Education Entities

Many organizations are involved in the operation, governance, and funding of Vermont public schools today. Hundreds of them. We enjoy:

• 153 school districts, many (but not all of which) operate schools.
• 50 union school districts that combine towns or districts to operate schools.
• 53 supervisory unions that provide administrative services to some districts.
• 251 towns, that collect the property taxes that form the bulk of school funding.
• 2 interstate school districts.
• 4 private academies that serve as public schools.
• 1 Agency of Education
• 1 State Board of Education
• 2 Legislative Education Committees

That’s 517 entities, one for every 162 students. Most of these entities elect a board, and most overlap in their responsibilities. No where else in the world are so many entities needed to provide public education to so few.

We used to have a lot more. In 1860, we enjoyed 239 towns and 2,591 school districts, educating 75,000 students. That’s one entity for every 29 students. We’ve come a long way.

Recent legislative attempts to improve the situation have only created more and overlapping organizations. These efforts have increased the inequalities among schools, added unnecessary complexity, made school governance and financing almost impossible for citizens to understand, and raised costs.

It’s time to reduce our education entities to a reasonable number, based on where students live and where our schools are located. That will be a good first step in improving quality, ensuring equity, reducing costs, and enhancing community control.

In reality, our children today are educated in about 50 K-12 school webs. By that we mean a set of sending elementary and middle schools and a high school. Regardless of administrative entities, what students experience is a 13 to 15 year educational journey from preschool through graduation. It’s the quality of this journey that matters.

We’d solve many problems if we simply made each of these K-12 school webs into a school district. For 90% of our students, this would mean no change. For a few, especially those in very small high schools or with limited middle school opportunities, we’d want to combine with nearby schools to increase quality. Our school webs reflect organic patterns of population, economic activity, and community. Vermont has about 32 of these K-12 educational communities, some concentrated, some spread out; some with a few as 1000 students, some with as many as 4000, and averaging 2500 each.

These should become our new educational entities, each with a board elected by the community, each running a complete set of public schools that guide students from Pre-K through high school graduation. That’s the way it’s done in most of the United States, and in most of the civilized world.

Once our schools are rationally organized, we can work on the next steps of providing equal funding, and improving educational quality.

Sources:

Equity and History: Vermont’s Education Revolution of the Early 1890s, Vermont Historical Society, https://vermonthistory.org/journal/76/VHS760101_1-18.pdf

Vermont School Webs, A Vermont Design for Education, https://vermontdesign.org/?page_id=26