Our schools are being crushed by state mandates

This commentary is by Caty Sutton, the superintendent of the Hartford School District; the Hartford School Board; the Hartford School District leadership and the Hartford Education Association leadership.

It is with great disappointment, discouragement and disillusionment that we write to express our profound concerns about what transpired throughout the last legislative session. As we anticipate what will come this year, those decisions will significantly affect and shape our fate as a district.

First, the passage of Act 169 at the end of the last legislative session and the reduction of the excess spending threshold from 118% to 115.5% in one fiscal year are devastating to our district and local community. Our district now faces an almost $5 million reduction in our budget while continuing to absorb the catastrophic, ongoing impact of crushing healthcare insurance costs and crippling inflation.

To put the above into perspective, we are looking at potentially having to reduce our administration, professional staff and support staff by 25% — one in four of our workforce — to present a budget to our community below the excess spending threshold so we can avoid the penalty that the state would impose.

At the same time, we continue to face the Vermont Agency of Education‘s ongoing accountability efforts, requiring districts to engage in significant and unfunded, unsupported initiatives. So, eviscerate our budgets, but expect our staff to take on even more?

All of this comes as the Legislature continues PCB testing in schools while leaving districts already affected in limbo, with little or no funding for mandated quarterly testing and no resources for remediation or abatement. These costs could amount to millions of dollars, leaving local taxpayers to fund a state-mandated response to a serious safety hazard.

We are also being given almost no lead time or transition period to adopt a new Medicaid reimbursement model, which will change how we are reimbursed and involve an entirely new system, requiring hours of training and implementation for staff who must deliver and adopt this approach.

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Finally, let’s not forget that Act 170 places us in a Cooperative Educational Service Area (CESA) by statute. Since we were incorrectly placed by the Legislature in the Northeast region, we must also undergo an arduous process laid out in the statute to move from the Northeast into the Vermont Learning Collaborative, with which we have already been collaborating for two years, while simultaneously engaging in district merger committee conversations with regional neighbors who are in a different CESA region and facing the same challenging budget reductions.

It is beyond challenging to believe that there is not a concerted effort to discredit, disenfranchise and essentially gut public education in Vermont, beginning with this fiscal year and the impossibility of our current budgeting circumstances.

Our community does not deserve this. Our educators have dedicated their careers and their lives to serving our students with integrity and care, and now we are put into the position of radically overhauling our district. For what, exactly? Neither the agency, the Legislature nor the governor has supplied us with any semblance of a realized vision for what this education transformation will give our students as a result of these profoundly damaging changes, and none of these entities has supplied us with the data and evidence that this transformation will lead to cost savings for our taxpayers.

Our community did not ask for district merger studies, PCBs, changes to Medicaid and additional requirements from the agency. We just want to continue to do what we do best: provide the best possible education and support to our students with the funding our community is willing and able to provide.

Going forward, we expect our local delegation to revisit the abrupt and crushing impact that this reduction to the excess spending threshold will have on our district and to advocate for changes to slow down this process. We also expect them to push for allocation of funding to continue to ensure the law is followed and we do not incur the infinite costs of PCB testing, remediation and abatement. And we expect them to scrutinize the unrealistic timelines and processes related to the formation of CESAs and the district merger committee study groups.

In short, we expect our local delegation to take care of our community, which is struggling to breathe under the weight of the myriad costs of imposed mandates.

Please help us to save our most valuable community resource and advocate for a future with a strong public education system. Center our students, and consider who among us is the most vulnerable and requires the most support. Remember that public education is a fundamental and most vibrant component of Vermont democracy and community life.

Please give us a lifeline to survive.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Our schools are being crushed by state mandates.