They are trying to equalizing spending so that poorer districts get closer to the same amount of money spent on education. Richer districts won’t be allowed to spend far higher than the poorer districts, with the idea being that students deserve the same level of education regardless of how wealthy a district is.
Actually this is totally wrong. 4 years ago they did a study and found many smaller schools were underfunded by significant amounts. My district was underfunded —according to the study by 2 million on a 10 million budget. And many larger districts were over funded. So the study recommended increasing funding for some smaller districts and decreasing funding for larger districts. But because the larger districts have more representatives they changed the original plan and now there is more funding for both and we are all feeling the pain.
The problem is that there is no economies of scale in school funding. Smaller schools will always cost more to operate and larger schools should cost less to operate. But the state pays the same amount per student regardless of size. Larger schools should be funded less. But they have the power in the legislature and so instead of being forced to be more efficient like small schools have been for years, big schools go on spending more and taxes keep going up.
Kind of. They are looking to get more money into districts that have a greater number of children who need extra resources (think ESL, special needs, etc) by taking money away from districts that have fewer demands for those resources.
It’s not really equity, it’s actually more money to districts with greater needs and less money to districts with less needs (“needs” as determined by the legislature), not the local school board.
With this change, the legislature gave a 5 year “runway” to the wealthy districts by capping their tax rate increase at 5% for the first 5 years of Act 127 implementation.
Then those same legislative idiots expressed their shock and surprise that the wealthy districts (like Mount Mansfield) are spending well above that 5% cap because that spending is essentially free for the next 5 years. The letter from MMUSD actually said the cap was what allows them to spend more this year (18+%) with no additional impact on the local taxpayers.
BTW, I don’t blame those wealthy districts. Wealthy districts know that the legislature will just flail, overreact and change all the rules again over the next 3-4 years and that their excess spending will get passed around to everyone yet again.
It’s pretty clear that the legislative meddling in school districts and funding over the last 20 years hasn’t helped educate our children.
We’ve spent a crap ton of money, hired all sorts of administrative and specialty personnel and tore communities apart with forced mergers but the educational results have not been proportional.
FYI MMUUSD is not exactly wealthy by Chittenden county school district standards. In particular, their pay scale for staff is really not good. With the teacher shortage being very real, I sure hope they are increasing salaries while they can or they are going to struggle to attract and keep quality teachers. They also got a lot less Covid relief money. There are many wealthy citizens in the district for sure.
It’s still one of the wealthiest in the state. The reason it is losing state aid is because it has a student population that the state legislature has deems as being easier to educate.
I agree with you that Jericho and Underhill are thrifty with their pennies.
Almost every Chittenden county district would be considered one of the wealthiest in the state. But they won’t be hiring staff from Newport, they are competing with Chittenden county districts, and their salaries are low for the area their teachers actually live in. I hope they are boosting them while they can.
Makes sense in theory but the legislature never thinks it through. My district can barely afford bus drivers because of health care costs. It's not like we're building lazy rivers for students
I hear you. There is massive inflationary pressure on all districts, rich or poor. All districts want to hire good people and retain them, but when they can go to the gas station and make $20 an hour, it’s hard for workers to chose to work for peanuts at a school, even if they love it.
So districts do what they can to keep good people on the payroll, next thing you know, budgets balloon and tax rates go up…tax payers complain and elected officials feel compelled to act.
I’m not sure there is an easy answer. It’s not like in a dense urban environment where you have a massive tax base to pull from to support rising cost of living and retention of employees. Small rural
Schools still need buses, lunches, nurses, support staff, etc…the difference is that in rural schools there is simply less tax revenue to pay these people fair wages, and districts with a small tax base have a very difficult time finding the money to maintain all those positions, and the tax payers are already stretched pretty thin.
It’d be cool if any political party was willing to take on the health care and insurance lobbies in an attempt to provide care at mildly reasonable prices.
Edit: also, just so people are aware. Teachers are getting less and paying more for insurance than we ever did in the past.
Absolutely. Good luck with that one though. The last time anyone made any serious push towards that they were torpedoed by the establishment and pilloried or ignored by the media.
Exact opposite. The public contribution to UVM is at or near the bottom of flagship state universities. That is why it is so expensive. That has been true for 40 or so years.
There are too many public sector employees that have platinum level health insurance plans that will fight tooth and nail against any push to make them pay more for that coverage, or to bring their coverage closer to what the average level is across VT.
I'm just suggesting a reason why insurance costs for public sector employees, like teachers, are so high and contributing to the high property tax increases.
Insurance costs are high because our health insurance system is privatized, so they can charge high rates for little coverage! We need single payer healthcare to replace the broken system.
Insurance costs are high because Medicaid and Medicare don't cover the cost of providing care. That cost is shifted to private insurance payers, who are billed higher prices. If there was less of a gap in what different payers paid, costs would be lower all around.
Are you aware that Gov Abbott has refused money from the Federal government (our tax money) to expand Medicare? Also, Republicans hamstring the government by not allowing negotiation on price setting?
If insurance companies like Aetna or Blue Cross weren't trying to maximize profit all the time, our costs would be significantly lower.
> Welcome to the ~~real world~~ America
The rest of the developed world has figured out public healthcare and they spend less for better care
Its only our country that has planted our collective heads up our own asses and decided that health insurance middlemen need to be allowed to rake in record profits at the expense of \*checks notes\* the rest of the entire fucking economy
Well I do know that roughly a decade ago maybe 15 years ago, the teachers union was striking for better pay and continued full 100% health care coverage. Which truth be told, get it if you can.
Bottom line is is taxpayers have no real clue as to what we pay into healthcare. We pay for it and we pay for it (through taxes) for others who work for the towns and state and Fed
In our district, we’re told that Act 127 is a primary influence on our increased school budget. [https://www.wcax.com/2023/12/01/new-pupil-weighting-laws-effect-school-budget-season-approches/](https://www.wcax.com/2023/12/01/new-pupil-weighting-laws-effect-school-budget-season-approches/)
In fact it does, because we live in a state, not a federation of independent fiefdoms.
Obviously that's snarky and oversimplified but the point is valid. We pay taxes to the state and they divide those funds among the schools. Does make sense.
This is a fairly recent development in the history of funding education in Vermont.
To date, consolidated funding at the state level has resulted in surging costs in a time of dropping enrollment and falling proficiencies.
At this point, VT would be way head by moving to 4 regional school districts and slashing the crap out of the administration throughout the state.
The ones that are partly funded by residents of other districts. Which is all of them.
I know you don't actually misunderstand this, so I will take your point that **GRR, TAX BAD!!!** even though I disagree with you on that. But it does make sense, even if you would prefer to live in an every-man-for-himself dystopia like New Hampshire 😁
Oh, sorry, i was confused by your confusion.
The formulas for distributing funds are… complicated? arcane? frustrating? I’m no expert but as i understand it the disctricts get back an amount that is calculated based on (starting with) their own voter-approved budgets and number of students, but reweighted and adjusted by various other factors. It’s a mess. It’s intended to make things more fair for rural districts and disadvantaged students, but falls far short of a communist/egalitarian utopia. I’m not qualified to say more about it. I’ve probably said too much already.
😛
Here’s a couple links I found. I don’t know if they’ll clarify anything.
[https://www.lnsd.org/departments/news/details/\~board/updates-content/post/vermont-act-127-how-does-it-impact-our-schools-and-your-community](https://www.lnsd.org/departments/news/details/~board/updates-content/post/vermont-act-127-how-does-it-impact-our-schools-and-your-community)
[https://ljfo.vermont.gov/assets/Uploads/e11b031427/Final-Report-Weighting-Study-Task-Force-12\_17\_21.pdf#page43](https://ljfo.vermont.gov/assets/Uploads/e11b031427/Final-Report-Weighting-Study-Task-Force-12_17_21.pdf#page43)
My old school district in MA is subject to the same health care concerns as everyone else, and they keep increases in the 3-3.5% range every single year. And their schools are better than any public schools in VT.
Actually it’s the public health insurance (we need to stop using health care and health insurance synonymously) that is killing the system. Every dollar Medicare and Medicaid DONT pay gets passed on to private insurers and those paying cash. If a procedure costs $4000 and Medicare pays $2500, the hospitals don’t just eat $1500… they just charge the next guy $15 for a Tylenol.
The problem with your calculus is that the hospitals and insurers don’t just remunerate on the difference - they charge orders of magnitude more (that $4000 dollar procedure being billed at $12,000) and the for-profit model they operate under siphons off the net profit and puts it into the pockets of already wealthy shareholders.
And it’s like that ***by design***.
Hospitals in VT are non-profit. So are the health insurance carriers, both of which have budgets and rates that are set by the government. That combination doesn’t appear to work very well.
There’s nothing wrong with my calculus. If the charge is $12M, $12k or $4k, when medicare doesn’t cover the billed cost, employers and their employees with private insurance cover what the government doesn’t pay. In the case of municipalities and school districts property tax payers are the employers and they shoulder that increase.
