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Colchester schools: Spending too little on classroom?

Colchester schools appear well-resourced and filled with skilled teachers, but should the district put more of its money into its classrooms? A recently formed watchdog group that focuses on classroom spending says yes. Colchester school officials say not necessarily, and question some of the group's underlying premises and statistics.

The group, First Class Education for Vermont, was formed last year by former Republican state Sen. Wendy Wilton and Fair Haven Union High School teacher Curtis Hier.

"We believe that schools are over-spending on administration, clerical staff, non-classroom type spending," said Hier. "Our graph shows a steady decline in the state average for classroom spending. It was around 65 percent and now it's at 61 percent. We believe that's unsustainable."

The group would like Vermonters to examine school budgets more carefully to see what portion of their tax dollars goes to non-classroom things such as food services, school nurses and transportation.

The organization recently posted information on its Web site ranking Colchester near the bottom in classroom spending in the state, with only two supervisory districts ranked lower. Using the Vermont Department of Education's FY 2005, First Class Education for Vermont claims that Colchester spends only 57.59 percent of its money on the classroom. At the same time, it reported that Colchester Middle School has received a check mark for failing to meet Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) goals.

"What we're trying to do is educate school boards and voters," Hier said. "We would like them to work together to adopt a benchmark that they can look at and see if they're spending their budget most effectively. We're putting some numbers out to local places like Colchester and we're hoping that it starts a hearty discussion."

Colchester superintendent Larry Waters said he's all for hearty discussion of school spending but he believes there are problems with the way Hier's group is interpreting information. For a start, he points out, the figures on the Web site refer to the district as it was two years ago. Moreover, he says the calculations need clarification.

"I'm not sure where they got their figures or how they calculated the information. I don't regard this group as one providing an accurate representation of our community or school," he said. "I don't believe our administrative cost is excessive. Our administrative salaries in the district for the next school year are about $1.1 million. In comparison to our overall budget our salaries are a very small part."

Gwen Carmolli, Colchester's Curriculum Director, also queries the accuracy of the information provided on the organization's Web site.

"They said the middle school has not met AYP but the middle school had a first-time check mark for AYP which meant that the school did not meet AYP in two sub-categories. In reading they met it (AYP) in every category. In math they met it for all students, but if you took two sub-categories - students with free and reduced lunch and students with disabilities - they did not meet it," Carmolli noted. "So that was a little bit of misinformation."

Carmolli said First Class was also wrong with its teacher/administration ratio for the middle school, with two administrators for 50 teachers. Moreover, she questioned the premise that all school districts can be compared as if they are like entities. She pointed out that a district like Colchester has much larger school populations than many others in the state and that size triggers federal and state mandates. In addition, all districts are not equal when it comes to students with special needs.

"We don't have the ability to say we're not going to hire a special educator. That's mandated and we have to cover the responsibilities of our IEPs (Individual Education Plans) and our special needs students," she said. "We are a larger school. It is likely that we have some full-time staff because we are a larger school. Small, rural schools in rural districts may be sharing one music teacher between all schools so if you look at supervisory unions their numbers might be low. It skews the numbers a little bit."

Hier agrees that the district is comparatively large, but says that really provokes more questions about how much money is being spent on non-classroom costs.

"For some reason a lot of money is going to administration or support personnel and it's not going to the classroom. I don't know why, so what I'm trying to do is start a discussion as to why that's happening," he said. "Voters across the state can ask what's going on in 2008. I think it's good for people to examine things."

Carmolli agrees that the statistics raise an interesting conversation.

"But I'm not sure that the data is as comparable as they would like it to be. I also think that it's very difficult to talk about school spending but not include in the conversation about the mandates that schools have," she said.

"We have to have health education; we have to have technology education; we have to have guidance counselors, and we have to have librarians. These things are not optional for us, so we cannot trim at will."