David Clark: Schools need to share the economic pain

Commentary
March 29, 2020

Editor’s note: This commentary is by David M. Clark, of Westminster, who is the chair of the Windham Northeast Supervisory Union

I have heard from a number of people who’ve expressed their concern about the potential for paraeducator layoffs. I share those concerns, however I have to balance those concerns against the realities being faced by the people who pay their salaries, the taxpayers.    

Phil Scott’s tax holiday has just been discovered to be a revenue holiday as well, and it’s a little tetchy right now as to whether the state will be making its April transfers to the schools on time. There was some slightly worse news to go along with it, because should those revenue shortfalls continue into FY20-21 they will be made up by the statewide property tax, and that’s going to be a stretch for a lot of taxpayers who no longer have jobs.

The language in the collective bargaining agreement about layoffs is clear and unambiguous. Furthermore, if there was ever a situation where layoffs need to be given serious consideration, this is that situation. I am going to go a step further as well and tell you that I think the boards are going to need to give very serious consideration to the possibility of teacher RIFs. I am as proud of the schools and the professionals who work in them in this district as anyone you know, but I need to state clearly and unambiguously that the current circumstances are the harbinger of a new paradigm.

Everyone, beginning with you and me, is entitled to a different take on current circumstances and what their longer-term implications are, and these are mine: To begin with, unlike the ’07-’08 recession, which was a top-down recession, this time we have a recession which is both top-down and bottom-up. Furthermore, the $2 trillion  which has been authorized to mitigate it is more than twice as much money as was thrown at the ’07-’08 recession, and many of the economics wonks who are commenting on it now say that this might be only half as much money as it’s going to take to restore some sort of economic equilibrium.  

This is an unfathomably enormous amount of money, and it will come at great cost. When the term “to print money” is used, the Federal Reserve does so by selling bonds (it borrows), and the Wall Street greed heads who buy those bonds are going to get their pound of flesh for it. This means that borrowing to cover any revenue shortfalls in school budgets is going to be pretty pricey because we’ll be competing against the federal government, or at least our banks will, for that money.

I think this is a pretty likely scenario because I believe that substantial numbers of our taxpayers are going to be severely challenged to pay their taxes either in part or in whole.  What I see coming down the pike is a long period of what was known as “stagflation” in the early ’80s because interest rate hikes created a fundamental cost-push on the money supply. 

We need at all times, but especially at this time to be cognizant of the huge pressures now being, or about to be exerted on our neighbors at a time when those same wonks say that the unemployment rate could hit 30%.  COVID-19 aside, I believe we’re looking at a 100-year event.  

Our schools have delivered the goods to our communities for a long time, and these communities, realizing the excellence of our work product, have been continually supportive of the budgets which we’ve proposed to support our excellent good work.  

Now, however, we are at a tipping point. The tipping point is this: We are now going to need to commit to a shared sacrifice with the communities that support us. If we adopt the attitude that “You passed the budget, and we’re going to spend it,” my prediction is that next time we go to those same voters with our “gimme hand” out, we’re gonna see a bloodbath, instead, and we cannot allow that to happen.   I support good teachers, good outcomes, and good schools, but the time has come where we need to also start sharing the pain.

 

 

Chairman: Schools should plan for possible staff cuts

Posted Monday, March 30, 2020 8:27 pm
By Susan Smallheer, Brattleboro Reformer

WESTMINSTER — The chairman of the Windham Northeast Supervisory Union believes schools in the four-town district have to start making contingency plans about teacher staffing levels in the likely event of serious education funding shortfalls because of the economic fallout from the coronavirus panedemic.

David M. Clark said Monday that he hoped school boards that are part of the supervisory union would have a serious discussion in the next two weeks about what level of staffing the schools can sustain, given the financial uncertainty.

Clark, of Westminster West and also a member of the Bellows Falls Union High School Board, said boards should have the difficult discussion about staffing levels, and whether to offer teachers their contracts by the April 15 deadline.