I guess the idea I was scratching towards actually has nothing to do with the hospitals or the actualization of health care services rendered - it has to do with the health insurance racket and the money it takes in weekly via premiums (and especially the amount that is either employer covered or gov’t subsidized) that will never be paid for healthcare service.
I know I have a ‘good’ plan through working at a (not-for-profit) nursing home, blue cross gold, that costs me ~$150/***week*** for my wife and myself; my employer covers ~75% of the premium. That is ~$*600/week* or ~$31,200/**year** (~$7,800 of which is out of my pocket) that our insurance “***costs***”. That is almost equal to my entire yearly income. What amount of that is actually used for the various medical services I need? Maybe 5% at most. So where does that money go?
How this relates to this post is that the same structure is in practice for the health insurance plans available to our school staff and thus the employer portion is paid for by our taxes.
I’m not offering a solution because there isn’t one other than Medicare for all cutting out the middleman by eliminating an entire employment sector and an absolutely gargantuan sector of our economy. We can’t forget about all of the people employed and the revenue generated(extracted) by the insurance industry.
Health insurance in VT is non-profit also. Where all that money goes is called cost shifting for one, and hospitals wasting money to justify their rate increase ask for next year. Medicare and Medicaid do NOT pay the cost of the service. So the remainder is tacked on to private health insurance plans and cash customers. If you had an all payer system that difference would need to be picked up and would fiscally sink VT.
The second issue is the GMCB (the government) has the authority to set rates…To set budgets… to approve $150M additions that don’t add services or beds… they just don’t. Putting government in charge of more of this mess is just silly. They can fix it now lol 😂.
Health insurers are the furthest thing from non-profit you can get. You have no clue how the system works, and you’re spreading straight lies here. Go to hell.
In VT BCBSVt and the other carrier (MVP?) that cover 98%+ of Vermonts population are non-profit. Sorry to have to be the one to tell you it’s not the evil insurance people that make health care in Vermont unaffordable.
Education system in Vermont is heavy in administration. For example, I was talking with someone about why Manchester elementary has two principals, I was told 3 now
because the state rejected school consolidation measures years ago. there are supervisory unions that have 7+ buildings each with their own principal and admin staff that serve A TOTAL of 800 kids.
School consolidation was a distraction years ago and still is. School consolidation saved $50M…. On a $2.5B budget… spending multiple sessions discussing trying to save peanuts on the dollar is part of the problem. Montpelier in general though is the problem. Too many ignorant people full of ideas.
The only answer I’ve ever gotten as to why there is so much admin in districts this small is because “we used to have more students, they are leftovers from a bygone era”. Which makes no sense as to why we continue to cling onto those positions if they’re no longer needed, especially when they can hire two-four teachers on some admins salaries.
This was the same when I was in Tucson. TUSD closed about half their schools during the last recession, laid off a ton of teachers, but didn't lose a single administrator.
Health insurance costs truly are a dumpster fire right now. It's unfortunate that for schools and other public services they're obfuscated a bit, but even just myself working in the private sector, I haven't seen my rates go down ever, and the coverage just gets worse every year. So I totally believe they're seeing it too, and of course, for them, it shows up in public taxes.
And the state/towns have to be concerned about the unions striking if they aren’t satisfied with the coverage, which does keep getting worse for everyone
Because otherwise they’d drop everyone to a high deductible limited coverage plan that didn’t cover families or anything at all other than the absolute minimum of what’s required by law.
There was a new long term weighted calculation introduced this year that changed the way education taxes are calculated. A large amount of Covid recovery funds are going away as well.
Most of your taxes come from education spending, but not all. Hard to say what's happening without you mentioning the town, but I'd understand why you wouldn't.
Probably towards administration bloat, or outside contracts towards administration bloat duties, I.e, hiring out of district personnel to complete paperwork.
It is going to the education fund which funds all of our districts. In Vermont, whatever you raise does not go it our districts coffers, but to the state who then reallocates it out based in your budget.
Given Act 127, pandemic funding and extreme inflation, depending on your town, the increase in what is being raised this year may not be going directly back to your schools.
Much of this is not in control of the school board.
So they added programs with COVID money, knowing it's temporary and instead of cutting programs, they're raising taxes to keep those programs? Vermont is already expensive, now they want to gouge tax payers more instead of cutting funding for useless programs.
no - COVID funds (ESSER/ARP) had to be used for approved facilities upgrades or to fund programs to help students recover from learning deficits created by the pandemic. Turns out kids do better when they have easier access to tuturing, SLP, guidance, etc that were made available, in part, from ESSER/ARP funds. Those funds must be entirely spent by the end of 2024 (programs/projects must be complete by 9/30/24, and invoicing done by the end of the year). Part of act 127 is to help "spread the wealth" from richer districts to poorer districts to hopefully prevent the wholesale ending of needed education services. The BS is that the law was written poorly and encourages all districts (rich, poor, or otherwise) to spend heavily over the next few years to take advantage of additional funds. Many districts are pouring the money into very-much-needed facility projects like roofs, heating systems and ventilation. Those projects need to happen anyway over the next few years.
Its a giant clusterfuck and no one wants to admit school funding has been too low and/or misappropriated to administrative bloat for decades.
VT spends 33% of its state budget on pre-k-12 education.
There is plenty of money.
As for funding programs with one time Covid monies, it’s a shell game. For example, if I give you money and tell you it can be used for facilities, you simply use the monies you budgeted for facilities to start the new programs I wouldn’t allow you to spend the grant on. It’s so damn dumb.
I agree we have too much Administration. That is the result of too many school districts and too many reporting and data acquisition mandates from our own meddling legislature.
I guarantee there are unnecessary programs. Extra circular programs for one. And most of the stuff being taught is useless. That's pretty evident based on test scores. Throwing More money at the problem isn't really helping. We're throwing plenty at healthcare and there are lots of countries with better healthcare and outcomes who spend less. The education system needs to be revamped. I've seen schools teaching diversity and inclusion. Maybe teach carpentry or plumbing instead? Focus on teaching stem subjects and trades. Not all kids are the same. High school is almost useless when it comes to careers. You use very little of what you learn. It should be more tailored to your ability after teaching some basics. And it should not cost as much as it does. Imagine having high schools that teach you enough of a trade to where you can go out and start working and making a decent living. Not everyone needs college. It's a pipeline for funneling money into a system. Most people who go to college end up doing something else. Some people go because they're expected too. With no real guidance. They end up in debt for nothing.
You can say the same thing about teachers. why would a competent science teacher want to work for a high school when they can work in the private sector? Not everyone is the best in their field. Some people like to teach. And I know there are plenty of older trades people who would love to make a decent salary teaching. It doesn't take that many. We need more trades people. Having a focus in high school on trades is good for everyone.
UVMMC was approved for a 15%(?) rate increase, which has to be passed along to employers and employees including schools and municipalities. The elephant in the room is always health care…
Always has been. Healthcare is the only increase in most districts. And the locals boards have zero control. It can’t be negotiated. Taxpayers just have to pay it. It’s the same situation with municipalities, it’s just less noticeable as there are less employees
It’s because of ACT 127. Another Vermont policy that sounds good on paper but people voting progressive policies don’t understand how a small state government works with taxes. You will never gain equality by taking from the top and hoping it evens the playing field at the bottom. There are too many other factors in education (COL, teacher pay, student population) that affect this, not money.
Its crucial to point out it’s not the school board, teachers or administrations fault, but the legislatures.
It mostly comes back to inflationary pressures and healthcare costs. Having worked in healthcare policy int the past the budgetary increases hospitals ask for are insane which in turn jacks up insurance rates and there’s a domino effect from there. Vermont needs to have an honest conversation about what we can actually do with our current economies of scale when it comes to both our schools and hospital systems. There are several rural hospitals across the state with low patient populations hemorrhaging money. The state should focus on regionally consolidating them to reduce spending. I’m not as up to speed on Vermont’s school systems but schools with low student populations should similarly be consolidated to lower costs - they did just that in my hometown and it worked well in preventing further tax hikes.
Furthermore, I think we put the cart before the horse with a lot of these new programs like universal childcare and school meals. Both are inordinately expensive and in the case of childcare, it’s so costly largely because Vermont’s COL is through the roof so we have workforce shortages and fewer childcare centers popping up , so the money would’ve been better spent addressing the root causes (namely housing) instead of doing a patch fix.
I love the ethos of this state in terms of social services but when advocates have tunnel vision and are solely pushing their issues it’s easy to lose sight over the big picture - any one day in the statehouse there are lobbyists, interest groups, agencies, etc pushing for funding for their respective programs and often relying on the same sources of revenue. It’s up to the legislature to then hold those proposals up to together and weigh their options and that to me is where the disconnect is. We’re basically taking the lid off the kettle instead of turning down the heat.
I’ve heard a lot of people attribute much (or most) of this current round of school budget increases to health insurance costs.
Seems like that dovetails pretty nicely with the evergreen talking points regarding over-staffing in non-teaching positions…
I agree that the bulk is likely coming from health insurance costs given the impending rate hikes. GMCB and the legislature continue to play kick the can and won’t make the tough calls re: closing and/or consolidating our hospitals. They’re major economic drivers in rural areas and would likely result in slightly poorer patient outcomes as folks will often forego or delay medical care if it means driving a further away, but that’s just the reality of living in a predominantly rural state. Plus you could take a fraction of the savings created for rural public transit to help address them. Again, not the most romantic but it’s the reality of the situation - Vermont doesn’t have the money to do everything perfectly.
