When retired superintendent Jay Badams was appointed last July to a special task force charged with drawing new school district maps for Vermont, he was optimistic about prospects for significant savings.
“I sat here and said … ‘Well, it seems we could probably run this state that only has the same number of kids as the city of Nashville with less governance and less administrative overhead,” said Badams, who previously oversaw a school consolidation initiative in Pennsylvania.
As the 11-member School District Redistricting Task Force dug into the data and research over the summer and fall, however, Badams changed his mind.
“There’s nobody here that knows whether consolidating will actually save money,” he told members of the House and Senate committees on education Thursday.
“There is no trust right now.”Jericho Rep. Edye Graning
What forced consolidation will achieve, he said, are school closures, larger classes, an erosion of local control and an enraged electorate.
“It doesn’t matter if they’re Republican or Democrat, we heard loud and clear at the public meetings that we had that no one likes the idea of forced consolidation. Period,” Badams said. “And so if we put our state and our communities and our towns through this level of disruption, and we don’t save them money, a lot of money, and reduce their taxes? I’m just glad I’m not running for office.”
Lawmakers returned to Montpelier this week to resume work on an education reform law called Act 73, which would shrink 52 supervisory unions and 119 school districts into 10 to 15 units of between 4,000 and 8,000 students.
The task force was supposed to have new district maps ready for the Legislature’s review by last month, but it instead rejected the premise of forced mergers altogether.
In his State of State address on Wednesday, Republican Gov. Phil Scott, a leading proponent of mandatory consolidation, castigated the panel as a group of ideologues bent on maintaining the status quo.
“And from my perspective, the recent failure to produce maps was a political strategy to preserve the old system,” Scott said.
But task force members say the elected officials who approved Act 73 fail to understand the disruption and dislocation it would unleash on an education system that isn’t yet prepared for that level of transformation.
“This needs to be done methodically. This needs to be done carefully. This needs to be done with a really clear understanding of who is being asked to merge with who and what those difficulties will be when they come together, and how do we support them through it,” said Jericho Rep. Edye Graning, the Democratic co-chair of the redistricting task force. “And without those supports, it can’t be successful.”
Forced mergers are the first step in an education reform law designed to curb growth in education spending that’s pushed property tax bills up by 40% over the past five years.
In addition to savings, Scott maintains that larger districts will reduce inequities and allow for more robust academic services, including career and technical training, pre-kindergarten and after-school programs.
In Wednesday’s speech, Scott cited the example of two schools in one county — one with 700 students and 17 foreign language classes, and another with 100 students that offers four.
“This isn’t meaningful local control, it’s significant inconsistency, unequal opportunity, and frankly, it’s just not fair,” he said.
Task force members, however, say economies of scale don’t suddenly manifest when Montpelier forces schools into new district boundaries. Graning said it took her community six years to execute the merger that resulted in the Mount Mansfield Unified Union School District, even though member towns had shared a common high school for nearly 50 years.
“This has to be done in a way that is studied, that there is leadership where you build that consensus in advance that this is going to be better for everyone,” Graning said. “There is no trust right now.”
More: Act 73 is already changing Vermont's education system
Norwich Rep. Rebecca Holcombe, a former education secretary under Gov. Peter Shumlin and Scott, oversaw implementation of Vermont’s previous mandatory merger initiative, called Act 46. She said that law differed fundamentally from what Act 73 is attempting to pull off now.
“It was a very different process in that it built into the process local engagement and local proposals. And the proposals that districts submitted were their assessment of the field — what they could do, what the opportunities were, what would work, what wouldn’t work,” said Holcombe, a Democrat. “To make it work for children and communities, you needed to have locals advising about what was possible.”
Task force members reject the notion that their report calls for the preservation of the status quo. The panel is urging the Legislature enact a law requiring all districts in the state to participate in what are known as “cooperative education service areas.” The new administrative structure would allow districts to enter into shared contracts across districts for services such as transportation, food service, IT and office administration.
Holcombe said the structure has a proven track record of delivering savings in other states, especially in rural areas. But she said its success hinges on districts getting technical assistance and other support from the state.
“You don’t have to wait three to five years to do a merger to start harnessing some of those benefits,” she said. “You can do it tomorrow.”
