Editor’s note: This commentary is by David M. Clark, of Westminster, who is a member of the school boards for Bellows Falls Union High School, River Valley Tech Center and the Windham Northeast Supervisory Union, of which he is chair.

I‘ve just come back from the Vermont School Boards Association’s Oct. 18 annual conference at the Lake Morey Resort, and in the words of the famous baseball philosopher, it was deja vu all over again for the VSBA.

Once again, technology bit the VSBA in a big way. Last year, in fairness to the electronic voting vendor, internet bandwidth at the resort might have been an inhibiting factor, certainly the live remote feed was an early casualty to the undoubted consternation of the four or five interested individuals who might actually have tried to follow the proceedings from the comfort of their living rooms. But this year the electronic Wilburys struck early and often, because after an initial 50 in favor and one opposed vote on pro forma bylaw changes, the body was forced to resort to a traditional voice vote on the first 11 proposed resolutions, before being granted a short reprieve on the 12th. But more about that one in a few moments.

After the initial brief shining moment of electronic voting which produced that 50-1 result, voice voting settled back into a predictable and fairly consistent pattern of 18 in favor and 8 opposed. Regrettably, this number represents a bit of a slide from last year when 29 people in the room set the course for the VSBA’s agenda for Vermont education, at least when the leadership chose to embrace it, but we’ll come back to that one, too.

This year there were 17 resolutions originating with school boards as opposed to the seven which made it in time for inclusion in last year’s VSBA annual report, all of them originating in the VSBA’s Resolutions Committee and all but one of them designed to strip powers from school boards. The one exception being the “School Innovation Zone” proposal, which having been lifted straight out of the Koch Brothers American Legislative Exchange Council ( or ALEC) playbook, was simply a backdoor conduit to support privatized education initiatives with taxpayer dollars, but then, why not? Nobody’s paying much attention anyway.

This year the aforementioned 12th resolution, which on behalf of the Vermont School Boards Association I’m proud to say, was the only one subjected to a successful electronic vote, was defeated by another one of those 18-8 margins. It was a request originating from my very own Windham Northeast Supervisory Union, a simple “Be it resolved” that was a request to the Legislature to impose a temporary moratorium on new education legislation until we’ve had a chance to evaluate the whacky side effects of some of the current statutes, one of which has been a precipitous drop in the number of dues-paying school boards still available to tithe to the Vermont School Boards Association.

Another one, as we now very well know, is the gutting of Vermont’s bedrock democratic values through Act 46, because in the best North Korean tradition, local “yes” votes to accomplish the Act 46 mega-mergers were allowed, but “no” votes weren’t, although in fairness to the process, those recalcitrant school districts were encouraged to try again to see if they could manage to get it right on the next attempt.

So in a classic illustration of the Law of Unintended Consequences, the VSBA, which lined up foursquare behind those Act 46 forced consolidations, got a fleeting taste of the sublime along with the sour.

I always find it remarkable when a service organization goes rogue, although after last year’s fiasco when the VSBA’s executive leadership tried cozying up to Phil Scott, when he said that maybe they ought to do the teacher health negotiatin’ only to get thrown under the bus at the eleventh hour, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. This year’s surprise took the form of the VSBA’s Executive Committee, in a hurried late night phone operation, going around the back of their board’s official position of merger neutrality, by urging the State Board of Education to reject the notion that they might actually want to respect the outcome of local votes.

But hey, why not? This is the new paradigm. While we were all sleeping, the Legislature passed another one of those zingers that the moratorium I mentioned earlier was supposed to prevent. It’s called Act 173, and I’ll bet you’ve never even heard of it. Simply put, Act 173 will change special education funding from its current reimbursement model to a simple block grant based on total school population. Wowie! If you’re one of the lucky schools with a small special needs population, you can even roll your savings over into your 504 programming. However, if yours is a high needs population, well guess what? Your taxpayers are about to take it on the chin big time.

You might think that maybe it’s not too late to slow down that speeding train, and in that regard it’s good to know that full implementation doesn’t occur until 2021, so at least you’ve got time to sell your house now and move. In fact there’s even a rules-making process going on right now. But this time it’s not going to be according to Hoyle, or even 3VSA Sec 801(b)(8) which is part of the Vermont Administrative Procedure Act. If you wanna have input, you gotta go and see the VSBA because there ain’t gonna be no stinking public hearings. The Agency of Education’s Rules Committee doesn’t need to hear from the public. And why is this? Well, it’s because the VSBA already has a seat at that table in the person of their executive director, and anyway, they’ve proven time and again that school boards are just too dumb to act in their own best interests (See paragraph 8 “Phil Scott,” above).

So the bottom line outcome of the Vermont School Boards Association annual “conference” is simply the continued marginalization of the very school boards that are supposed to be their raison d’etre in the first place. In a few years when your local school is closed and young families either won’t move to your town, and the ones who are left are looking for a way to move out without losing whatever equity they might have had in their homes, well you’ll know who to thank.