A Vermont Design

Students • Purposes • An Organic Approach • School Webs • Districts • Vision • Funding • Taxes

Begin with students
We center this design around the folks for whom our schools are most important: the students. We start by looking at education through their eyes, from when they gingerly enter preschool until they proudly stand in the graduation line. We follow them as they pass through an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school, along a path millions Vermonters have forged since before we became a state. Some live in cities, some in villages, others in rural isolation. For all of them, school is the place to learn your lessons, meet your friends, compete in sports, sing in a choir, paint a picture, and prepare to be a good citizen*. Any new design should first and foremost provide this full education experience to our students. Our task is to figure out how to do this without unfairly taxing Vermonters. We are confident it can be done.

Purposes
The purpose of this design effort is to provide to our students better schools, community-centered, and less costly.

An organic approach
Under this organic approach, a school district would consist of a contiguous group of schools — a school web — based not on town lines but on Vermont’s natural community patterns. These districts would provide education from preschool through high-school graduation, and perhaps beyond. In this way the vacant spaces in our schools can be filled to our advantage. The people in each district would elect a school board to set policies, and hire a superintendent to lead the schools. With this approach, we’d end up with about 25 school districts, some as small as 2000 students, some as large as 4000. Each would operate at least one high school, a middle school, and several elementary schools. Each district would receive a grant from the state to operate its schools, based chiefly on the number of students, adjusted slightly for special needs and population density.

School webs

Let’s follow a Vermont student along her educational path. Vermonica Greene’s parents introduce her to the preschool room in her local elementary school at age three. It’s a happy place where she learns to get along with others, speak clearly, and play creatively. When she’s ready, she moves on to the kindergarten room, also a happy place, where she works with colors, numbers, letters, and words in small groups with her neighbors and friends. From there she moves through four to six more years of cognitive, artistic, and social growth, until she’s ready for middle school.

The local middle school is larger than her elementary school, but still close by, and governed by the same school board. Here Vermonica expands her circle of friends to include those from neighboring villages. She sings in the choir, joins the basketball team, acts in a play, discusses classic literature, and explores math, science, and history. She and her parents often meet her teachers in the community grocery, in the restaurant, and at the electric car recharging station. Her school district lines are drawn according to the patters of settlement, work, travel, that have connected her community over more than 200 years.

At the high school Vermonica expands her circle of friends and classmates, prepares for college and career, confronts advanced challenges in math and science, while discussing important issues in literature and history. Specialist studios, labs, tools, and teachers enable her to follow and develop her interests. Just two villages downriver from her middle school, her high school is a happy place staffed by a band of dedicated teachers led by an experienced principal. All under the watchful eyes of the same school board elected by her community neighbors.

The organization and governance of public schools should be designed around the naturally-occurring web of schools that students like Vermonica passes through. Here is a map of these school webs.

Right-size districts
How big should a school district be?

Big enough to encompass at least one web of elementary, middle and high schools, but small enough to remain connected to the local community. Today, Vermont districts range from zero to 4000 students. Some own no schools at all, others as many as 13. Their geographic area ranges from 1.5 to more than 300 square miles. Some follow the organic school webs described above, others follow arbitrary lines drawn on a map 250 years ago. Given Vermont’s diversity of settlement patters and population distribution, it would not be wise to require that all districts be the same size.

To serve Vermonica’s need to enjoy a full academic and social educational experience, she needs a high school of at least 500 students and 30 teachers. Enough to form and lead a concert band, teach chemistry and calculus, and field a soccer team. As well as a middle school of around 300. Elementary schools might range in size from one classroom to several hundred students, depending on the population density and existing school buildings. The determination of what right-size means is best determined by the local community working with state education experts.

We re in the midst of developing an interactive map that shows where these clusters or webs of schools exist today. Please take a look at it, and suggest improvements.

Community connection
Under the organic approach described here, districts would decide how to spend their annual educational allocation, within broad outlines set by the State Board of Education. They would hire their teachers, define their curriculum, and organize their schools to most efficiently provide the education desired by their community. A newly-empowered State Board of Education, with 5-year terms to isolate them from electoral politics, would set any necessary statewide policies, employ a Rector who would sit with the Governor’s cabinet, and provide subject-matter and organizational expertise to the schools. 

Vision
As soon as the new districts are defined, citizens from each web of schools will sit together to envision education under the new design. They’d include students, parents, teachers, principals, and school board members from the PreK – 12 cluster. Their task would be to sketch out how their schools might be better organized so as to provide a solid education at a cost within their projected state allocation. The State Board of Education would provide training to volunteers who would lead these visioning sessions. All of these citizens would have an equal voice in the deliberations.