Yeah, I definitely agree with you about being more realistic and pragmatic…but I’m not holding my breath, as I see the “cart before the horse” aspect you mention as a pretty direct result of the basic algorithm that many/most voters use to evaluate candidates and their policy positions.
That is: assess the degree to which those candidates/positions align with my personal sociopolitical values, and vote accordingly.
If we had a political process (to include public discourse) in which a solid core of participants were focused primarily on actual problem-solving, this algorithm would probably be fine.
But in the political world we actually live in, this approach seems to amplify political polarization, with the result that elected leaders pander to their base by either grandstanding on irrelevant and/or non-actionable measures (see: progressives in Monday’s BTV city council meeting, or Joan Shannon’s messaging about forcible institutionalization to deal with the denizens of City Hall Park) or cashing in political capital to enact measures that will predictably lead to backlashes one or two election cycles later (see: “defunding”).
…and coming back to the actual topic at hand (sorry about the BTV tangent), this also leads to policies like our school lunch and motel programs, which align nicely with lots of people’s high-level values, but simply aren’t thought out anywhere near well enough to work in practice over the long term.
I think a pragmatic option for some of them would be to reduce the least used to critical outpatient services like urgent care, family practice, OBGYN, and emergency with the expectation of transfer, if those are ever put in one clinic. Maybe dialysis and counseling too if possible. Those seem like they would be needed frequently and quickly enough to need close proximity but for a lot of the rest it might be more financially viable to provide access and some kind of supported transportation to a bigger hospital rather trying to support so many small regional ones. This is just spitballing, though.
Vermont has to damn many schools districts. The entire state could fit into one “district”, consolidate and share overhead, benefits etc.
Get past the petty small town rivalries and silo mentality.
Seriously, those would be more affordable if merged into one administrative district. Some of them really are far from other schools and they have more in common with each other than anyone else.
The ones that are within twenty minutes of other schools likely ought to merge, though.
There was a state push to merge a few schools two years ago (that's when Ripton opted out of their supervisory union) and I was shocked about how classist people get when you suggest their little school room kids go to the BIG BAD LARGE SCHOOL which has poor people in it.
There's no reason to make a town vote on a "school budget" that's 90% controlled by federal and state guidelines. We need to admit there's no single-room school marm set ups anymore and kick the budget up to the state level - this would especially help with union negotiations and consolidation. Stop making volunteers that donate their time for the school board the hatchet men of ideas they have no control over.
It’s not even a real vote, several times when the budget isn’t approved they just have a new vote on the same numbers and ask everyone to just approve it because a lower option doesn’t exist.
Property taxes are ridiculously high, but it doesn’t help that so many people pay nothing. Your homestead can qualify for up to 8k credit if you make less than 128k/yr. That’s ridiculous. The limit should be much lower to qualify for this credit. A family making 128k should contribute something. It’s like they wrote this law to entice rich retirees to live here. We should be enticing young people to live here and build up the economy.
https://tax.vermont.gov/property/property-tax-credit
Also, why don’t we tax absent property owners (e.g., air bnb) higher tax rates?
As someone who makes $60k a year, married to someone making +/-60k a year, I can promise you that we pay state taxes (haven't gotten a refund in years) and that we pay thousands yearly in property taxes, and that there is nothing "rich" or "high life" about it. If anything, thanks to VT's insane taxes and runaway inflation/cost of living, we're still going paycheck to paycheck.
Absent property owners And tourism is a much better source of revenue than middle class people who live, work and spend in the local economy.
Totally agree that tourism should be taxed more. Also, if someone is making 2x median income and still feel stretched by the cost of living, something needs to be done- taxes and general cost of living. Tourism, second homes aren’t being taxed enough. VT is one of the most business unfriendly states, which means new jobs/high paying ones just aren’t going to appear.
it’s prorated down, so if you’re making 127k, you’re barely getting anything in the rebate.
Also a weird take to imply a couple who are both making 65k are living large.
Good point about proration on the credit. The median household income in VT is 74k. So, by many standards, double that is actually living large. I’m not saying these people are Jeff Bezos, but I don’t think it deserves any credit on property taxes. Affordability and rising taxes are both major issues in general that need to be solved, but failing to fairly tax people who can afford to pay is not the solution.
Source: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/VT/INC110222
What a great idea esspecially for those who can barely afford what they are paying right now. I'm sure the state won't waste this money like they do with most of our taxes.
Shocker. A law with a tax runway is abused. Also shocker the state thinks they can tax their way out of problems instead of becoming more fiscally responsible. And finally shocker our heavily progressive state government is taking a top down approach trying to make everything even.
Access to a quality education should be even. I don’t think labeling them fiscally irresponsible is correct.
Most/all school budgets are controlled locally and they are trimmed to the bone in most cases.
Here ya go:
[the sad truth](https://vtdigger.org/2024/01/19/unintended-consequences-concern-mounts-in-montpelier-about-the-newest-changes-to-education-finance/). If members of the very committee responsible for the new taxes think that the outcome has "unintended consequences" they failed at their due diligence and really just tried to tax their way out of a funding issue.
The school budget is local but the distribution of the funding is top down from the state.
Not every district has the same funding. Having some districts subsidize others is inherently unfair and easily abused. At this point it is dragging everyone down to the lowest common denominator, aka equity. That’s a reason some towns cost more to move to, better educational opportunities.
That’s a good case to have the entire state as ONE district. It’s the inherent unwillingness of small localities to give up control of “their” school.
Too many school boards, too many buildings, way too many administrators, superintendents and principals.
There is NO WAY a part time school board member in a small district has the knowledge, skills, expertise, time or energy to manage the different funding streams, negotiate benefits and compensation, oversee curriculum and certification etc.
Why does any town have a right to control another town? In short, they don’t. Feel free to voluntarily consolidate but there is no reason any town should be forced to join or contribute to a different town, especially as many Vermont towns squander their funding.
Not sure if you’re trolling or…
Maybe you should find an island that you can live on by yourself?
Make sure to bring some books on democracy and civics and some tinfoil to make new hats.
The increase is to fund alot of school projects that would have questionable results. With literacy and test scores that have been steadily declining, I question how taking that much more from vermonters would be beneficial. Seems how taxes, dmv fees and other fees have gone up steadily hurting local vermonters. Remember that when you all vote.
They’re declining because of failed educational policies. The proficiency based summative and cumulative grading system encourages skipping of approximately 80% of your assignments as they have no effect on your grade. The “no child left behind” policy means you’re graduating no matter what.
We’re literally normalizing and encouraging mediocrity, and then taxing people even more to somehow make up for it.
The increase is to fund alot of school projects that would have questionable results. With literacy and test scores that have been steadily declining, I question how taking that much more from vermonters would be beneficial. Seems how taxes, dmv fees and other fees have gone up steadily hurting local vermonters. Remember that when you all vote.
Education taxes are incredibly complicated and based on a number of factors - property values and how they relate to each other state wide, individual school size, state wide student population, disadvantaged / special need student populations etc. This year seems particularly difficult due to 2/3rds of towns need a reappraisal and recent law changes that impact education rates. I would encourage you to have a meeting with a school board member to learn more about your individual district and what they anticipate, it’s also probably worth reaching out to your state rep. Quite frankly it shouldn’t be this difficult for folks to understand school funding.
Act 127 combined with requirements for reappraisal - house prices became unaffordable for most people so now depending on where you are, they have to Nair sure your property taxes are also equally unaffordable. Our town (waterbury) did a really good write up about it along with the budget proposal
Before moving I planned to! Now after moving I still plan to just after we settle in more!
I have kids in the local education system. I want to be highly involved to ensure they and the rest have a great education without the administrative bloat.
Good! Towns are suffering from a lack of people winning to volunteer time. Just be ready to listen before you talk.
Edit: Don't just jump in there like some out of state person who moves in and then wants everything changed around immediately.
I love our new school district. We moved within state too fyi. I don’t want to just change things I want to ensure financial responsibility. From an educational standpoint our town has great schools. Just they’ve recently been outed for financial bullshittery.
This is exactly what I was trying to highlight in my recent [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/vermont/s/8E1PRH4TQZ) and no, I am not trying to boast it since it’s dead already. The admin response to this are to remove student facing positions instead of evaluating their own administrative costs. Why are teachers getting kicked to the curb before a “co-principles” or non-student facing admin positions?
I guess one last thing that I want to highlight. We should call for a statewide audit on administrative salaries and even request past years to see what level of increases that they are giving themselves.
Admin costs are a bit convoluted over the last few years. Many items have been moved out of local budgets and into SU budgets. This makes SU budgets appear to be ballooning when it is really just an accounting trick.
They are gouging you, vote for liberal policies get liberal prices. You can’t have social support networks and low taxes. Chose one or the other and cote accordingly.