If the school boards don't make decisions, the contracts will automatically renew on April 15, he said, and commit the schools to a level of spending that might not be sustainable or even possible.

"We have two weeks before the boards have to make some tough decisions about the financial realities," said Clark. The boards will face RIFs — or reduction in force.

And, he said, the school boards have to revisit the early retirement incentives that are offered teachers. Teachers and support staff have different contracts with the school boards.

"It is my personal opinion that the boards, in addition to weighing the question of reduction in force, should also give consideration to reopening and possibly modify, by widening the criteria for consideration of early retirement incentives. I'm putting this proposal into play at this time because there may be teachers who for health reasons, or out of other considerations, might want to have another opportunity to reconsider the option of early retirement," he said Monday.

He said it was only fair that the school boards revisit their budgets because many of its taxpayers are losing their jobs — or will be — because of the drastic financial upheavals.

Clark said voters have approved both the BFUHS budget and the Rockingham school budget; voters in the Westminster-Grafton-Athens elementary unified district don't vote on their annual joint budget until April 9, and there are plans to delay that vote for another three weeks because of the pandemic.

Clark said he has been fielding a lot of criticism since last Wednesday's vote to set up a process for laying off paraeducators in the supervisory union. He said the vast majority of the paras could not be laid off because they work with special education students in one-on-one programs.

Jack Bryar, who is chairman of the Windham Northeast Unified Elementary school district, and is also Grafton's representative to the supervisory union, said he is not in favor of hitting "the panic button," but he said he is definitely in favor of the various school districts coming up with some kind of contingency plans.

Last week, a report by the Legislature's Joint Fiscal Office told legislative members that the state school funding program faced a $35 million to $45 million shortfall, and that the $12.9 million surplus had already evaporated.

School funding comes not just from property taxes, but also from a complex combination of various other taxes — rooms and meals, sales taxes and property transfer taxes. Bryar said he was told by state Agency of Education officials that while the state expects to make all payments by the end of the fiscal year, the 2020-21 year is another matter. "Hopefully there's a light at the end of the tunnel and it's not an incoming train,"

Bryar said. Lily Hart, one of four teachers who comprise the leadership of the teachers' union, said the union would have a statement on the issue later in the week. Bryar said the unified elementary school district, made up of Westminster, Grafton and Athens, was slated to hold its first-ever annual meeting on April 9, but that isn't feasible, given all the state orders to social distance and not gather in groups larger than 10.

He said he expected he and another school district officer would entertain a motion to postpone the meeting, probably for three weeks.

"We've told people not to come," he said.

Contact Susan Smallheer at ssmallheer@reformer.com or at 802 556-2147.

 

 

Letter to Grafton Select Board  
(reprinted from the Grafton News of November, 2019)

Hello Everyone,
Thank you for letting me address your meeting last night about the Act 46 forced mergers and their impacts on our communities. I'm sorry that I completely underestimated the turnout and came up significantly short on my handout, which consisted of updates on the legal action now being considered by the Vt. Supreme Court. Some of that material can be found here: https://www.avsbm.org and the balance of that material, specifically the Vt. Attorney General's rebuttal, will be posted up later this week.

Let me please address with you some additional considerations of the implications of Act 46.

To begin with, as to the stated Act 46 goals of "Equity, Accountability & Transparency", you can make own equity judgment based on the evidence provided in your tax bills. As to the latter, it's long been my belief that there is no higher form of accountability and transparency than when you have a five member board scrutinizing $50.00 line items in a proposed school budget. I believe the real purpose behind Act 46 lies elsewhere, and it's actually a clever one.

Under the forced merger of the Athens, Grafton & Westminster school districts, a single entity has been created with board membership consisting two members each from the three towns. In the immediate near term this clearly gives Athens & Grafton a considerable voting advantage over Westminster which might well be employed to reconfigure spending in a manner not quite so onerous to the smaller towns. This, I believe is the near term calculation of the Act 46 legislation.

