Will state mandate school consolidation?

School funding critics gain some traction

By Jesse Roman

Published:

Thursday, March 18, 2010 12:10 PM EDT

There’s growing consensus in the Legislature, on both sides of the aisle, that school reforms need to happen sooner rather than later.

Even the rhetoric is the same: Consolidating small school districts would save money, improve educational opportunities, and result in a fairer tax code.

But reform may not occur this year.

“I think that there is a desire to move the issue forward and a recognition that we do need to change the way things are done; the rub is how do we do that,” House Speaker Shap Smith, D-Morristown, said Tuesday in an interview.

Legislative leaders set last Friday, March 12, as the deadline for advancing bills out of committee to give the House and Senate time to consider and pass bills. Those bills that didn’t make it out of committee likely won’t make it to the floor this session.

The leading education reform bill was conspicuously absent at the end of the day Friday, largely because disagreements lingered within the mostly Democratic committee. Smith granted an extension and the bill was finally reported out of committee Tuesday night by a unanimous vote.

The bill, largely the creation of Rep. Peter Peltz, D-Woodbury, stops short of requiring school districts to consolidate, but does require that supervisory unions at least discuss it. Budget and tax incentives are offered to districts that decide to merge.

If the House passes the bill, it goes to the Senate. It’s unclear what a final bill might look like, since there are major rifts between chambers about whether the state should require school districts to consolidate, or leave it for the districts to decide.

All three education proposals unveiled in recent weeks feature school district consolidation in some form.

Unlike Peltz’s plan, the other two— from Rep. Heidi Scheuermann, R-Stowe, and Sen. Robert Hartwell, D-Bennington — mandate consolidation from 260 school districts to only 15 or 16.

“As the process unfolds, we’ll work to find the proper balance of incentives and, where appropriate, make sure people are considering the consolidation issue,” Smith said Tuesday.

The argument on whether to require districts to consolidate doesn’t seem to break down by party lines; rather, there appears to be a rift between House and Senate.

The Peltz plan leaves consolidation up to local districts; Hartwell’s Senate bill, which didn’t make it out of committee, would require consolidation — an approach favored by several influential senators, including Sen. Susan Bartlett, D-Lamoille.

Scheuermann said Senate Democrats have been much more responsive than House members to ideas in her education bill, including abolishing the statewide property tax and having the new, big regional districts handle school funding.

“I’ve been beating this drum a lot and I’ve been making a lot of inroads lately in the Senate,” Scheuermann said in an interview.

Bartlett says she is open to the idea of switching from a statewide school property tax to a small, regional-based system — but doesn’t see it happening this year.

“It is way too late in the year to get into changing the funding system. That is a big conversation,” she said. “But we can give it legs so people start thinking about it and talking about so perhaps we can roll it out next year.”

Scheuermann’s plan never had much of a chance in the House, where the Education Committee, chaired by Rep. Johannah Donovan, D-Burlington, abandoned it early on in favor of Peltz’s incentive-based plan.

That’s largely because the committee thought a top-down mandate just wouldn’t work, Peltz said Tuesday in an interview.

“The cruel irony and contradiction here is people blame the statewide property tax for various problems, but they think the best way to answer that is by further state imposition,” Peltz said. “Over the years, we’ve had 20 attempts at school consolidation, but because we went with a top-down mandate with little concern with the quality of schools or direct local oversight, they have failed.”

In her column in this week’s Stowe Reporter, Scheuermann makes the exact same but opposite Act 60 argument for why opponents shouldn’t have issue the state mandates in her bill.

“The irony in this argument is that many of those who oppose my plan on this ground also supported, and continue to support, a statewide property tax,” she says. “If that is not a state mandate, I’m not sure what is.

Peltz, a member of the House Education Committee, said the committee has heard testimony from superintendents, school board officials, principals and teachers, and they have largely been receptive to his ideas.

“They’ve said, ‘We’re willing to do this if the decisions are made locally,’” Peltz said. “They know efficiencies can be gained.”

Speaker Smith agrees with the House Education Committee’s direction, and believes incentives can achieve the desired effect, so the state doesn’t have to be too heavy-handed.

“I think the conditions on the ground are such that supervisory unions … might make those decisions on their own,” Smith said. “I don’t think (consolidation) is something we can mandate from Montpelier, especially if it’s not clear it would be saving money.”

Scheuermann isn’t convinced about that, and neither is Bartlett.

“Do we let people volunteer, or do we have Montpelier say, ‘Here’s the path: In X number of years we’ll have 14 districts,’” Bartlett said at a legislative breakfast in Stowe last week. In her view, the latter is preferable to telling school officials, “Here’s a lofty goal, now get here somehow.”

“The path to getting to larger districts needs to be paved by finding all the best practices in administration and requiring all districts to implement these practices over a two-year time period,” Bartlett said in a recent statement to the Stowe Reporter.

For Scheuermann, mandated consolidation is important, but perhaps more important is fixing the property tax system. She says she’s made “inroads” in the Senate on the issue, but, when asked, said it’s far from clear that initiative will pass: “In politics, a month and a half is a very long time, so I can’t answer that,” she said. “I just hope we don’t do something for that sake of doing something.

“My brother always told me, ‘Never mistake activity for achievement.’ I think that applies exceptionally well in this case.”


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