Contact: david.clark@wnesu.com
Double-crossed by governor
June 28, 2017
On Tuesday, June 20, the Vermont School Boards’ Association and the Vermont Superintendents’ Association issued a joint press release called “Statement on Health Insurance Negotiations and FY 2018 Budgets.”
It’s quite a remarkable document given the fact that after working closely with Gov. Phil Scott both before and after the governor’s suggestion that it made a lot of sense for the VSBA to negotiate directly with the Vermont NEA state leadership on teacher health benefits on behalf of school boards, the governor abruptly changed direction and with the acquiescence of an obliging Legislature, decided to drop that idea and reduce state payments to school districts based on a formula which would determine how much money those districts might save if they were to negotiate teacher health benefits based on the 80/20 split advocated by the governor.
According to a press release by the Governor’s office this should amount to a savings of $25.00 to $75.00 to homeowners on average, a reduction of roughly two cents on the State-Wide property tax. Unfortunately, school districts, which by and large passed their budgets in March will now be making up the shortfall.
This magnificent doublecross of the VSA and the VSBA by the governor was a foreseeable outcome of a hypothetical situation widely promoted by the VSBA whereby school boards would be bypassed in their legal right and obligation to negotiate the benefits portion of their wage and benefits packages with teachers in favor of, initially, “government” in Scott’s language, or as the proposal began to metastasize, the School Boards’ Association. Completely left out of this discussion, of course, were the school boards themselves.
The June 20 VSA/VSBA joint press release is essentially an exercise in “I didn’t actually say, what I said, it just looks that way.” They acknowledged in their release, “Since the beginning of the session our associations have expressed an interest in working collaboratively with the General Assembly and the governor to take responsible steps to contain K-12 costs while preserving educational quality.
“Unfortunately,” they continue, “the perspective of local officials have not been sought in the current closeddoor negotiations between the General Assembly and the Scott administration.”
From the perspective of large numbers of school board directors from around the state, it would appear that the “perspective of local officials” has not been sought by their School Board Association since well before the legislative session began. For another take on the matter one might harken back to the words of the immortal Oliver Hardy, who could have been addressing the Vermont School Boards’ Association when he said to Stan, “Well, this is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into.”
DAVID M. CLARK
(Board chairman, Bellows Falls Union High School) Bellows Falls
Gutting local democracy
June 22, 2017
The fur is starting to fly as a consequence of Gov. Phil Scott’s willful misunderstanding of collective bargaining law as it applies to teacher health benefits and the continuing fallout from the pushback against the statewide school consolidations mandated under Vermont Act 46. But one positive result of all this really bad politics has been the creation of a new school board advocacy group called “The Alliance of Vermont School Board Members” (on the web at AVSBM.com).
If you’re wondering how we ever got into such an unnecessary mess, it’s important to know that one of the principal instigators has been none other than the Vermont School Boards Association, which since rewriting their bylaws last fall in order to exclude as much of their voting membership as possible from policy formulation, has cast itself in the rather unique position of actively advocating for putting local school boards completely out of business by its aggressive lobbying before the Legislature in favor of Act 46.
Just in case you didn’t know it, there is also a Vermont Principals’ Association and a Vermont Superintendents Association, who along with the VSBA are all conveniently housed under the same roof at 2 Prospect Street in Montpelier and who all utilize the same coffee machine and office copiers. No Chinese wall here between these various interests.
And it makes for an interesting comparison with the firewall the VSBA has built between itself and the school boards. As a result of that bylaw change, the voting members of the VSBA are no longer the local boards, but rather school supervisory unions and the new merged superdistricts, all with one vote each. Nice and tidy for stuffing an unpalatable agenda down our collective throats.
All in all, what it adds up to is a direct assault on the Vermont values, which are embedded in our town-meeting style direct democracy, all of which are headed the way of the dodo bird as a likely consequence of this illinformed gutting of local control.
Now would be a good time to get involved with the Alliance of Vermont School Board Members, even if you don’t sit on a school board, and help us put the brakes on this runaway train.
DAVID M. CLARK
(Board chairman,
Bellows Falls
Union High School)
Westminster
Opinion: Governor’s grandstanding
June 1, 2017
As most people are well aware by now, the Legislature and Phil Scott are at an impasse over the state budget, and the sticking point seems to be Gov. Scott’s strong desire to utilize the putative potential savings that the new health insurance coverages might generate.
More specifically, the governor has based his calculations on what would happen of teachers picked up 20 percent of their premium costs. Well the farmers and truck drivers down here in Windham Northeast (Athens, Grafton, Rockingham and Westminster) already have that in their teacher’s contracts now. What we’re really talking about is Phil Scott’s ability to make good on his “no new taxes” campaign pledge.
But the budgets are already passed and the teacher contracts signed, so what it amounts to in the cold light of day is simply a 3 percent cost shift to local taxation.
If you’re wondering how we ever got in this mess, let’s take a stroll back thru time to the passage of the statewide property tax legislation, Act 60. The idea behind Act 60 was a noble one, equitable resource allocation to all Vermont public schools, from state funding and a mechanism to “equalize” the burden of that funding.
Except in practice it didn’t work.
What it did do was create subsets of winners and losers, and every time the Legislature decided to tinker with the formulas new and different subsets of winners and lowers emerged.
Still the beat goes on and the school consolidations mandated under Act 46 are supposed to be the latest panacea for a situation created by stripping local control over local school budgets from local towns who spent what they could afford without overspending their taxpayers means.
When I went to my annual training session with the Vermont School Boards Association recently at the Lake Morey Inn, the question was pointedly raised about what happened to the much touted savings from all those consolidations which the VSBA has so forcefully lobbied for, and the answer was a loud, simple and uncomfortable silence.
Enter now Phil Scott, who, with his Chief of Staff Jason Gibbs whispering in one ear, and the no longer locally accountable Vermont School Boards Association whispering in the other, has announced his intention to repudiate not only statute but literally decades worth of case law because he intends to strip teachers of their legal right to collectively bargain the benefits part of their wage and benefits package.
This is a classic grand standing political play in which the lawyers stand to end up as the biggest winners and taxpayers as the biggest losers.
A big shout out to everyone in Montpelier who has made this nightmare scenario possible.
David M. Clark, of Westminster, is the chairman of the Bellows Falls Union High School Board.