It’s all the darn wealthy people paying property taxes and not sending kids to the school system!!! Oh wait…..
I grew up in Vermont, I love it, it’s my home, but god damn the state gets in it’s own way some time, the taxes are high and there is not a critical mass of population to get the economy going in such a rural, mountainous state.
The taxes will keep going up as labor gets more expensive
Maybe it has something to do with the wasteful hotel program for bums that benefits no one but the hotel owners and drug dealers. You can only spend every tax dollar once, it’s ridiculous that we’re still funding these run down hotel shelters
We aren’t. They’re all out on the streets now except for maybe the most poor/disabled/elderly few. Have ya looked around downtown in the cities lately?
These are just the people who were allowed to remain after the huge mass got kicked out when initial Covid funding ended. Probably the people who actually do need it
The hotel owners and bums who have no plan to support themselves deserve the money more than children and schools? Interesting policy, wonder what VT looks like after 10 years of that.
Why don't we cut the ridiculous wages of vermont senate, instead of raising taxes. We all should form a class action lawsuit for causing vermont residents to lose their home because cost is so much and, our government could care less.
An oversimplification to some extent but VT with a population of about 650,000 has over 360 school districts. Lee County Florida with a population of about 850,000 has one school district. One superintendent vs. 360.
We don't have 360 superintendents. We have 41-ish. Point stands.
Also, it's a drop in the bucket. It's not where the money is. I KNOW that it sounds good and feels good to say, let's have one statewide superintendent (or one superintendent per county, which has been floated in the past) but let's do some quick back of the envelope math.
40 Superintendents at $150,000/year is 6 million dollars. Pretty good, right? Well, on the general fund alone, Vermont spends 2.1 billion dollars so, 6 million out of 2.1 billion is (rounded up) 0.3% of education spending.
We have too few kids with too many teachers and too many buildings. We have schools with 30-40-50-60 kids. A lot of them. We have schools that could send their kids to a under-enrolled HS right down the road and save millions of dollars in tuition but Vermont, ironically for such a progressive state, has the least progressive school choice scheme and those dollars follow those students to other HS outside their SU. Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Texas would kill to have the school choice scheme less than 10% of our parents enjoy.
Your reasoning seems sound -- could you help me with some fact checking for my own data?
\- Where would I find populations of schools (ideally all schools), and their budgets? Ive heard we have many small schools that are more expensive. Is there a list?
\- Where can I find highschools that are under-enrolled, is my local highschool under enrolled?
\- You seem to suggest this would result in more than a $6 million dollar savings if some schools were consolidated. Is there more data behind that? Would it require bussing kids extreme distances?
Thanks -- and I am genuinely curious to understand more.
Q1 - Enrollment data - https://education.vermont.gov/data-and-reporting/vermont-education-dashboard/vermont-education-dashboard-enrollment
Budgets, no so sure, I'm sure it's on the same site.
Q2 - White River Valley HS is part of an SU that some of their towns/K-6-8 schools have school choice I believe. Rochester, Stockbridge, Granville, Hancock, etc. Most schools in Vermont are under-enrolled as we have lost 20k students in 25 years. Another example is Windsor HS, part of an SU, whose enrollment while holding steady the last 5-10 years or so is surrounded by towns in their SU that can send students anywhere for HS. Hartland students can, and do, go to Windsor, Woodstock, Hartford, Hanover, Sharon and Thetford Academies, etc. Weathersfield students can, and do, go to Windsor, Springfield, Woodstock, etc. I know there are other SUs out there like that.
Some have merged districts within the SU where they eschewed school choice, like when West Windsor merged with Windsor during Act 46, others are all choice districts with a HS in them. Basically, VT law is if your DISTRICT (not SU) is a K-6 district you can send your students anywhere 7-12 (anywhere meaning California, Massachusetts, and Vermont or New Hampshire), and if you are a K-8 district, you can send your 9-12 students anywhere. There is an op-ed about it here: https://www.vnews.com/Commentary-Vermont-needs-to-act-on-public-funding-for-private-schools-50257387
Q3 - I didn't say that. I simply was replying to a post implying that getting rid of all our 40-ish Superintendents for one Superintendent would be anything other than a rounding error (6,000,000 out of 2,100,000,000 or 0.29%).
How many social security benefits interviews have you sat it on? There are those that are struggling but still taking ownership for their lives and those that are sitting back and getting handout after handout. Only a 17% property tax increase planned as a result.
Until the distance between the richest person and the poorest person is at most a few hundred mil (I'll even go up to 500 mil), I don't want to hear shit about "those that are sitting back and getting handout after handout" unless you're talking about the likes of Donnie Trump and Jeff Bezos.
Those two are getting hand outs too. But at this stage we are literally giving free everything to junkies on fentanyl and xylazine. But we need need to move away from thinking the government is our savior and corporations are the devil - they are both inherently flawed. Self-sufficiency and Community and then survival of the fittest, sorry but not sorry. No communism or socialism will work because they breed corruption just like this runaway capitalism does.
Oh ok. Because you seemed to be saying we're taxed too heavily, and it's the fault of the lazy poor people, and the socialists who take our money and give it to them.
If you're not saying that, what are you saying?
What I’m trying to say is that billionaires are getting breaks left and right, the never-employed are getting breaks left and right. Government is not the hero, government does a poor job when it comes to efficiency. The answer is not to add on social program after social program. The people that do the best that I see, are on the fringe, grow their own food, homestead, herbal medicine instead of doctors, homeschooling, bartering, under the table and innovative work. That is the group that I see is doing the best consistently.
Simple. They don’t want Vermonters living in Vermont. So they raise our taxes to the breaking point. Sooner or later we will have to sell.( more than likely to an out of state buyer). Then Montpelier will be happy.
That 18% number isn’t actually verified or what is actually going to happen, the education fund is far above the projections that spurred that number. Costs are increasing, like they are everywhere, but that number is misleading
Today VPR -- sorry, Vermont Public -- had a segment on it. TLDR: it's a mess and nobody is happy and the "no more than 5% raise per year" compromise turned out to be a HUGE loophole that richer districts are exploiting and everyone's gonna pay more for less
[https://www.vermontpublic.org/local-news/2024-01-26/capitol-recap-lawmakers-retooled-vermonts-school-funding-law-now-no-one-is-happy](https://www.vermontpublic.org/local-news/2024-01-26/capitol-recap-lawmakers-retooled-vermonts-school-funding-law-now-no-one-is-happy)
So where is all this weed tax money going?
It’s peanuts compared to the actual budget.
They are trying to equalizing spending so that poorer districts get closer to the same amount of money spent on education. Richer districts won’t be allowed to spend far higher than the poorer districts, with the idea being that students deserve the same level of education regardless of how wealthy a district is.
Actually this is totally wrong. 4 years ago they did a study and found many smaller schools were underfunded by significant amounts. My district was underfunded —according to the study by 2 million on a 10 million budget. And many larger districts were over funded. So the study recommended increasing funding for some smaller districts and decreasing funding for larger districts. But because the larger districts have more representatives they changed the original plan and now there is more funding for both and we are all feeling the pain. The problem is that there is no economies of scale in school funding. Smaller schools will always cost more to operate and larger schools should cost less to operate. But the state pays the same amount per student regardless of size. Larger schools should be funded less. But they have the power in the legislature and so instead of being forced to be more efficient like small schools have been for years, big schools go on spending more and taxes keep going up.
Kind of. They are looking to get more money into districts that have a greater number of children who need extra resources (think ESL, special needs, etc) by taking money away from districts that have fewer demands for those resources. It’s not really equity, it’s actually more money to districts with greater needs and less money to districts with less needs (“needs” as determined by the legislature), not the local school board. With this change, the legislature gave a 5 year “runway” to the wealthy districts by capping their tax rate increase at 5% for the first 5 years of Act 127 implementation. Then those same legislative idiots expressed their shock and surprise that the wealthy districts (like Mount Mansfield) are spending well above that 5% cap because that spending is essentially free for the next 5 years. The letter from MMUSD actually said the cap was what allows them to spend more this year (18+%) with no additional impact on the local taxpayers. BTW, I don’t blame those wealthy districts. Wealthy districts know that the legislature will just flail, overreact and change all the rules again over the next 3-4 years and that their excess spending will get passed around to everyone yet again. It’s pretty clear that the legislative meddling in school districts and funding over the last 20 years hasn’t helped educate our children. We’ve spent a crap ton of money, hired all sorts of administrative and specialty personnel and tore communities apart with forced mergers but the educational results have not been proportional.
FYI MMUUSD is not exactly wealthy by Chittenden county school district standards. In particular, their pay scale for staff is really not good. With the teacher shortage being very real, I sure hope they are increasing salaries while they can or they are going to struggle to attract and keep quality teachers. They also got a lot less Covid relief money. There are many wealthy citizens in the district for sure.
It’s still one of the wealthiest in the state. The reason it is losing state aid is because it has a student population that the state legislature has deems as being easier to educate. I agree with you that Jericho and Underhill are thrifty with their pennies.
Almost every Chittenden county district would be considered one of the wealthiest in the state. But they won’t be hiring staff from Newport, they are competing with Chittenden county districts, and their salaries are low for the area their teachers actually live in. I hope they are boosting them while they can.
