FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

November 30, 2021

Please contact Maggie Lenz

802-279-4262

maggie@leoninepublicaffairs.com

VERMONT EDUCATION EXPERTS VOICE THEIR CONCERNS OVER LEGISLATIVE WORK ON EDUCATION FUNDING INEQUITY

Montpelier, VT., — On Monday the Coalition for Vermont Student Equity (CVTSE) hosted The Future of Equity in Vermont Education: A Panel Discussion. The panel considered the glaring inequities in Vermont’s current funding formula and the harms that have been caused to Vermont’s most struggling communities. They also discussed the discriminatory nature of the recent proposal to remove English language learners from the equity formula and their grave concerns over the pending recommendations of the Pupil Weighting Task Force. 50 people were in attendance, and there was a question and answer period at the end. Please use this link to watch the panel.

Panelists:

Nicole Mace is the Finance Manager at the Winooski School District. She has a law degree from the University of Pittsburgh and a Master’s degree in Public Policy & Management from Carnegie Mellon University. Nicole was the General Counsel and then Executive Director of the Vermont School Boards Association from 2011-2019. She is a parent of a 5th grader at JFK Elementary School in Winooski and has been a resident of Winooski since 2009. Nicole served on the Winooski City Council from 2015-2019.

Rep. Laura Sibilia was elected in 2014 and currently serves in the Vermont House of Representatives. She is the Vice Chair of the Energy and Technology Committee. Laura has lived in Southern Vermont for more than 30 years, and has served on the Dover School Board since 2003. She was a pioneering member of the new River Valleys School District Board in 2018, and has been working on the pupil weighting issue for many years.

Rory Thibault is the current chair of the Cabot School Board of Directors and also serves on the Caledonia Central Supervisory Union Board. Rory’s school board involvement began with Cabot’s Act 46 process. He served as the primary author of the Cabot School District Alternative Governance Structure proposal, which was ultimately accepted by the State Board of Education. During his time as a board member, Rory has focused on supporting Cabot School’s innovative approaches to public education, namely the integration of project based learning into all grade levels, and most recently increased collaboration with other districts within the enlarged supervisory union. Rory is the State’s Attorney for Washington County.

Dr. Alex Yin has been serving on the Winooski School Board since 2017. While on the board, he helped pass a $57.8 million dollar bond to build and renovate school facilities for an overcrowded district. He also has been an advocate in turning the cultural liaison positions in Winooski into a year-long position to help strengthen the relationship between the New American families and the school district. Alex is the Executive Director of Institutional Research at the University of Vermont, where he is responsible for the school’s data analytics

Ted Plemenos is the Chief Financial Officer for the Rutland City Public Schools. After earning a Bachelor’s degree in Public and International Affairs, and a Master’s degree in Business Administration, Ted served as a financial executive for ExxonMobil Corporation for more than 30 years. His prior experience in education finance includes serving for two years as the Director of Finance and Administration for a division of Rice University, and volunteering for several years as an advisor to the board of trustees for an elementary and a middle school.

Moderator:  Kendra Sowers, CVTSE Board Chair

#GivingTuesday is coming right up! But you don’t have to wait until then. Please make a gift if you’re able to help us fight for equitable educational opportunities for VT’s poor, rural and diverse districts. #Vtpoli #Vted #FixTheFormula #equity

Donating is easy and every penny helps CVTSE continue to fight for the equity every Vermont child and citizen deserves!!

https://www.gofundme.com/f/equity-in-vts-education-funding-for-all-children

or

The Coalition for Vermont Student Equity invites you to join our panel of experts to discuss how the work being done by the legislative Task Force on the Implementation of the Pupil Weighting Factors report will affect the issue of equity in our education funding system.

The task force must present a report and proposed legislation to the entire legislature by Dec 15, 2021. What will be in that report? How will it shape your schools and community?

To register, go to: https://cvtse.org/panel

The presentation is free for anyone who would like to attend.

For more than two decades now, many people suspected the pupil weights being used to determine each district’s portion of the education fund were incorrect. The Pupil Weighting Factors Report, authored by the University of Vermont and Rutgers University and delivered to the legislature in 2019, confirmed this. 

As a legislative task force meets ahead of the next legislative session to try to solve this glaring inequity, it seems as though most stakeholders agree that the problem is enormous. Exactly how to solve it, though, has become a point of contention. Districts that have been seriously harmed by the flawed formula are advocating for its complete correction as recommended by researchers from UVM and Rutgers. Correcting the formula will act as a mechanism to redistribute the massive education fund so that small schools, low-income, rural and diverse districts finally receive their fair share of education funds. Public Assets Institute, an organization run by the architects of the current, inequitable system, are instead advocating for a band-aid approach, which would add money to the education fund in the form of unreliable grants, or categorical aid, targeted at harmed districts. The goal here seems to be to protect the interests of wealthier communities, by avoiding redistributing existing funds and instead adding additional money to the system, resulting in a tax increase for everyone, even the harmed districts.

