Contact: david.clark@wnesu.com
Letter: A bunch of baloney
Editor of the Reformer
Full Disclosure: I represent Westminster on Bellows Falls Union High School board, which I also chairman.
Quite a number of people I know and respect have lined up behind the proposal to merge the schools in the four towns of the Windham Northeast Supervisory Union — Athens, Grafton, Rockingham and Westminster — into an Act 46 "super district." There are many good reasons for doing this, beginning with the extreme burnout that must be experienced by our central office administrators who have to prepare five separate budgets and answer to five different boards, once you throw the Supervisory Union and Bellows Falls Union High School into the mix.
Act 46, which was initially about cost containment, has morphed into being all about Equity, Accountability and Transparency, but that is a Golden Farce, what it's really about is diverting attention from a Legislature that can't control its own runaway budget, to the softer target of the schools by means of the ridiculously jingoistic mantra of "enrollments down, costs up, that's why our taxes are rising." Nice try but wrong answer. Let's take a look at those rising taxes.
In Vermont we have two property tax rates, the homestead rate, which is paid on the house you live in, and the commercial rate, which is everything else. However we live in an almost surreal situation where the Homestead property is actually subsidizing the commercial property in many towns in the state, and in Brattleboro and Dummerston that subsidy paid by the homeowner runs roughly in a range of 10 to 15 cents per thousand dollars of assessed valuation. If that's not already bizarre enough, it's also worth also remembering that the sixth cent tacked onto the Sales Tax about ten years ago was for the purpose of "stabilizing" that Commercial tax rate.
Now let's cut to the chase. Practically every year since the Passage of Act 60, which gave us the State-wide property tax, our legislature has been trying to tinker with the revenue formula to make it more equitable. That (and also their uncontrolled spendthrift habits) have created the mess we're in today, for the plain and simple reason is that there is no equity in the property tax, which is an 18th century agrarian anachronism. It's income which is the best measure of the ability to pay, and in the absence of a broad-based tax to substantially fund education, it's going to be just another bad fix on top of the last one ad nauseum.
I really wanted to sit this one out, I didn't think the proposal was going to gain much traction in my town of Westminster. However my hand has been forced here a little bit by the appearance of an anonymous postcard urging Westminster voters to turn the merger proposal down cold. I did some digging and those individuals behind it are all good, well meaning people, even if their tactics were on the long side of clumsy.
There are other governance models possible under Act 46 besides the super district, and I think we ought to look a little closer at some of them. However, the notion that the creation of an administrative megalith is going to somehow improve equity, accountability and transparency more efficiently than local governance by local boards directly answerable to their constituents, is a bunch of baloney.
David M. Clark,
Westminster, Feb. 22
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I recently breezed thru an editorial in the Sunday New York Times called “Republican’s Guide to Presidential Behavior”. Some of the highlighted key words were “Accuse, Blame, Threaten, Intimidate, Neglect, Claim, Refute, Hide, Collude”. This caused me to reflect on a letter I wrote over a month ago on the topic of Act 46, which I refer to as the “Blame The Victim” Act” and some of its enablers.
In particular, I slapped the Vermont School Board’s Association around a little bit, because after a Bylaw change at their last Annual Meeting they no longer even represent school boards, just Supervisory Unions and the new Super Districts. In making my case I recalled their unwavering support for a former Superintendent of Schools and his assistant who might have been charitably described as “Ethically Challenged”. Regrettably, my language was judged to be a little strong and the letter was rejected.
This has set me thinking about the changing boundaries of political discourse in society these days. Apparently it’s O.K. to pummel a constitutionally elected President of the United States because we regard him as an odious individual, but it’s not O.K. to apply similar descriptors to local politics because of the potential repercussions.
In some vague way I’m beginning to believe that this is the classic description of bullying behavior. Everyone piles on the “safe” target but refuses to acknowledge the more immediate menace because persons of local influence might get angry about it. Granted, I don’t make the editorial decisions, but I do go to bed at night with a clear conscience because I still call ‘em as I see ‘em.
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A number of years ago I was in hot pursuit of a Superintendent of Schools and his Assistant Super who were, in my judgment, bad news for the WNESU Schools. The more they wiggled and twisted, the deeper the hole they dug themselves until finally they were caught pulling a real fast one when they cooked up a phony-baloney tax document, a so-called Department of Ed. tax worksheet, and then backdated it in an attempt to cover their tracks with regard to a 21 cent miscalculation of the education tax rate for the Town of Rockingham.
Based on their never ending gyrations over the course of time, I thought this blatant act of dishonesty should have been enough for a Just Cause Dismissal. Regrettably, their masters on the WNESU Board chose to turn a blind eye toward their behavior yet again. It took a while, but much as was the irony of Al Capone going to the Big House for tax evasion, justice was finally served because of a Title IX complaint filed against the Super.
It’s water over the dam now, and both that Board as well as the Superintendency have turned over a couple of times since then.
As hard as I was pushing, I didn’t fully realize who was helping the crowd that was pushing back, it was that champion of Good Governance, the Vermont School Board’s Association which was whispering in the elected leadership’s ear. A little later on I would come to find out who was whispering in theirs. This was on the occasion of a trip up to 2 Prospect Street in Montpelier, home of the Vermont Principal’s Association, and some others.