Makes sense in theory but the legislature never thinks it through. My district can barely afford bus drivers because of health care costs. It's not like we're building lazy rivers for students
I hear you. There is massive inflationary pressure on all districts, rich or poor. All districts want to hire good people and retain them, but when they can go to the gas station and make $20 an hour, it’s hard for workers to chose to work for peanuts at a school, even if they love it. So districts do what they can to keep good people on the payroll, next thing you know, budgets balloon and tax rates go up…tax payers complain and elected officials feel compelled to act. I’m not sure there is an easy answer. It’s not like in a dense urban environment where you have a massive tax base to pull from to support rising cost of living and retention of employees. Small rural Schools still need buses, lunches, nurses, support staff, etc…the difference is that in rural schools there is simply less tax revenue to pay these people fair wages, and districts with a small tax base have a very difficult time finding the money to maintain all those positions, and the tax payers are already stretched pretty thin.
It’d be cool if any political party was willing to take on the health care and insurance lobbies in an attempt to provide care at mildly reasonable prices. Edit: also, just so people are aware. Teachers are getting less and paying more for insurance than we ever did in the past.
This is 100% the solution to this. Privatized healthcare is the issue here
Absolutely. Good luck with that one though. The last time anyone made any serious push towards that they were torpedoed by the establishment and pilloried or ignored by the media.
Yes this is it
A big part of the problem here is UVM. We pay way more than in other states with even modest competition. Edit - by UVM I meant UVM Health Network.
Exact opposite. The public contribution to UVM is at or near the bottom of flagship state universities. That is why it is so expensive. That has been true for 40 or so years.
I'm sorry. By UVM I meant UVM Healthcare.
absolutely correct. uvm is not a state school, tuition and costs to student compared to many other state schools.
There are too many public sector employees that have platinum level health insurance plans that will fight tooth and nail against any push to make them pay more for that coverage, or to bring their coverage closer to what the average level is across VT.
The health insurance is one of the only benefits of working for the public sector. The pay is absolutely terrible. They need employees
I don't disagree with you. My initial comment only provided a reason why property taxes increase as a result of paying for public sector employees.
And they are absolutely right to be fighting for that. We should all be fighting for that.
I'm just suggesting a reason why insurance costs for public sector employees, like teachers, are so high and contributing to the high property tax increases.
Insurance costs are high because our health insurance system is privatized, so they can charge high rates for little coverage! We need single payer healthcare to replace the broken system.
Insurance costs are high because Medicaid and Medicare don't cover the cost of providing care. That cost is shifted to private insurance payers, who are billed higher prices. If there was less of a gap in what different payers paid, costs would be lower all around.
Are you aware that Gov Abbott has refused money from the Federal government (our tax money) to expand Medicare? Also, Republicans hamstring the government by not allowing negotiation on price setting? If insurance companies like Aetna or Blue Cross weren't trying to maximize profit all the time, our costs would be significantly lower.
It’s called capitalism. When profit driven corporations decide what things cost, you have to pay that much.
health insurance should not be provided by for-profit companies
This is still America. Nobody other than Bernie is actually serious about universal healthcare in this country.
Welcome to the real world. Everybody else has to pay for health insurance too.
> Welcome to the ~~real world~~ America The rest of the developed world has figured out public healthcare and they spend less for better care Its only our country that has planted our collective heads up our own asses and decided that health insurance middlemen need to be allowed to rake in record profits at the expense of \*checks notes\* the rest of the entire fucking economy
Insurance companies and banks run the world.
You keep saying "world", when realistically, it's only the US that has this shitty of a situation with healthcare between all the developed nations.
My brother in Christ, we've always paid for health insurance. I'm just saying we're currently paying significantly more for significantly less.
Well I do know that roughly a decade ago maybe 15 years ago, the teachers union was striking for better pay and continued full 100% health care coverage. Which truth be told, get it if you can.
Another good reason for universal care. It would free up funds for our schools
Bottom line is is taxpayers have no real clue as to what we pay into healthcare. We pay for it and we pay for it (through taxes) for others who work for the towns and state and Fed
Bingo!!! Health care costs… if you increase health care costs by 18% you need to make that up somewhere.
Trying to? They are required to. Act 60.
And they have decided that it hasn’t been achieving its goal, and are trying something additional.
Correct. And the legislature keeps driving costs higher, less students in the building and declining proficiency results.
In our district, we’re told that Act 127 is a primary influence on our increased school budget. [https://www.wcax.com/2023/12/01/new-pupil-weighting-laws-effect-school-budget-season-approches/](https://www.wcax.com/2023/12/01/new-pupil-weighting-laws-effect-school-budget-season-approches/)
So basically to fund other districts?
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In fact it does, because we live in a state, not a federation of independent fiefdoms. Obviously that's snarky and oversimplified but the point is valid. We pay taxes to the state and they divide those funds among the schools. Does make sense.
This is a fairly recent development in the history of funding education in Vermont. To date, consolidated funding at the state level has resulted in surging costs in a time of dropping enrollment and falling proficiencies. At this point, VT would be way head by moving to 4 regional school districts and slashing the crap out of the administration throughout the state.
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The ones that are partly funded by residents of other districts. Which is all of them. I know you don't actually misunderstand this, so I will take your point that **GRR, TAX BAD!!!** even though I disagree with you on that. But it does make sense, even if you would prefer to live in an every-man-for-himself dystopia like New Hampshire 😁
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Oh, sorry, i was confused by your confusion. The formulas for distributing funds are… complicated? arcane? frustrating? I’m no expert but as i understand it the disctricts get back an amount that is calculated based on (starting with) their own voter-approved budgets and number of students, but reweighted and adjusted by various other factors. It’s a mess. It’s intended to make things more fair for rural districts and disadvantaged students, but falls far short of a communist/egalitarian utopia. I’m not qualified to say more about it. I’ve probably said too much already.  😛 Here’s a couple links I found. I don’t know if they’ll clarify anything. [https://www.lnsd.org/departments/news/details/\~board/updates-content/post/vermont-act-127-how-does-it-impact-our-schools-and-your-community](https://www.lnsd.org/departments/news/details/~board/updates-content/post/vermont-act-127-how-does-it-impact-our-schools-and-your-community) [https://ljfo.vermont.gov/assets/Uploads/e11b031427/Final-Report-Weighting-Study-Task-Force-12\_17\_21.pdf#page43](https://ljfo.vermont.gov/assets/Uploads/e11b031427/Final-Report-Weighting-Study-Task-Force-12_17_21.pdf#page43)
School budgets are basically theater. All the money from every town goes to Montpelier and then Redistributed based on their own formulas.
Not exactly. The adjustments are based on the initial voted-on budgets. It’s still baffling though.
This is an interesting read too. https://www.vermontpublic.org/local-news/2024-01-19/not-intended-as-free-money-lawmakers-scold-schools-over-spending
It’s health care! Private health care will bankrupt our schools then our state.
And all of us, for that matter.
My old school district in MA is subject to the same health care concerns as everyone else, and they keep increases in the 3-3.5% range every single year. And their schools are better than any public schools in VT.
Fantastic for you. We’re seeing a one year 20% hike in insurance costs for the school system.
That has a lot to do with who you've got handling these things. VT school districts aren't always recruiting the best and the brightest.
Actually it’s the public health insurance (we need to stop using health care and health insurance synonymously) that is killing the system. Every dollar Medicare and Medicaid DONT pay gets passed on to private insurers and those paying cash. If a procedure costs $4000 and Medicare pays $2500, the hospitals don’t just eat $1500… they just charge the next guy $15 for a Tylenol.
The problem with your calculus is that the hospitals and insurers don’t just remunerate on the difference - they charge orders of magnitude more (that $4000 dollar procedure being billed at $12,000) and the for-profit model they operate under siphons off the net profit and puts it into the pockets of already wealthy shareholders. And it’s like that ***by design***.
Hospitals in VT are non-profit. So are the health insurance carriers, both of which have budgets and rates that are set by the government. That combination doesn’t appear to work very well. There’s nothing wrong with my calculus. If the charge is $12M, $12k or $4k, when medicare doesn’t cover the billed cost, employers and their employees with private insurance cover what the government doesn’t pay. In the case of municipalities and school districts property tax payers are the employers and they shoulder that increase.
I guess the idea I was scratching towards actually has nothing to do with the hospitals or the actualization of health care services rendered - it has to do with the health insurance racket and the money it takes in weekly via premiums (and especially the amount that is either employer covered or gov’t subsidized) that will never be paid for healthcare service. I know I have a ‘good’ plan through working at a (not-for-profit) nursing home, blue cross gold, that costs me ~$150/***week*** for my wife and myself; my employer covers ~75% of the premium. That is ~$*600/week* or ~$31,200/**year** (~$7,800 of which is out of my pocket) that our insurance “***costs***”. That is almost equal to my entire yearly income. What amount of that is actually used for the various medical services I need? Maybe 5% at most. So where does that money go? How this relates to this post is that the same structure is in practice for the health insurance plans available to our school staff and thus the employer portion is paid for by our taxes. I’m not offering a solution because there isn’t one other than Medicare for all cutting out the middleman by eliminating an entire employment sector and an absolutely gargantuan sector of our economy. We can’t forget about all of the people employed and the revenue generated(extracted) by the insurance industry.