Categorical aid, as we’ve seen with the small schools and transportation grants, add administrative costs and burden, especially to those districts that run the leanest business offices due to insufficient resources.  Districts cannot count on these grants or at best, cannot count on the amount of the grant year over year. Perhaps the current legislature will create a good product that helps districts. But there is no way to guarantee that the next legislature will maintain the grant amounts, their purpose or the criteria for qualifying for them. This makes planning, including the hiring of staff, extremely difficult. And the UVM Study has an empirical basis for setting the weights. What empirical basis would be used to determine how to establish categorical aid amounts? 

Equity should be a shared goal for all Vermonters. But as Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, “to those accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” And because of this, we understand that some wealthier districts will feel as though they are being asked to make sacrifices. I’m not going to sugar coat it. If the weights are finally corrected to reflect the actual costs of educating different types of learners, wealthier, mostly white districts will have to operate differently. This won’t be a guaranteed tax increase for any district, though. That is within each district’s control. They can choose to reduce some programming, develop creative ways to do more with less, they can raise their property taxes or some combination thereof. But by correcting the weights, the  playing field will finally be level for everyone.

In addition, Vermont is currently sitting on a huge influx of federal funds.  This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to achieve the equity that the Vermont Supreme Court ruled was required in the 1997 Brigham v State decision, utilizing federal funds to help overweight districts mitigate the changes as they work through the process of adjusting their budgets.  These one time funds will not be there if this task force fails to recommend full implementation of the expert recommendations and the legislature fails to pass legislation to do so, in 2022.  Carpe Diem!

Implementation of the weights is simple. It’s a matter of plugging what we now know are the correct weights into the formula we already use.  Use of categorical aid would require designing a whole separate system, adding layers of bureaucracy and added expense. Failure to create a plan to implement the University of Vermont and Rutgers University recommendations will allow Vermont’s most impoverished, rural, small and multicultural districts to continue being harmed.  Isn’t two decades long enough?

This commentary is by Marc B. Schauber of Dover, executive director of the Coalition for Vermont Student Equity.

A legislative task force in Vermont is proposing that English language learners should be funded separately from their native English speaking peers. This will only further the disparities between rich and poor, BIPOC and white. It’s that simple.

Vermont should fund the education of English language learners the same way affluent white students are funded. This is the only way to achieve real equity in the system.

Please sign up here to stay on top of this critical issue. We need your help to fight this! Go to https://cvtse.org/subscribe/  for information and to sign up to receive our action alerts and updates.

#Vtpoli #Vted #FixTheFormula #equity

For more than two decades now, many people suspected the pupil weights being used to determine each district’s portion of the education fund were incorrect. The Pupil Weighting Factors Report, authored by the University of Vermont and Rutgers University and delivered to the legislature in 2019, confirmed this. 

As a legislative task force meets ahead of the next legislative session to try to solve this glaring inequity, it seems as though most stakeholders agree that the problem is enormous. Exactly how to solve it, though, has become a point of contention.

Districts that have been seriously harmed by the flawed formula are advocating for its complete correction as recommended by researchers from UVM and Rutgers. Correcting the formula will act as a mechanism to redistribute the massive education fund so that small schools, low-income, rural and diverse districts finally receive their fair share of education funds.

Public Assets Institute, an organization run by the architects of the current, inequitable system, are instead advocating for a band-aid approach, which would add money to the education fund in the form of unreliable grants, or categorical aid, targeted at harmed districts. The goal here seems to be to protect the interests of wealthier communities, by avoiding redistributing existing funds and instead adding additional money to the system, resulting in a tax increase for everyone, even the harmed districts.

Categorial Aid?

Categorical aid, as we’ve seen with the small schools and transportation grants, add administrative costs and burden, especially to those districts that run the leanest business offices due to insufficient resources.  Districts cannot count on these grants or at best, cannot count on the amount of the grant year over year. Perhaps the current legislature will create a good product that helps districts. But there is no way to guarantee that the next legislature will maintain the grant amounts, their purpose or the criteria for qualifying for them. This makes planning, including the hiring of staff, extremely difficult. And the UVM Study has an empirical basis for setting the weights. What empirical basis would be used to determine how to establish categorical aid amounts? 

Equity should be a shared goal for all Vermonters. But as Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, “to those accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” And because of this, we understand that some wealthier districts will feel as though they are being asked to make sacrifices. I’m not going to sugar coat it. If the weights are finally corrected to reflect the actual costs of educating different types of learners, wealthier, mostly white districts will have to operate differently. This won’t be a guaranteed tax increase for any district, though. That is within each district’s control. They can choose to reduce some programming, develop creative ways to do more with less, they can raise their property taxes or some combination thereof. But by correcting the weights, the  playing field will finally be level for everyone.

