We have good schools in Vermont, but they cost a lot. Our schools are close to their communities, they produce solid results, and they’re good places for our children to be. But they cost more per student than most other schools in the United States and in the world.
From the research posted here on A Vermont Design, we’ve learned that simply closing small schools, or consolidating districts, won’t save much money, and will produce unintended negative consequences. So what can we do to maintain the quality of our schools, but lower the costs?
From examining school budgets across the state, and talking with many education professionals, we can identify three main drivers of increasing school costs:
◦ expensive health insurance
◦ over-identification of special education
◦ too many people in our schools.
Health insurance
Vermont schools pay more for the health insurance for their employees than almost anywhere else. Even in Massachusetts, which supports the most expensive medical care system in the world, the cost for a teacher’s health insurance plan is less than it is in Vermont. And consumes a far smaller proportion of their salary. Examining closely the budget of a typical Vermont elementary school, we see that health insurance costs amount to 47% of teacher salaries — $141,000 on top of salaries of $294,000. And it’s rising more than 10% per year. This is ludicrous and unprecedented and unsustainable.
Why is this cost so high? Because the UVM Health Network has turned itself from a public care-giving organization into a private monopoly that sucks resources from citizens, school districts and taxpayers to support 100 staff making over a half million dollars each, with the head guy taking more than $3 million from us each year. This while the average Vermonter earns $60,000. Their $260 million in “surplus” (profit) would be enough to educate 12,000 students for a year. This is ridiculous, but not a laughing matter.
The State has the power to control these obscene monopoly payments and profits, but has not done so.
Special Education
The same small school that spends $294,000 on teacher salaries for kindergarten through sixth grade spends $477,000 on special education services for these same students. That’s $5000 per student. Again, ludicrous. The cause of this is multifold, but far beyond the proportions of any other state or country.
Another larger district in a different part of the state spends $8 million of its $24 million budget on its 700 K-8 students, another $8 million on its 300 high school students, and the remaining $8 million on special education. A third of its budget.
Recent changes to the statewide funding scheme incentivize districts to over-identify students for special education. The state pays double for each student so identified. Lead us not into temptation…
And again, the State has the power to manage these costs, but has not done so.
Too Many People
While it’s comforting to have many caring adults in a school, there’s a point of diminishing returns when the staff to student ratio falls below 1 to 6. And yet the budgets and staffing of our two typical districts show perhaps too many adults, professional and otherwise, working in the school and drawing a salary. In fact, Vermont’s staff to student ratio is the lowest among the states. The elementary school in our example, with fewer than 100 students, employs 31 staff: six classroom teachers, six aides, a full time principal, a full-time physical education teacher, half-time music and art teachers, and part-time nurse, librarian, counselor, support staff, custodians, cafeteria workers, and bus drivers.
Walk through an elementary school parking lot and count the cars. Then divide the number of students in the school by the number of cars. Each car represents at least one adult, since we can assume than none of the students drove themselves to school. While some of the cars may belong to parent volunteers or delivery people, the bulk of them are likely to belong to school staff. This is one of Vermont’s cost drivers that local boards can partially control.
Tuitions
This is not as big a cost driver as the three listed above, but in both sample districts, tuition payments for high school form an overly large portion of the spending. In the larger district, one-third of the total budget is paid to private schools, at the rate of $24,000 per student, a total of $8 million for 320 students. This leaves the district with $8 million for its remaining 700 students in K-8, less than $12,000 each.
In the smaller district, more than $800,000 is paid in tuition to public and private high schools at $20,000 per student. Tuitions plus special education costs amount to almost half the budget, leaving less than $12,000 for each K-8 student.
Conclusion
To rein in rising costs at Vermont schools, we need to control monopoly pricing for health insurance; manage special education spending; and take a close, hard look, school by school, at the staff to student ratio.
Sources: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_213.50.asp
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