Regrettably, it's only a temporary power shift, because if the Act 46 forced mergers are sustained, the combined entity will be required to call elections to create a permanent board with the same two each, three town representation. In this lies the second part of a double whammy, and it is this: These will be what are known as "At Large" elections.

In an At Large election, the combined voters of all three towns will go to the polls to cast ballots for all six positions, and with a Check List three to four times the size of that of Athens & Grafton combined, it will be Westminster voters who will eventually determine the outcome of those elections. What this means is that in a situation where a seat is contested, it will be Westminster voters who will determine who will fill that seat, or seats, and it has a very real potential to set up a dynamic whereby the larger town's voters can eventually close the smaller town's schools and bus the small town's kids to the 'more efficient' large town's school, and this is exactly what Act 46 has been designed to do.

Quite apart from that potential outcome, Act 46 also serves another useful purpose, and that is to establish the precedent that State Agencies will have the power to overturn the outcomes of local votes. The schools, of course, being a soft target because of the costs of running them in an era where they are also the primary social services safety net for the three thru 21 years of age population, they are likely to be the first to lose their independence. Once that precedent is established, it is not a great leap to begin to question why Town affairs can't be more efficiently run on a county-wide basis whereby road graders, dump trucks and road crews can be more efficiently utilized as well ?

I'm sorry to be the bearer of such hard tidings, but if the Supreme Court fails to sustain the Act 46 Lawsuit, it's my prediction that the quest for future municipal "efficiencies" won't be too long in the offing.

Respectfully, David M. Clark, Westminster October 8, 2019

board member:
Bellows Falls Union H.S. Board
River Valley Tech. Center

board chair: Windham N.E. Supervisory Union

Exec. Director (acting) Alliance of Vt. School Board Members

 

 

 

Letter: Wake-up call for Vermont democracy

Brattleboro Reformer   |  April 16, 2019

Editor of the Reformer,
From the beginning, Act 46 acknowledged that schools which were meeting the goals of the Act should not be compelled to merge if they could provide conclusive documentation of it. Athens, Grafton and Westminster irrefutably did just that. Regrettably, what happened here as elsewhere was that we ran into the ideological buzzsaw of a runaway State Board of Education which, Facts be Damned, was determined to merge everybody.

As I have stated repeatedly on these pages and elsewhere, this is not really a struggle over education policy, it is a battle to determine if non-elected state agencies can override the results of duly warned and executed local votes. If they are allowed to get away with it, this will be the Death Knell of Vermont Democracy.

What happened in the auditorium at Bellows Falls Union High School Wednesday night was an act of the people taking control of an outside agenda which promoted the anti-democratic policy goals of certain well heeled special interests, who have seized the opportunity to advance their own goals that the Act 46 mergers created. Let us fervently hope that Vermonters, and most especially their elected representatives in the Legislature, will wake up in time to save their democracy.

David M. Clark
Westminster, April 12

 

Illegal forcible assumption of debt

Eagle Times   |  March 9, 2019

Now that we're done congratulating ourselves on the perpetuation of the democratic principals embodied in our participation at Town Meeting, let's talk about the real and present danger to our Democracy. It is the involuntary school mergers which are taking place right now. While they are ostensibly about improving education and saving money, Act 46 was designed from the beginning to serve a much different purpose, and that is a consolidation of power which allows a centralized bureaucracy to dictate what our value system will look like going forward. It is in fact the polar opposite of our Town Meeting-style Democracy.

The very notion that somehow unelected State Agencies possess the power to overturn the outcomes of duly Warned and executed local elections should be universally offensive to all Vermonters, but where is the outrage ? Regrettably the reaction so far seems more akin to a shrug. I was at my local Town Meeting in Westminster Saturday morning where some of our Legislative Reps put in an appearance, and while they were all willing to spout the usual platitudes about the usual things, not one of them could bring themselves to speak to, or about, Act 46. If the people who represent us in Montpelier can't speak up for Democracy, we are indeed in deep trouble.

