Contact: david.clark@wnesu.com
Dismantling Democracy
- David M. Clark
Caledonian Record | September 23, 2018
To the Editor:
Forced school mergers may seem like small potatoes, but they are not. They are an existential threat to our democracy.
In a last ditch effort to save their community school, the small town of Holland voted recently to close it in order to preserve a school board with some form of control. This in turn would allow them to tuition their kids to other schools, or even possibly start an independent school. North Bennington, to cite a similar example, did that in 2012 and tuitions to an independent school operating in their old school building. However, Holland has been told by the Agency of Education that they won’t allow it. Other school districts which have voted against school mergers have gotten the same response from AOE. The nearest comparison I can come up with is a North Korean election.
And in a classic example of political buck passing, the State Board of Education has been given the unenviable job of drawing the pencil thru the bedrock Vermont values of local responsibility and local control. Let me tell you why: There are a lot of well-connected special interests that would benefit greatly from having a State take-over of public education, and the mantra of “efficiency”, “equity” (whatever that means?), and “transparency” is nothing more than a disingenuous subterfuge. Let me tell you right now, there is no more financially transparent situation than when you have a three member school board scrutinizing $50.00 line items in a proposed school budget.
What remains to be seen is whether there is sufficient public will to do something about it. In a famous 1963 experiment, a psychologist named Stanley Milgram recruited a cross section of average people to find out if they would administer an increasingly severe series of “electric” shocks to a 2nd group of people not actually connected to the electrodes but in on the real purpose of the experiment. Despite the increasingly desperate pleas of the “victims”, acting under Milgrim’s directions the first group was entirely willing to ignore their sense of humanity and do what they were told. Let us hope the State Board of Education will summon the courage to act with both discretion and honor, and not merely blind obedience.
David M. Clark
Westmister
Thieving from the Ed property tax
Rutland Herald | September 6, 2018Let’s do a little exercise called “Follow the Money.”
In a Times Argus news story which appeared in several papers last week, there was an update on the recent shenanigans of the Vermont Economic Progress Council and their latest reverse-Robin Hood good deed. It now appears that the Council has voted unanimously to approve funding for a “Tax Incremental Finance District,” or TIF, for a few lucky winners in Montpelier. What the TIF does is to “… help reduce costs for developers interested in building in the city.” And what is the source of this largesse? Well now, it turns out “The TIF uses education property taxes to fund infrastructure projects …” which, in this case, support the developers of a new hotel and parking garage for the Capital City. Let us not mince words here. This amounts to stealing from the Education Property Tax Fund and therefore, every property owner who has paid into it. Many years ago, when Act 60, the statewide property tax legislation, was passed, there were a few of us who prophesied that the only thing you could guarantee with a statewide property tax was that it would go up, and once the powers that be managed to pry open Pandora’s Box and start to siphon it off for other uses, it would go up exponentially.
By continuing to rely on that cookie jar known as the education property tax, we have now arrived at that exact moment.
David M. Clark
Westmister
