News Articles

December 13, 2006

Directing money toward classrooms

Vermonters who live in supervisory union districts know that they can vote their local school budgets up or down every March. They also know that they get to vote on their union high school budgets. But they may not give much thought to the fact that they are not allowed the opportunity to vote on central office expenses for their supervisory unions. Big deal, one might think. Except that it really is a big deal.

In fiscal year 2005, approximately $116 million dollars, or roughly 11 percent of all public K-12 expenditures, was spent with no accountability to local voters. Eleven percent was average. In some supervisory unions, it was quite a bit more. For Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union, the figure was closer to 35 percent. That's over $7 million in that supervisory union that nobody got to vote on.

Cost containment for education must include reigning in the rapidly increasing spending of supervisory union central offices. A year ago, I called on Vermonters to get their school boards to adopt 65 percent as a goal for direct classroom spending. I hope that school boards will prepare and present budgets this cycle that will reflect such efforts. But I want to go beyond the argument I laid out last year.

If one looks at Table 5 of the Summary of the Statistical Reports of Schools (SASRS), available on the Vermont Department of Education Web site, one can see what percentages supervisory unions and supervisory districts are spending directly on the classroom. But the figures for individual schools in a supervisory union are misleading, because they don't allocate the supervisory union expenses.

So for instance, Mill River Union High School appears to be spending near the 65 percent threshold on the classroom, but after allocating supervisory union expenses, it's actually under 60 percent. It turns out that Rutland South Supervisory Union's classroom spending is under 60 percent as well, but unfortunately the voters cannot hold the supervisory union accountable for that.

So what should we do? Well, we could change the reporting method to include an allocation for supervisory union expenses. That would make it easier to see if our schools are spending the 65 percent. Or we could have more comprehensive reform in the form of Commissioner Cate's proposal that we have one governing board for each supervisory union.

Ideally, these new boards would adopt the ethic to devote at least 65 percent of spending to the classroom. This way, the confusion would be eliminated, voter accountability would be brought to all of the spending, and we could ensure that a larger percentage of money actually gets to the classroom.

Supervisory unions would be run more like our city school districts. Currently, city districts are able to devote larger percentages of funds to the classroom than supervisory unions. This is true even if student transportation expenses are factored out. For example, Rutland schools spent 72.6 percent of their non-transportation funds in the classroom in fiscal year 2005. By comparison, Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union spent 66.8 percent, Rutland South spent 61.4 percent, and Rutland Southwest spent 59.2 percent. Eliminating a layer of bureaucracy and having more accountability would improve these latter numbers.

Would there be a loss of local control? Not really. As it is, there is a large amount of expenditures that is not at all locally controlled by voters. The current system is not only not local; it's not democratic. Under this plan, all of the expenditures would be voted on by all of the citizens.

We need to be working toward comprehensive reform. And we should be searching for ways to make our democratic process work for us at the local level. We can't simply rely on our leaders in Montpelier, some of whom have a tendency to suggest cuts without providing direction, and some of whom have a tendency to just look at the revenue side of the equation.

Reaching consensus on the school governance issue won't be easy. It'll take time. Until then, the 65 percent concept can be a useful benchmark for Vermonters to gain a frame of reference to understand their local school budgets better. Sen. Wendy Wilton and I have set up an organization called First Class Education for Vermont (www.fcevt.com) in order to inform interested citizens. We encourage school board members, educators, parents, and taxpayers to review the information and review our online petition.

Curtis G. Hier is a teacher at Fair Haven Union High School.