The reasons why they, and we, should find Act 46 so deeply disturbing are because these forced mergers represent a direct contravention of the constitutional protections of Due Process. This analogous to the taking of your home for a highway project without the benefit of an Eminent Domain Hearing. In this case it affects towns which are being forced to assume the debt of other town schools without this Due Process. This directly violates our protections under the Vermont Constitution as embodied in 24 VSA, Section 1755 which says in part, "No municipality can incur liability for bonded debt without the consent of the voters". That's not hard to understand, unless perhaps your paycheck comes from Montpelier.

This is the "Dark Money" of the special interests that Jane Mayer wrote about in her book of the same title in 2016, hard at work. And Vermont is the perfect place to put the play on. We are so secure in our knowledge that it can't happen here, in peaceful, beautiful, reasonable, Vermont, where, unlike the rest of the country, Government still seems to work, that our complacency has made us ripe for the plucking.

David M. Clark
Westminster, Vt.

 

Single Vermont School District
- David M. Clark

Caledonian Record   |  Jan 18, 2019

To the Editor:

Much like Joan of Arc, Dan French has had a vision. Regrettably, instead of lifting a siege, the Secretary of Education's vision of a single school district for the State of Vermont appears more likely to be intended as a complete take over. It's off to a pretty good start because the Agency of Education has already taken several steps, some of them dubiously legal, and some of them not at all, to begin that takeover.

Lola Duffort, writing in Vt Digger on January 10 blew the lid off it last week in her remarkable story about the Secretary's "Visions" That's a story you can bet your bottom dollar was never supposed to see the light of day.

The legal skirmish lines have already been formed, and 31 School Districts, five Select Boards, One Planning Board and a dozen or so impacted citizens have gone to Court to make the argument that a couple of State Agencies, the A.O.E. and the State Board of Education have no legal right to overturn the results of duly warned and held local elections that produced results which were contrary to the expectations of those Agencies.. So A.O.E. & the State Board have decided to just go ahead and seize these schools' assets for a dollar and, at the same time, harness them with the bonded indebtedness of other schools in other communities, and they intend to do it without so much as a head nod toward the basic constitutional protections of Due Process.

it's something Kim Jong Il could be proud of.

Meanwhile, down here where the heavy hand of our putative overloads is being keenly felt, we're still trying to do the things we need to do to meet our statutory obligations to our communities and school children. However this is proving to be a little bit difficult just at the moment. A few weeks ago when I wrote about the chaos that the Act 46 forced school mergers were creating in the midst of school budgeting season, it was not yet apparent that the Agency of Education would be taking actual steps to deliberately sabotage that process by running a classic hidden ball trick. It works like this.

There are two parts to building a budget, calculating your likely expenses and estimating your revenues. Because of the countless number of variables that the State-Wide property tax formula has created, School Business Managers need to access that revenue data from the Agency of Education, and because AOE is no longer feeling constrained by the Rule of Law, it's playing by its own rules now, To use my district as an example, by combining the revenue information for the Athens, Grafton & Westminster school districts, which the State Board has slated for an Act 46 forced merger, it's no longer possible to make those calculations for the individual school districts.

Pretty clever, isn't it ?

In the Lakeview School District, which is the Craftsbury, Greensboro, Hardwick region, the Business Manager has informed the Greensboro School Board Chair that, "I have received very direct guidance from AOE today (January 11). It was clear that we are NOT to create individual budgets for districts involved in mergers".

School budgeting information is a critical public asset, not a poker chip to be played. The Agency of Education is running this play in direct defiance of the law. But it all fits neatly together in Dan French's vision for an easily managed, top down education bureaucracy, the juiciest parts of which will undoubtably end up for sale to the highest bidder or the coziest crony or some combination thereof.

There's still enough time to do something about it, but it's a small window. Or you can kick back and relax while a very determined force continues to undermine the bedrock of Vermont democracy and gut the living organism, which are the schools, and our small Vermont communities.

David M. Clark
Westminster, Vermont

 

 

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