Mitigation

In addition, Vermont is currently sitting on a huge influx of federal funds.  This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to achieve the equity that the Vermont Supreme Court ruled was required in the 1997 Brigham v State decision, utilizing federal funds to help overweight districts mitigate the changes as they work through the process of adjusting their budgets.  These one time funds will not be there if this task force fails to recommend full implementation of the expert recommendations and the legislature fails to pass legislation to do so, in 2022.  Carpe Diem!

Implementation of the weights is simple. It’s a matter of plugging what we now know are the correct weights into the formula we already use.  Use of categorical aid would require designing a whole separate system, adding layers of bureaucracy and added expense. Failure to create a plan to implement the University of Vermont and Rutgers University recommendations will allow Vermont’s most impoverished, rural, small and multicultural districts to continue being harmed.  Isn’t two decades long enough?

Marc B. Schauber, Executive Director / Coalition for Vermont Student Equity

Our poorest and most diverse Vermont school districts have been critically underfunded for decades. This is due to inherent flaws in our pupil weighting formula, which directs how Vermont calculates student needs and allocates education funds across the state. The Pupil Weighting Factors Report of 2019, commissioned by the legislature and written by researchers from the University of Vermont and Rutgers University, concluded that Vermont does not currently recognize the actual costs of educating students who attend small schools, come from low-income households, live in rural areas or those who are English language learners. Districts that educate a large number of these learners are forced to make up for the lack of resources by raising their property taxes or by making cuts to their school budgets. The UVM/Rutgers report made very specific recommendations on exactly how to adjust the weights to create equity in the funding formula.  

Rutland struggles to meet the increasing needs of children who are deeply scarred by the opioid epidemic. Burlington and Winooski, the most diverse communities in the state, struggle to pass budgets that fully support the needs of our diverse students. Windham County and Northeast Kingdom struggle with a lack of economy of scale while having to provide essential human services for our rural students. Our districts and other struggling districts throughout the state all share the extreme difficulty of meeting students’ minimum needs due to insufficient resources. Meeting these specific needs often comes at the expense of cutting general education programming. Imagine what we could do if we were equitably resourced.

The Task Force on the Implementation of the Pupil Weighting Factors Report has been meeting since June to try and solve this issue. While they agree that the problem is real, the solution has become highly politicized. The Task Force could have spent some of it’s allotted 12 meetings creating an implementation plan (as it’s appropriately named) which would phase in and mitigate taxing impacts on “overweight districts” (districts that have had access to more resources than their actual student needs demand). Instead, they have spent their time creating alternatives to the weights, paying little deference to the expert recommendations right in front of them. 

With few meetings remaining, the Task Force’s only released proposal strips English language learners out of the formula entirely, funding them with unreliable grants, separately from their native English speaking peers. With no empirical basis for the grant amounts, the only thing that’s clear is that these grants would be a boon to many overweight districts, while leaving the most diverse districts with considerably fewer resources than would the UVM/Rutgers recommendations. The Task Force has also made it clear that if they correct the remaining weights, they will use the smallest weights possible, which are derived from data that the report authors themselves have said are less accurate. Additionally, they’ve made it abundantly clear that they only intend to provide modeling for their proposals. That means the Task Force will not provide updated modeling to compare their proposals to the empirically derived, highly vetted recommendations from the 2019 Report. It is also worth noting that the Task Force includes two members from Addison County and none from Chittenden County. Diverse districts are not represented on this Task Force.

The common intersection between poverty and new American English language learners makes the flaws in our funding formula particularly troubling. As usual, our poorest and most diverse communities are most harmed by systemic inequities. It is their more homogeneous and affluent neighbors who, in contrast, have been getting more than their fair share of education funds for over 20 years. Under the corrected formula, everyone’s access to resources would actually reflect the diverse needs of students they are educating. This is true equity and the right thing to do to ensure that all of Vermont’s children have equitable educational opportunities. The influx of one-time federal funds could easily be used by the Task Force to mitigate the impact of such a formula change on overweight districts. 

Recently, Niche.com published a list of the top 10 public schools in Vermont. All but one of these schools is overweight. That isn’t a coincidence. Money buys resources. The majority of school districts in Vermont are underweight and doing their absolute best with what is available, but only so many programs can be cut from a budget and we can only ask our low-income tax base to spend so much. While we recognize that every Vermont district is struggling right now due to the pandemic, we promise you, not all struggles are created equal. The Task Force has a clear choice – to act on equity or to merely pay lip service to equity while maintaining the status quo.

Board of Directors, Coalition for Vermont Student Equity

Kendra Sowers, Chair

Alison Notte

David Schoales

Rory Thibault