School boards must be willing to share in the sacrifice
By Geoffrey Norman
Please, Montpelier said, please look carefully at your budgets and see if you cannot possibly find a way to cut expenditures. You don’t have to sue a mead cleaver. A scalpel will suffice. We’re taking about less than 3 percent. Do it, and you will save the taxpayers of Vermont $23 million and help us close a dangerous gap between revenues and spending. Everyone else has. We’re all in this together and if we share the sacrifice, we’ll come out of it together and stronger.
To which the school boards have answered, Not happening.
A few boards made some modest cuts. Others actually increased spending. Total savings will come in at less than 20 percent of that $23 million.
Now, the incoming administration and the new Legislature will have to find a way to fill this new hole in a budget that was already some $112 million short.
Gov.-elect Peter Shumlin and the incoming Legislature do have $19 million in federal money they can use. This money was appropriated last summer to help states avoid teacher layoffs and to make sure the teachers’ unions stayed on the reservation in the last election. The Douglas administration, believing that Vermont had plenty of teachers and that some attrition was necessary, asked Washington for permission to put the $19 million toward teacher pensions which are woefully underfunded. Washington went for it.
Mr. Shumlin did not. The money, he said, should go to the school boards so they wouldn’t be forced to make those $23 million in cuts. It would be unwise to let go of teachers in order to meet those budget goals, he said in one interview, because, “As we create jobs in this state, we’re going to bring in young employees. With young employees come relationships. With relationships come children. And with children come the need for schools.”
This is what might be called the long view.
Even if Vermont were to experience an immediate and sustained baby boom, there would be more than enough teachers to handle the load. Anyone who has followed the debate over education spending in this state knows the numbers. Since 1997, K-12 enrollment has gone down more than 14 percent. Over that same period, school staffing has increased almost 25 percent. Cutting education spending means reducing staffing.
The $19 million is a patch. When that money has been spent, the system will still be overstaffed and, as always, in need of more money. It is exceedingly unlikely that there will be any help coming from Washington. Even less likely, if that is possible, that school boards and teachers’ unions will agree to staffing reductions.
We will hear the usual noises about school consolidation and how this will bring our deliverance. But consolidation without spending cuts will amount to little more than a redesign of the organizational chart and some new titles for the same old people.
A downsizing is a downsizing. But local school boards have now made it plain that they aren’t up to cutting a mere 2.3 percent, on average, from their budgets. The teachers’ union, being a union, will fight for every single job.
So, since we won’t be saving our way out of this fix, there remains only one solution. Taxes.
The task of the legislators, this session, will be to find new and interesting things to tax — the attorney general has already suggested soda pop and since it is for the children, who could object? — and to increase the take from taxes already in place. They will, no doubt, succeed where the school boards have failed.
After all, it is what they do best.
Geoffrey Norman of Dorset is editor of vermonttiger.com, a blog focusing on Vermont issues.