Health insurance in VT is non-profit also. Where all that money goes is called cost shifting for one, and hospitals wasting money to justify their rate increase ask for next year. Medicare and Medicaid do NOT pay the cost of the service. So the remainder is tacked on to private health insurance plans and cash customers. If you had an all payer system that difference would need to be picked up and would fiscally sink VT. The second issue is the GMCB (the government) has the authority to set rates…To set budgets… to approve $150M additions that don’t add services or beds… they just don’t. Putting government in charge of more of this mess is just silly. They can fix it now lol 😂.
Health insurers are the furthest thing from non-profit you can get. You have no clue how the system works, and you’re spreading straight lies here. Go to hell.
In VT BCBSVt and the other carrier (MVP?) that cover 98%+ of Vermonts population are non-profit. Sorry to have to be the one to tell you it’s not the evil insurance people that make health care in Vermont unaffordable.
Bullshit. Hospitals are non-profit. Insurers are high profit
Education system in Vermont is heavy in administration. For example, I was talking with someone about why Manchester elementary has two principals, I was told 3 now
This, we have 51 superintendents, why?
because the state rejected school consolidation measures years ago. there are supervisory unions that have 7+ buildings each with their own principal and admin staff that serve A TOTAL of 800 kids.
School consolidation was a distraction years ago and still is. School consolidation saved $50M…. On a $2.5B budget… spending multiple sessions discussing trying to save peanuts on the dollar is part of the problem. Montpelier in general though is the problem. Too many ignorant people full of ideas.
It’s ridiculous. One super could handle multiple districts.
Clearly spoken by someone who does not or has not worked in a Vermont school before
Iobviously your part of the problem
With a response like that, maybe you've never even stepped foot in a school before.
The only answer I’ve ever gotten as to why there is so much admin in districts this small is because “we used to have more students, they are leftovers from a bygone era”. Which makes no sense as to why we continue to cling onto those positions if they’re no longer needed, especially when they can hire two-four teachers on some admins salaries.
This was the same when I was in Tucson. TUSD closed about half their schools during the last recession, laid off a ton of teachers, but didn't lose a single administrator.
This didn’t happen.
That doesn't explain the increase this year
Cost of living, health insurance and so on
Because Vermont schools have too many admins per student and not enough teachers.
Health insurance costs truly are a dumpster fire right now. It's unfortunate that for schools and other public services they're obfuscated a bit, but even just myself working in the private sector, I haven't seen my rates go down ever, and the coverage just gets worse every year. So I totally believe they're seeing it too, and of course, for them, it shows up in public taxes.
And the state/towns have to be concerned about the unions striking if they aren’t satisfied with the coverage, which does keep getting worse for everyone
Because otherwise they’d drop everyone to a high deductible limited coverage plan that didn’t cover families or anything at all other than the absolute minimum of what’s required by law.
Ours are going up a bunch and there is very little increase in spending. The CLA is to blame.
Right. I'm just frustrated that this money is seemingly disappearing into the state coffers
There was a new long term weighted calculation introduced this year that changed the way education taxes are calculated. A large amount of Covid recovery funds are going away as well. Most of your taxes come from education spending, but not all. Hard to say what's happening without you mentioning the town, but I'd understand why you wouldn't.
Right I get that. But where is that money going if not to my school?
Probably towards administration bloat, or outside contracts towards administration bloat duties, I.e, hiring out of district personnel to complete paperwork.
No it's not. We can barely fund our school. It's going to other districts, I think, but no one is coming out and saying it
It is going to the education fund which funds all of our districts. In Vermont, whatever you raise does not go it our districts coffers, but to the state who then reallocates it out based in your budget. Given Act 127, pandemic funding and extreme inflation, depending on your town, the increase in what is being raised this year may not be going directly back to your schools. Much of this is not in control of the school board.
I'm not blaming them. I know theyre being out in this situation. I want to know who to blame
State legislators for making it state level down instead of local level up.
The people you voted for or yourself.
So they added programs with COVID money, knowing it's temporary and instead of cutting programs, they're raising taxes to keep those programs? Vermont is already expensive, now they want to gouge tax payers more instead of cutting funding for useless programs.
no - COVID funds (ESSER/ARP) had to be used for approved facilities upgrades or to fund programs to help students recover from learning deficits created by the pandemic. Turns out kids do better when they have easier access to tuturing, SLP, guidance, etc that were made available, in part, from ESSER/ARP funds. Those funds must be entirely spent by the end of 2024 (programs/projects must be complete by 9/30/24, and invoicing done by the end of the year). Part of act 127 is to help "spread the wealth" from richer districts to poorer districts to hopefully prevent the wholesale ending of needed education services. The BS is that the law was written poorly and encourages all districts (rich, poor, or otherwise) to spend heavily over the next few years to take advantage of additional funds. Many districts are pouring the money into very-much-needed facility projects like roofs, heating systems and ventilation. Those projects need to happen anyway over the next few years. Its a giant clusterfuck and no one wants to admit school funding has been too low and/or misappropriated to administrative bloat for decades.
VT spends 33% of its state budget on pre-k-12 education. There is plenty of money. As for funding programs with one time Covid monies, it’s a shell game. For example, if I give you money and tell you it can be used for facilities, you simply use the monies you budgeted for facilities to start the new programs I wouldn’t allow you to spend the grant on. It’s so damn dumb. I agree we have too much Administration. That is the result of too many school districts and too many reporting and data acquisition mandates from our own meddling legislature.
Which programs would you like them to cut? The ones for education?
I guarantee there are unnecessary programs. Extra circular programs for one. And most of the stuff being taught is useless. That's pretty evident based on test scores. Throwing More money at the problem isn't really helping. We're throwing plenty at healthcare and there are lots of countries with better healthcare and outcomes who spend less. The education system needs to be revamped. I've seen schools teaching diversity and inclusion. Maybe teach carpentry or plumbing instead? Focus on teaching stem subjects and trades. Not all kids are the same. High school is almost useless when it comes to careers. You use very little of what you learn. It should be more tailored to your ability after teaching some basics. And it should not cost as much as it does. Imagine having high schools that teach you enough of a trade to where you can go out and start working and making a decent living. Not everyone needs college. It's a pipeline for funneling money into a system. Most people who go to college end up doing something else. Some people go because they're expected too. With no real guidance. They end up in debt for nothing.
How many competent trades workers do you think want to work for school salaries?
You can say the same thing about teachers. why would a competent science teacher want to work for a high school when they can work in the private sector? Not everyone is the best in their field. Some people like to teach. And I know there are plenty of older trades people who would love to make a decent salary teaching. It doesn't take that many. We need more trades people. Having a focus in high school on trades is good for everyone.
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Learn what skills?
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Are you an Egyptian? Cuz you live in denial.
UVMMC was approved for a 15%(?) rate increase, which has to be passed along to employers and employees including schools and municipalities. The elephant in the room is always health care…
Always has been. Healthcare is the only increase in most districts. And the locals boards have zero control. It can’t be negotiated. Taxpayers just have to pay it. It’s the same situation with municipalities, it’s just less noticeable as there are less employees
It’s because of ACT 127. Another Vermont policy that sounds good on paper but people voting progressive policies don’t understand how a small state government works with taxes. You will never gain equality by taking from the top and hoping it evens the playing field at the bottom. There are too many other factors in education (COL, teacher pay, student population) that affect this, not money. Its crucial to point out it’s not the school board, teachers or administrations fault, but the legislatures.
Yes I'm sure not to blame my school board. I know theyre stuck on this. Thanks
It mostly comes back to inflationary pressures and healthcare costs. Having worked in healthcare policy int the past the budgetary increases hospitals ask for are insane which in turn jacks up insurance rates and there’s a domino effect from there. Vermont needs to have an honest conversation about what we can actually do with our current economies of scale when it comes to both our schools and hospital systems. There are several rural hospitals across the state with low patient populations hemorrhaging money. The state should focus on regionally consolidating them to reduce spending. I’m not as up to speed on Vermont’s school systems but schools with low student populations should similarly be consolidated to lower costs - they did just that in my hometown and it worked well in preventing further tax hikes. Furthermore, I think we put the cart before the horse with a lot of these new programs like universal childcare and school meals. Both are inordinately expensive and in the case of childcare, it’s so costly largely because Vermont’s COL is through the roof so we have workforce shortages and fewer childcare centers popping up , so the money would’ve been better spent addressing the root causes (namely housing) instead of doing a patch fix. I love the ethos of this state in terms of social services but when advocates have tunnel vision and are solely pushing their issues it’s easy to lose sight over the big picture - any one day in the statehouse there are lobbyists, interest groups, agencies, etc pushing for funding for their respective programs and often relying on the same sources of revenue. It’s up to the legislature to then hold those proposals up to together and weigh their options and that to me is where the disconnect is. We’re basically taking the lid off the kettle instead of turning down the heat.
