property tax to support bigger increase in other districts.
According to the presentation, if this budget passes there will be the following reductions in staffing from FY24:
- 1.0 FTE Literacy Coach
- 1.0 FTE English
- 1.0 FTE Spanish
- 1.0 FTE Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA)
- 1.0 FTE Literacy Coach
- 1.0 FTE Math Coach
Clearly voter sentiment is forcing the district back toward the pre-pandemic level of funding. New expenses are not being added into the education budget.
Elmore-Morristown Results
Elmore-Morristown parents and taxpayers have more reason to be happy with their schools’ past results than their neighbors in Winooski. Students in this district in all grades perform better on proficiency tests for Math and English competency than the state average.
Legislative Report Card
A funding and educational system which results in such a huge disconnect between costs and results is broken. Our children deserve better results. Our taxpayers deserve lower costs and greater accountability. This legislature deserved Fs for both results and effort.
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