Letter: Act 46's end game: Strip towns of control
Bennington Banner | Nov 1, 2018
To the Editor:
There is a strong possibility right now that in a few years we will be looking back wistfully to an extinct Vermont institution called Town Meeting. For those of us who haven't tumbled yet to the Game Plan, for all its talk about efficiency and educational equity, all Act 46, the school merger legislation, amounts to is a Trojan Horse maneuver to wrest control of the schools away from the communities that nurture those schools and incorporate them into a cumbersome and all powerful megalith.
First lambs to the slaughter were, of course, those school districts that believed there really was no exit and therefore elected to negotiate the terms of their surrender on the best terms possible and accept the property tax rate reduction incentives (read "bribes") that were an inducement to early adopters. Now that the willing have fallen in line, or in many cases simply fallen, the push is on the incapacitate the hold outs through the involuntary forced mergers the state Board of Education is know decreeing.
Those of us who sat through the state board meeting spectacle at Mill River High School last Monday, Oct. 29 were treated to a magnificently staged performance in which the state board merged some schools the secretary of education had not recommended for merger and chose not to merge others the secretary had recommended. This was just a show piece to position the state board to make a case for their supposed "independent judgment" in the lawsuit which is soon to follow.
However, deep into the day we got around to the real agenda, which was described in the agency's "Default Articles of Agreement," which will dictate the course these involuntary mergers will take. As a sop to an abstract concept called "community involvement," merged schools will have two years to enjoy the way things were, because after those two years are up, all bets are off. What happens next is the throttling of any sort of local democracy through a nifty vehicle called "at large" voting. This is how it works:
Take my own three to-be-merged towns of Athens, Grafton and Westminster. Representatives to the newly merged board will still be elected from the three towns, however, the vote will be commingled across the district. So a candidate who wins all of the votes in Athens or Grafton can still be denied the seat by the results of how Westminster votes, because our voter check list is three times the size of Athens and Grafton combined. And in a few years, when we get tired of heating and maintaining their school building, we can just go ahead and close it and bus their kids to our own school, which gains the "efficiency" of the larger enrollment. After all, what's an hour's bus ride for a kid living in the Houghtonville section of Grafton to us? We didn't tell the family to live there, and probably they won't for long.
This is the End Game behind Act 46. Disempower the local communities, stifle our 200 years of local responsibility and involvement and replace it with a centralized, unyielding bureaucracy. As someone else recently said, centralized administration over self-government, management over education, and pseudo-efficiency over real equity.
David M. Clark,
Westminster
Can you do better?
The Times ArgusMay 15, 2018
In the topsy-turvy world that is Montpelier these days, no topic seems to generate as much heat and as little light as school funding. The fun began last year about this time when Gov. Phil Scott thought it might be politically expedient to actually overreach his “No New Taxes” campaign pledge with what, at first blush, looked like the almost irresistible topper of a two-cent cut in the statewide education property tax rate. Of course, on the QT and with the acquiescence of the legislative leadership, he plugged that yawning gap with what we politely refer to as “One Time Money” and this year, he wants to do it again.
Now, in order to throw John Q. Public off the scent, he needed a fall guy and the perfect fall guy was, of course, those pesky schools which were causing all the budget trouble in the first place. But even if the governor wanted excellent schools that would provide a highly trained workforce, that didn’t mean he actually wanted to pay for it.
Enter now the Vermont School Boards Association, which could see opportunity in all this, and when Phil Scott opined that it might be a good idea to have a statewide teacher health insurance plan, the VSBA and their conjoined Siamese twin, the Vermont Superintendents Association, said “Happy to help.” Or, it might just have been their ambitious leadership. What they got was burned, and in cozying up to Gov. Scott, not only did they throw every school board budget in Vermont under the bus, instead of being players, Phil Scott used them as chips.
Remarkably, it’s still their current thinking, or as VSBA Director Nicole Mace put it Wednesday night, “Have people at the local level (meaning the school boards) focus on what they’re experts in.” Which is apparently nothing. So, let this clodhopper from southern Vermont weigh in and just say, that if the operators in the state capitol think they can do a better job with a statewide plan than we’ve already done down here, where we’ve reigned in our budgets and negotiated Phil’s 80/20 health insurance split, then let ’em.
But, let’s make those premium obligations a state government responsibility at the same time, so we’ll really know what and who’s responsible for runaway school budgets.
Maybe it will turn out that the governor’s political apparatus can defy the laws of gravity, or maybe it can’t, and we’ll wind up finding out what the rest of the country already knows, which is that statewide teacher’s contracts lead to statewide teacher’s strikes.
David M. Clark
Westminster
Archived Articles:
November, 2018
"Act 46's end game:
Strip towns of control"
-Bennington Banner
Nov. 1, 2018
October, 2018
"Tick, tick, tick' goes Act 173"
-Rutland Herald
Oct. 30, 2018
"David Clark: A candid take
on the VSBA conference"
-VT Digger
Oct. 24, 2018
September, 2018
"Dismantling Democracy"
-Caledonian Record
Sept. 23, 2018
"Thieving from the Ed
property tax"
-Rutland Herald
Sept. 6, 2018
June, 2018
"Our democracy is not safe"
-Rutland Herald
June. 20, 2018
May, 2018
"Can you do better?"
-The Times Argus
May. 15, 2018
October, 2017
"Letter: VSBA says no to accountability"
-Brattleboro Reformer
Oct. 24, 2017
"Gutting Local Control"
-Rutland Herald
Oct. 19, 2017
June, 2017
"Double-crossed by governor"
-Rutland Herald
June 28, 2017
"Gutting local democracy"
-Rutland Herald
June 22, 2017
"Opinion: Governor's granstanding"
-Burlington Free Press
June 1, 2017
May, 2017
"Making a mess of teachers' health insurance"
-Eagle Times
May 21, 2017
April, 2017
"Act 46 is fundamentally flawed"
-Brattleboro Reformer, April 12, 2017
March, 2017
"A bunch of baloney"
–Brattleboro Reformer, March 1, 2017
"Not suitable for publication"
"The problem with Act 46"
-Eagle Times
March, 2017
February, 2017
"Act 46: the death knell of local control"
-Commons Online, February 22, 2017
Materials formerly available at
The Alliance of Vermont School Board Members (AVSBM) Website