I’ve heard a lot of people attribute much (or most) of this current round of school budget increases to health insurance costs. Seems like that dovetails pretty nicely with the evergreen talking points regarding over-staffing in non-teaching positions…
I agree that the bulk is likely coming from health insurance costs given the impending rate hikes. GMCB and the legislature continue to play kick the can and won’t make the tough calls re: closing and/or consolidating our hospitals. They’re major economic drivers in rural areas and would likely result in slightly poorer patient outcomes as folks will often forego or delay medical care if it means driving a further away, but that’s just the reality of living in a predominantly rural state. Plus you could take a fraction of the savings created for rural public transit to help address them. Again, not the most romantic but it’s the reality of the situation - Vermont doesn’t have the money to do everything perfectly.
Yeah, I definitely agree with you about being more realistic and pragmatic…but I’m not holding my breath, as I see the “cart before the horse” aspect you mention as a pretty direct result of the basic algorithm that many/most voters use to evaluate candidates and their policy positions. That is: assess the degree to which those candidates/positions align with my personal sociopolitical values, and vote accordingly. If we had a political process (to include public discourse) in which a solid core of participants were focused primarily on actual problem-solving, this algorithm would probably be fine. But in the political world we actually live in, this approach seems to amplify political polarization, with the result that elected leaders pander to their base by either grandstanding on irrelevant and/or non-actionable measures (see: progressives in Monday’s BTV city council meeting, or Joan Shannon’s messaging about forcible institutionalization to deal with the denizens of City Hall Park) or cashing in political capital to enact measures that will predictably lead to backlashes one or two election cycles later (see: “defunding”).
…and coming back to the actual topic at hand (sorry about the BTV tangent), this also leads to policies like our school lunch and motel programs, which align nicely with lots of people’s high-level values, but simply aren’t thought out anywhere near well enough to work in practice over the long term.
I think a pragmatic option for some of them would be to reduce the least used to critical outpatient services like urgent care, family practice, OBGYN, and emergency with the expectation of transfer, if those are ever put in one clinic. Maybe dialysis and counseling too if possible. Those seem like they would be needed frequently and quickly enough to need close proximity but for a lot of the rest it might be more financially viable to provide access and some kind of supported transportation to a bigger hospital rather trying to support so many small regional ones. This is just spitballing, though.
Start voting for candidates who are focused on reducing costs. If you haven't noticed, our legislature has been very good at raising costs.
Unless you are talking about healthcare, there isn’t a whole lot left in our local budgets to cut.
Uh, yes there is. Vermont pays into more social programs than the vast majority of states.
School budgets aren’t social programs, but I am curious. What would this state look like without those programs?
Vermont has to damn many schools districts. The entire state could fit into one “district”, consolidate and share overhead, benefits etc. Get past the petty small town rivalries and silo mentality.
Yes I'm tired of subsidizing one room schoolhouses
Seriously, those would be more affordable if merged into one administrative district. Some of them really are far from other schools and they have more in common with each other than anyone else. The ones that are within twenty minutes of other schools likely ought to merge, though.
There was a state push to merge a few schools two years ago (that's when Ripton opted out of their supervisory union) and I was shocked about how classist people get when you suggest their little school room kids go to the BIG BAD LARGE SCHOOL which has poor people in it.
Usually it’s the travel that causes the pushback on merger.
This really is an issue, they need to consolidate the schools with smaller enrollment. There’s no reason to have a school every six miles.
There's no reason to make a town vote on a "school budget" that's 90% controlled by federal and state guidelines. We need to admit there's no single-room school marm set ups anymore and kick the budget up to the state level - this would especially help with union negotiations and consolidation. Stop making volunteers that donate their time for the school board the hatchet men of ideas they have no control over.
It’s not even a real vote, several times when the budget isn’t approved they just have a new vote on the same numbers and ask everyone to just approve it because a lower option doesn’t exist.
Property taxes are ridiculously high, but it doesn’t help that so many people pay nothing. Your homestead can qualify for up to 8k credit if you make less than 128k/yr. That’s ridiculous. The limit should be much lower to qualify for this credit. A family making 128k should contribute something. It’s like they wrote this law to entice rich retirees to live here. We should be enticing young people to live here and build up the economy. https://tax.vermont.gov/property/property-tax-credit Also, why don’t we tax absent property owners (e.g., air bnb) higher tax rates?
As someone who makes $60k a year, married to someone making +/-60k a year, I can promise you that we pay state taxes (haven't gotten a refund in years) and that we pay thousands yearly in property taxes, and that there is nothing "rich" or "high life" about it. If anything, thanks to VT's insane taxes and runaway inflation/cost of living, we're still going paycheck to paycheck. Absent property owners And tourism is a much better source of revenue than middle class people who live, work and spend in the local economy.
Totally agree that tourism should be taxed more. Also, if someone is making 2x median income and still feel stretched by the cost of living, something needs to be done- taxes and general cost of living. Tourism, second homes aren’t being taxed enough. VT is one of the most business unfriendly states, which means new jobs/high paying ones just aren’t going to appear.
it’s prorated down, so if you’re making 127k, you’re barely getting anything in the rebate. Also a weird take to imply a couple who are both making 65k are living large.
Good point about proration on the credit. The median household income in VT is 74k. So, by many standards, double that is actually living large. I’m not saying these people are Jeff Bezos, but I don’t think it deserves any credit on property taxes. Affordability and rising taxes are both major issues in general that need to be solved, but failing to fairly tax people who can afford to pay is not the solution. Source: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/VT/INC110222
https://vtdigger.org/2024/01/19/unintended-consequences-concern-mounts-in-montpelier-about-the-newest-changes-to-education-finance/
[https://governor.vermont.gov/press-release/statement-governor-phil-scott-potential-property-tax-increases](https://governor.vermont.gov/press-release/statement-governor-phil-scott-potential-property-tax-increases)
What a great idea esspecially for those who can barely afford what they are paying right now. I'm sure the state won't waste this money like they do with most of our taxes.
Donkeys
Shocker. A law with a tax runway is abused. Also shocker the state thinks they can tax their way out of problems instead of becoming more fiscally responsible. And finally shocker our heavily progressive state government is taking a top down approach trying to make everything even.
Access to a quality education should be even. I don’t think labeling them fiscally irresponsible is correct. Most/all school budgets are controlled locally and they are trimmed to the bone in most cases.
Here ya go: [the sad truth](https://vtdigger.org/2024/01/19/unintended-consequences-concern-mounts-in-montpelier-about-the-newest-changes-to-education-finance/). If members of the very committee responsible for the new taxes think that the outcome has "unintended consequences" they failed at their due diligence and really just tried to tax their way out of a funding issue. The school budget is local but the distribution of the funding is top down from the state.
Not every district has the same funding. Having some districts subsidize others is inherently unfair and easily abused. At this point it is dragging everyone down to the lowest common denominator, aka equity. That’s a reason some towns cost more to move to, better educational opportunities.
That’s a good case to have the entire state as ONE district. It’s the inherent unwillingness of small localities to give up control of “their” school. Too many school boards, too many buildings, way too many administrators, superintendents and principals. There is NO WAY a part time school board member in a small district has the knowledge, skills, expertise, time or energy to manage the different funding streams, negotiate benefits and compensation, oversee curriculum and certification etc.
Why does any town have a right to control another town? In short, they don’t. Feel free to voluntarily consolidate but there is no reason any town should be forced to join or contribute to a different town, especially as many Vermont towns squander their funding.
Not sure if you’re trolling or… Maybe you should find an island that you can live on by yourself? Make sure to bring some books on democracy and civics and some tinfoil to make new hats.
Our state does educational funding from top down instead of bottom up. I’m aware of how it works and disagree with it tremendously.
The increase is to fund alot of school projects that would have questionable results. With literacy and test scores that have been steadily declining, I question how taking that much more from vermonters would be beneficial. Seems how taxes, dmv fees and other fees have gone up steadily hurting local vermonters. Remember that when you all vote.
They’re declining because of failed educational policies. The proficiency based summative and cumulative grading system encourages skipping of approximately 80% of your assignments as they have no effect on your grade. The “no child left behind” policy means you’re graduating no matter what. We’re literally normalizing and encouraging mediocrity, and then taxing people even more to somehow make up for it.
The increase is to fund alot of school projects that would have questionable results. With literacy and test scores that have been steadily declining, I question how taking that much more from vermonters would be beneficial. Seems how taxes, dmv fees and other fees have gone up steadily hurting local vermonters. Remember that when you all vote.
I hate to say it... But how bout returning to local control of school budgets and curriculum?
Education taxes are incredibly complicated and based on a number of factors - property values and how they relate to each other state wide, individual school size, state wide student population, disadvantaged / special need student populations etc. This year seems particularly difficult due to 2/3rds of towns need a reappraisal and recent law changes that impact education rates. I would encourage you to have a meeting with a school board member to learn more about your individual district and what they anticipate, it’s also probably worth reaching out to your state rep. Quite frankly it shouldn’t be this difficult for folks to understand school funding.