The catalyst for the trip was some unsportsmanlike behavior on the part of one of my offspring during tournament play, but the actual learning experience was the close nature of the relationships between the Principal’s Association, the School Board’s Association and also the Vermont Superintendent’s Association who are all housed under the same roof at #2, and all of whom drink from the same water cooler & use the same coffee machine found under that roof.
I was up there again the summer before last, not long after the passage of Act 46, when various School Boards from around the state made the pilgrimage to #2 to get told how the law was going to sugar off. In the room, and it is by no means a complete list, were the VSBA Director at the time Steve Dale, a former Douglas Administration functionary, former Rockingham Town Manager Jeff Francis, the current Director of the Superintendent’s Association and overall shot-caller, Vaughn Altemus from the Vt. Agency of Education & Rebecca Holcomb the A.O.E. Director, and a whole supporting cast of somewhat lesser lights. You might say it was a lesson in learning how sausage is made.
More recently, at its annual meeting this past fall at the Lake Morey Inn, the VSBA membership took the rather unusual step of effectively disenfranchising about half the school boards in the state by amending its bylaws so that it no longer represents local School Boards, just Supervisory Unions and Act 46 Super Districts. Of course the handwriting was already on the wall for this a year ago when those of us who showed up at Lake Morey to receive our legislatively mandated, compulsory School Board Chair training discovered that in fact as far as the VSBA was concerned they’d already drawn the pencil thru those local boards, and my group were simply identified as members of Windham Northeast Supervisory Union. no sublety there about future intent, you might say.
So we come full circle back to the Act 46 mantra of Equality, Accountability & Transparency, for this is how it works from On High. Fortunately, there are a few obstinate school districts left in the state who value the importance of local control, which has been under an unrelenting assault since the passage of the State-Wide Property Tax Law, Act 60, the most notable achievement of which may very be the onslaught of the spikes in school spending caused by an ever-changing funding formula which creates a new set of winners and losers every time the Legislature attempts to tinker with their Frankenstein Monster of the State-Wide property tax.
Act 46 is simply more of this odious bad business and has been aided and abetted by the incestuous relationships formed by the Vermont School Board’s Association with their much too close neighbors at the VSA. Indeed, perhaps the School Board’s Association has reached the end of its useful service life and it well may be time for the remaining independent boards to start talking about the kind of collective support system that might ensure local control at a reasonable price to tax payers as well as the continuation of the superlative educational outcomes of which Vermont is justly proud.
David M. Clark
Westminster, Vt.
March 23, 2017
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The problem with Act 46
March 27, 2017
To the Editor,
Back in the beginning, school finance was a simple thing. Victory spent what Victory could afford and Stowe spent what Stowe could afford, and if you wanted what Stowe had to offer, you moved to Stowe if you could afford to. Then along came the Brigham Decision in Vermont, which led to the statewide property tax to fund education and all of a sudden things started to get very, very complicated.
What has resulted is an increasingly complex funding formula which is probably only thoroughly understood by a few state bureaucrats within the Agency of Education and Department of Taxes, and maybe a handful of school business managers. And yet the Vermont Legislature keeps tinkering with the formula in a futile attempt to make it “equitable," and every time they do, they create a new subset of property tax winners and losers.
Some of those losers can be found in towns like Brattleboro and Dummerston, as well as many others, where, in a bizarre twist of fate, their residential property tax rate is actually subsidizing the commercial property and second home owners to the tune of 10 to 15 cents per $1,000. Astonishing, and that’s a particularly deep and abiding irony when you realize that the sixth cent which was added to the Vermont Sales Tax a few years ago was for the purpose of subsidizing the commercial property tax rate.
So maybe this 18th century agrarian anachronism of the property tax isn’t such an equitable means of redistributing the wealth, and now into the mix comes the legislature’s latest attempt to fix a problem that can’t be fixed, with a new tool from their 18th century toolbox, so-called Act 46.
The problem with Act 46 is that it’s underpinnings are built on a deception. It’s reason for being, we are told, is to create “Equity, Accountability, and Transparency," however its real purpose is to deflect our attention from the Legislature’s chronic inability to live within it’s own economic means.
Now that it has spent and overspent not only their own funding but also that portion of General Fund monies that used to help support education, they’ve run out of dough and need a fall guy, and what better place to pin the blame than on the schools which are vulnerable to the ridiculously simple suggestion that because spending is up while enrollments are declining, well there’s the problem.
Somehow quite a number of Vermont towns and school districts have been sold a bill of goods that says local responsibility isn’t providing the kind of educational and financial accountability and oversight that the creation of megalith school districts will provide, but you know and I know that’s a bunch of rubbish.
You can date the beginning of the spikes in school budgets and taxation to exact moments of the passage of Acts 60 and Act 68, which began to take local responsibility and local control out of the hands of local school boards and created the statewide property tax.
If you want to fix it, just forget about the creation of juggernaut school districts built on the Orwellian lie of “Equity, Accountability and Transparency” and start talking about a broad-based tax structure, where the ability to pay is also based on income not just the house you happen to live in.
David M. Clark
Westminster, Vt.