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Ousted senator, teacher launch school-funding initiative

MONTPELIER - Schools in Vermont would be required to spend 65 cents of every education dollar on classroom-based needs under a proposal outlined Thursday by an outgoing, one-term Republican state senator from Rutland.

Called the "65 Cent Solution" by its supporters, the campaign unveiled by Sen. Wendy Wilton and Rutland County social studies teacher Curtis Hier is identical to efforts already under way in nearly a dozen other states.

It also marks the latest in a minor flurry of education finance proposals that have begun blowing around the Capitol and throughout Vermont in the weeks before the Legislative session begins about a month from now.

The state's education commissioner is looking into the feasibility of reducing the number of school districts from more than 280 to about 63; the governor is poised to propose, for the second straight year, a cap on education spending; and a group of Republican representatives calling themselves Revolt & Repeal want to yank the entire funding system out by its roots and start over.

Wilton's plan is the least ambitious of the lot, although she and Hier - who, coincidentally, is the brother of Rep. Joyce Errecart, a Shelburne Republican who is a founding member of Revolt & Repeal - say their goal is largely voter awareness of how education dollars are spent.

"I am as committed as ever to education reform" Wilton said at a press conference here. "How our education dollars get spent is a compelling issue, and I'm going to continue to work on it."

Thanks to her defeat at the polls last month, she will no longer be able to work on education reform from the Senate Education Committee on which she served for the last two years.

"We are encouraging school boards to look carefully at their budgets over the next month or so," she said.

"Voters will be more savvy this March."

Wilton said that according to statistics compiled by state education officials, classroom expenditures totaled about 61 percent of school spending in 2005, down from about 63 percent four years earlier. The 65 percent benchmark is considered by some experts to represent the appropriate allocation to classroom activities.

The movement was started by the founder of the Web-based retailer Overstock.com, and it so far has led to four states adopting policies requiring that schools spend 65 percent of their budgets on classrooms and teachers. At least six other states and Vermont are in the nascent stages of joining that group.

Not everyone thinks the idea is a good one, most notably the National Education Association. At the Vermont chapter of the teacher's union, president Angelo Dorta refers to it as the "65 percent deception" because, he said, it is based on a false set of assumptions.

"At first, the 65 percent solution is a simple and seductive notion," Dorta writes in the most recent edition of the union's newspaper.

"The proposal seems to make children the top priority."

The deception, he says, comes from excluding from classroom expenditures the costs of teacher training, student support and food services, among other things.

He also says that such a mandate is anathema to Vermont's tradition of local control.

"We don't want additional, politically motivated gimmicks such as the 65 percent deception to plague public education in Vermont," he said.

Hier, who has taught social studies at Fair Haven Union High School for 20 years, disputes Dorta's assertions. Hier has been on the receiving end of criticism for espousing his views, and he has sued the school district because he claims he was overlooked for a promotion based on his support of the 65 percent benchmark.

"I am a teacher, that's what I do," said Hier, a former NEA member who has written a book about education reform. He said that over the course of his career, he has seen an explosion of bureaucracy that has buried teachers and impeded their ability to do their jobs.

"There's a financial tradeoff with this," he said. "The growing bureaucracy makes the job of classroom teachers more difficult."

Wilton and Hier said they didn't expect their efforts to lead to any laws mandating the 65 percent spending limit, which, if achieved statewide, would shift about $10 million from administrative costs toward classrooms, the organization predicted.