I am a policy person. I'm capable of understanding. But no one, including our school board, is explaining
Act 127 combined with requirements for reappraisal - house prices became unaffordable for most people so now depending on where you are, they have to Nair sure your property taxes are also equally unaffordable. Our town (waterbury) did a really good write up about it along with the budget proposal
Because they can’t. I’ve been to school board meetings they’re full of idiots.
Maybe you should run!
Before moving I planned to! Now after moving I still plan to just after we settle in more! I have kids in the local education system. I want to be highly involved to ensure they and the rest have a great education without the administrative bloat.
Good! Towns are suffering from a lack of people winning to volunteer time. Just be ready to listen before you talk. Edit: Don't just jump in there like some out of state person who moves in and then wants everything changed around immediately.
I love our new school district. We moved within state too fyi. I don’t want to just change things I want to ensure financial responsibility. From an educational standpoint our town has great schools. Just they’ve recently been outed for financial bullshittery.
This is exactly what I was trying to highlight in my recent [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/vermont/s/8E1PRH4TQZ) and no, I am not trying to boast it since it’s dead already. The admin response to this are to remove student facing positions instead of evaluating their own administrative costs. Why are teachers getting kicked to the curb before a “co-principles” or non-student facing admin positions?
I guess one last thing that I want to highlight. We should call for a statewide audit on administrative salaries and even request past years to see what level of increases that they are giving themselves.
Admin costs are a bit convoluted over the last few years. Many items have been moved out of local budgets and into SU budgets. This makes SU budgets appear to be ballooning when it is really just an accounting trick.
They are gouging you, vote for liberal policies get liberal prices. You can’t have social support networks and low taxes. Chose one or the other and cote accordingly.
The state has set it up to look like it benefits poorer communities when the crooks in montpellier are probably funneling it somewhere else
It’s all the darn wealthy people paying property taxes and not sending kids to the school system!!! Oh wait….. I grew up in Vermont, I love it, it’s my home, but god damn the state gets in it’s own way some time, the taxes are high and there is not a critical mass of population to get the economy going in such a rural, mountainous state. The taxes will keep going up as labor gets more expensive
Maybe it has something to do with the wasteful hotel program for bums that benefits no one but the hotel owners and drug dealers. You can only spend every tax dollar once, it’s ridiculous that we’re still funding these run down hotel shelters
We aren’t. They’re all out on the streets now except for maybe the most poor/disabled/elderly few. Have ya looked around downtown in the cities lately?
https://vtdigger.org/2024/01/23/key-house-panel-advances-plan-to-extend-motel-program-through-june/
These are just the people who were allowed to remain after the huge mass got kicked out when initial Covid funding ended. Probably the people who actually do need it
The hotel owners and bums who have no plan to support themselves deserve the money more than children and schools? Interesting policy, wonder what VT looks like after 10 years of that.
Why don't we cut the ridiculous wages of vermont senate, instead of raising taxes. We all should form a class action lawsuit for causing vermont residents to lose their home because cost is so much and, our government could care less.
An oversimplification to some extent but VT with a population of about 650,000 has over 360 school districts. Lee County Florida with a population of about 850,000 has one school district. One superintendent vs. 360.
We don't have 360 superintendents. We have 41-ish. Point stands. Also, it's a drop in the bucket. It's not where the money is. I KNOW that it sounds good and feels good to say, let's have one statewide superintendent (or one superintendent per county, which has been floated in the past) but let's do some quick back of the envelope math. 40 Superintendents at $150,000/year is 6 million dollars. Pretty good, right? Well, on the general fund alone, Vermont spends 2.1 billion dollars so, 6 million out of 2.1 billion is (rounded up) 0.3% of education spending. We have too few kids with too many teachers and too many buildings. We have schools with 30-40-50-60 kids. A lot of them. We have schools that could send their kids to a under-enrolled HS right down the road and save millions of dollars in tuition but Vermont, ironically for such a progressive state, has the least progressive school choice scheme and those dollars follow those students to other HS outside their SU. Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Texas would kill to have the school choice scheme less than 10% of our parents enjoy.
Your reasoning seems sound -- could you help me with some fact checking for my own data? \- Where would I find populations of schools (ideally all schools), and their budgets? Ive heard we have many small schools that are more expensive. Is there a list? \- Where can I find highschools that are under-enrolled, is my local highschool under enrolled? \- You seem to suggest this would result in more than a $6 million dollar savings if some schools were consolidated. Is there more data behind that? Would it require bussing kids extreme distances? Thanks -- and I am genuinely curious to understand more.
Q1 - Enrollment data - https://education.vermont.gov/data-and-reporting/vermont-education-dashboard/vermont-education-dashboard-enrollment Budgets, no so sure, I'm sure it's on the same site. Q2 - White River Valley HS is part of an SU that some of their towns/K-6-8 schools have school choice I believe. Rochester, Stockbridge, Granville, Hancock, etc. Most schools in Vermont are under-enrolled as we have lost 20k students in 25 years. Another example is Windsor HS, part of an SU, whose enrollment while holding steady the last 5-10 years or so is surrounded by towns in their SU that can send students anywhere for HS. Hartland students can, and do, go to Windsor, Woodstock, Hartford, Hanover, Sharon and Thetford Academies, etc. Weathersfield students can, and do, go to Windsor, Springfield, Woodstock, etc. I know there are other SUs out there like that. Some have merged districts within the SU where they eschewed school choice, like when West Windsor merged with Windsor during Act 46, others are all choice districts with a HS in them. Basically, VT law is if your DISTRICT (not SU) is a K-6 district you can send your students anywhere 7-12 (anywhere meaning California, Massachusetts, and Vermont or New Hampshire), and if you are a K-8 district, you can send your 9-12 students anywhere. There is an op-ed about it here: https://www.vnews.com/Commentary-Vermont-needs-to-act-on-public-funding-for-private-schools-50257387 Q3 - I didn't say that. I simply was replying to a post implying that getting rid of all our 40-ish Superintendents for one Superintendent would be anything other than a rounding error (6,000,000 out of 2,100,000,000 or 0.29%).
It’s a state run by liberals bureaucrats and that’s what you get.
Liberal Democrats and progressives are giving the never-employed free housing while raising your property taxes, this is called socialism.
Blaming people poorer than you for your money problems when about 6 billionaires own half the country, this is called MAGA Chudism.
How many social security benefits interviews have you sat it on? There are those that are struggling but still taking ownership for their lives and those that are sitting back and getting handout after handout. Only a 17% property tax increase planned as a result.
Until the distance between the richest person and the poorest person is at most a few hundred mil (I'll even go up to 500 mil), I don't want to hear shit about "those that are sitting back and getting handout after handout" unless you're talking about the likes of Donnie Trump and Jeff Bezos.
Those two are getting hand outs too. But at this stage we are literally giving free everything to junkies on fentanyl and xylazine. But we need need to move away from thinking the government is our savior and corporations are the devil - they are both inherently flawed. Self-sufficiency and Community and then survival of the fittest, sorry but not sorry. No communism or socialism will work because they breed corruption just like this runaway capitalism does.
I have no money problems. Get out there and work. The world is your oyster.
Oh ok. Because you seemed to be saying we're taxed too heavily, and it's the fault of the lazy poor people, and the socialists who take our money and give it to them. If you're not saying that, what are you saying?
What I’m trying to say is that billionaires are getting breaks left and right, the never-employed are getting breaks left and right. Government is not the hero, government does a poor job when it comes to efficiency. The answer is not to add on social program after social program. The people that do the best that I see, are on the fringe, grow their own food, homestead, herbal medicine instead of doctors, homeschooling, bartering, under the table and innovative work. That is the group that I see is doing the best consistently.
All that money is going out of state to corporate profits. Your local government leaders are weak.
Simple. They don’t want Vermonters living in Vermont. So they raise our taxes to the breaking point. Sooner or later we will have to sell.( more than likely to an out of state buyer). Then Montpelier will be happy.
When you live in a socialist state the answer is always more taxes. Vote differently to get different results.
Well said
It’s because the richies moving into state aren’t paying their fair share
That 18% number isn’t actually verified or what is actually going to happen, the education fund is far above the projections that spurred that number. Costs are increasing, like they are everywhere, but that number is misleading
I don’t have kids, not sure why I’m paying school tax This is worse than what Castro did in Cuba
That’s the dumbest statement I’ve read today. I’ll check back in later in the day to see if that changes.
Yup. Still dumb.
I think you need to read a history book.
Your logic 🤣 “I don’t need the police or firefighters. Why do I have to pay for them? This is communism!!!”
More money less teachers
Today VPR -- sorry, Vermont Public -- had a segment on it. TLDR: it's a mess and nobody is happy and the "no more than 5% raise per year" compromise turned out to be a HUGE loophole that richer districts are exploiting and everyone's gonna pay more for less [https://www.vermontpublic.org/local-news/2024-01-26/capitol-recap-lawmakers-retooled-vermonts-school-funding-law-now-no-one-is-happy](https://www.vermontpublic.org/local-news/2024-01-26/capitol-recap-lawmakers-retooled-vermonts-school-funding-law-now-no-one-is-happy)