The visioning process begins with a careful self-assessment of their schools: curriculum, staffing, school climate, buildings and services. And they do this through the eyes of a student. They compare a student’s experience with those in other schools. They examine their staffing and their buildings compared with the rest of Vermont. The consult the latest research on what makes a good school. And finally they do the same for their budget.

Armed with this information, they sketch out what they want their PreK – 12 system to look like. They do this from the point of view of a student: what will he have she experience as they work their way from elementary school to middle school to high school? Not just their reading and math, but their music, sports, clubs, health, literature, science, history, nutrition, friendships, and social development.

Finally the visioning team looks at what their state allocation will be. Then they develop a new spending plan, from scratch, not based on what they spent last year, but on what’s needed to deliver their educational vision. The total of their spending must equal the state allocation.

This will require much give and take and gnashing of teeth, because what we dream of is not always possible with what we have. This is a good process. It builds community. It involves students, teachers, parents, and taxpayers. It results in a comprehensive plan that they can take to their communities for approval. It can also be a useful in identifying citizens who might make effective board members when those elections come around.

This is a positive path to school improvement that has succeeded in Vermont and all over the world. It can build for us better education, community-based, at a reasonable cost.

Equal Funding

Today a student in Derby gets a $14,000 education, while a student in Fairlee gets a $28,000 education. Some schools teach an array of foreign languages, some none at all. Some provide advanced technical and academic courses, while others only a basic curriculum. This inequity flies in the face of Vermont’s values and its Constitution. See the Resources tab for details.

Equity might be best achieved if the Legislature would each biennium set the per-student allocation, and raise the necessary funds from broad-based statewide taxes on property (all property, including financial as well as real assets), income (all income, including income from financial investments), with some contribution from sales and other revenues. In this way all students in the state would benefit from equal school funding.

To raise school funds at the district level would exacerbate our inequalities. The wealthiest districts today contain 50 times the taxable property wealth per student than the poorest districts, from $25 million in Stratton to $0.5 million in Orleans. See a table of taxable wealth per student by town. The differences are simply too great to be adjusted through any formula. The fairest way to raise funds for our schools is at the sate level.

The per-pupil state allocation would need to be large enough to support the quality of education that Vermonters desire. Right now, the vast majority of our districts spend between 17 and 22 thousand dollars per student, so the allocation would need to be somewhere in the middle of that range.

Taxation

Today a typical wage-earner in Vermont pays about 30% of his income in federal and state taxes, while a typical investor or landlord pays less than 10%. This inequity may explain why many working families find living here unaffordable. To support our schools, a typical Vermont wage-earner annually contributes almost 2% of his wealth and 5% of his income, while a typical investor or landlord contributes less than 1% of his wealth and 2.5% of his income. See an explanation of this.

Expanded tax base

Vermont now spends about $2.3 billion per year on public schools and related expenses. This is paid for with revenue from a tax on real property ($1.6 billion) as well as various sales taxes ($750 million). The current tax rate on our $100 billion of real property is about 1.5%. See Education Fund Outlook,

Yet Vermonters own another $100 billion of net assets not currently taxed: financial investments, 401(k)’s, trust funds, bank accounts, stocks, bonds, and business equity. See Net Worth Held by Households.

By subjecting these forms of wealth to the same rate of taxation as our homes we could lower the statewide property tax rate by half, to less than 1%, and still support our schools at the levels we desire. This kind of broad-based property tax is used in many European countries today, and was once widely employed in the United States. See America Used to Have a Wealth Tax: The Forgotten History of the General Property Tax.

Any system we design must eliminate these inequities in spending per student, and in taxation. A flat per-student allocation, adjusted slightly according to student needs and population density, can reduce the spending inequities. A simple statewide school tax applied to all property and to all income can ensure a fair contribution from all of us, and reduce tax rates for most Vermonters.

Under such an organic approach, our web of schools can maintain their quality, our communities strengthen their ties, and our taxation its equity.

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* A Good Citizen
Indeed, the preparation of virtuous citizens is by law the chief purpose of our public schools. For 250 years, we have worked to live up to the ideals of the Vermont Constitution, which tells us that

Laws for the encouragement of virtue, and prevention of vice and immorality, ought to be constantly kept in force … and a competent number of schools ought to be maintained in each town, for the convenient instruction of youth.

Vermont Constitution