February 4, 2010
Representative Heidi E. Scheuermann
Tax Rate Grows Ten Percent Despite Level-Funded Budget – The Barton Chronicle, January 13, 2010
School Budget Drastic Measures – Morrisville News and Citizen, January 21, 2010
Teachers Save Day for Stowe Budget – Stowe Reporter, January 21, 2010
Town Teachers, Board Unyielding in Impasse – Rutland Herald, January 22, 2010
Cuts Loom for Teachers, Programs – Colchester Sun, December 17, 2009
ACSU Schools Tighten Spending – Addison Independent, January 21, 2010
These articles are merely six recent examples of the increased focus on our state’s education system, and the situation in which our state, our schools and our communities now find themselves. There are countless others throughout the state – stories of the slow dismantling of our schools, program by program, in order to address the skyrocketing property taxes that Vermonters are paying.
Vermont now spends over $1.4 billion on education, an increase of over $600 million since 1997, and net education property taxes have nearly doubled. This combination of rapidly rising costs and unbearable tax burdens underscores the unsustainability of our current education system.
Simultaneously, Vermonters are increasingly asking if our schools are able to provide the highest quality education for a knowledge-based global economy that requires more, not less, in terms of educational opportunities and resources. Doing better with fewer resources requires that we use our educational dollars more wisely, facilitate the sharing of resources between schools more efficiently and effectively, and re-think our educational delivery.
The time is now for an Educational Transformation in Vermont. The State Board of Education realizes this and the Commissioner of Education has spoken eloquently about the need to transform our delivery system to expand opportunities for our children and improve outcomes.
The passage of Act 60 in 1998 was to make certain the State provide “substantially equal educational opportunity” to all Vermont students. Since that time, the Act’s principal goal of ensuring the equalization of funding has been realized. Communities that were not able to afford certain tools, programs, and services prior to Act 60 now are able to provide them.
With this goal arguably accomplished, the equalization of funding is no longer the issue at hand. Its impact on quality and cost during this economic downturn and beyond is the next obvious challenge. As schools throughout the state become casualties in a race to the bottom in order to simply reduce costs, the question now is how we can provide a first rate education to students across the state so that they are able to compete successfully in the knowledge-based global economy of the 21st Century.
School districts and supervisory unions throughout Vermont already collaborate well on a number of things, including the services provided by speech pathologists, and psychologists. This is done in an effort to eliminate duplicities and to save costs, and has been a positive development over the years.
It is now time to build on that collaboration and cooperation.
I am, therefore, proposing a plan this week that will bring together our educational communities in order to expand educational program and service opportunities for all of our children and do so in a cost effective way. The plan builds on one of the proposals from the State Board of Education to replace the current 63 Supervisory Unions with 14 or 15 Educational Districts that boundary the current Regional Technical Centers. It also eliminates the statewide property tax and replaces it with an Education District Property Tax to be raised by and distributed within the Education District, with an assurance that the state continue to provide “substantially equal educational opportunity” to all Vermont students.
This is a very brief outline of the proposal. To see more details, please contact me at 253-2275 or heidi@heidischeuermann.com. Or you can visit my website at www.heidischeuermann.com.