education law change:tax break?

Lots of debate this past session occurred over how the structure of school governance could allow communities to continue to offer the best affordable educational opportunities for Vermont’s students and still save money on the administration. As many readers will imagine, this discussion caught the attention of the teachers’ union and all the lobbyists for superintendents, teachers and school boards. A lively and lengthy discussion occurred whenever this topic came up!

In the end H.66 was approved by both the House and Senate, but not everyone was happy. The idea is to reduce administrative costs, improve opportunity for efficiency and save taxpayer money.

The bill will allow groups of school districts to band together into a Regional Educational District, a RED, to get lower tax rates for four years. The lower rates are the incentive to band together and are for homestead property tax rates only. The tax rate reductions are .08 the first year, .06 the second year, .04 the third year and .02 the fourth year. All of the districts in the RED will have the same equalized homestead property tax rate and then each community will apply its own CLA. Since rates in our county vary so greatly this means if any of our county schools join together to form a RED, some rates will go up, others will go down. The bill states that "The rate for each town within the RED shall not increase or decrease by more than 5% in a single year." So it will take a few years to equalize the rates.

In order to form, the RED has to have a minimum of 4 school districts or 1250 students, but waivers are available. The RED will have one school board to govern all the schools in the district, like a Unified Union School District such as the communities of Franklin, Highgate and Swanton now have now for their 7-12 grade students at MVU. The school districts forming a RED do not have to be contiguous. The RED can have its own superintendent or can be part of a supervisory union.

The bill requires Supervisory Union Boards to discuss whether to explore the creation of Regional Educational Districts by December 1 this year. Local boards can also discuss the possibility but are not required to do so. Supervisory Union Boards have to vote by October 1, 2012 whether or not to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the merger and report the results to the Commissioner of Education and to each member school district. This means the board has to identify the towns that would be a good fit and that would want to move forward by doing an official study with the goal of creating a RED for those towns. REDs have to be created by July 1, 2017 to get the tax reductions. The final decision is up to the local voters. The voters in each district must approve the plan for creation of a RED.

Why was everyone not happy? Some saw this initiative as a threat to school choice. Several school districts in Franklin County now offer school choice to grade 9-12 students or grade 7-12 students because these communities do not maintain their own schools for these grades. These districts include Fairfield, Fletcher, Sheldon, Bakersfield, Berkshire and my hometown of Georgia. If a school district that now has school choice for any grade joins a RED that maintains a school with those grades, students must attend those schools. No tuitioning is allowed, at least not using public money. School choice using public money is lost in this case. Parents could pay for the tuition themselves, but that would be a very significant change for communities that now offer choice for secondary students. School choice can still exist if there are no classes offered within the RED. So districts that now have choice for some or all of their students could keep it by joining together only with other districts that have choice to make their own Regional Education District.

If there is more than one class offered in a particular grade within the RED, then there is limited choice within those classes already offered. For example, if each of 4 schools within a RED offers grades prek through 6, students throughout the RED have the choice of attending any of the 4 schools for those grades.

School districts that want to keep choice as it exists now have two options:
1. don’t join one of these new Regional Educational Districts or
2. join one that contains only towns that also offer choice for the same grades. If the RED does not maintain a high school and does not designate a high school, choice remains as it is now.

All the REDs have to be approved by the Commissioner of Education and there has to be a proposed cost or educational opportunity benefit.

Contact me at cbranagan@leg.state.vt.us for more information on this. This bill is waiting for the governor’s signature.

Rep. Carolyn Branagan
Franklin-1 Fairfax/Georgia
Vermont House of Representatives