I eavesdropped on ibrattleboro’s excellent coverage of your town mtg, & was pleased to see the discussion about the ill-conceived proposal from the legislature to kill our local school boards. I believe the Vt legislature originally met for much shorter sessions, and like so many institutions has grown bigger just because there was time available for it to do so. This proposal suggests they have too much time on their hands and are inventing fixes for things that ain’t broke.
Sure, we can always use improvements to our public education system, but abolishing our citizen school boards seems misguided, especially since they cost almost nothing to maintain (in Guilford, for example, just over $2,000 a year in a school budget of some $2 million!)
It’s interesting that when this latest item surfaced it was promoted as a way to cut education costs. Now we hear that the proposers aren’t sure of that anymore — whoops! So they figured they’d better come up with another reason for getting rid of our local school boards. One of those reasons was that it would make life easier for supervisory union superintendents, who now have to attend board meetings in their various towns. Wow, pretty strong argument for abolishing our local board system.
Now we hear that eliminating local school boards will “improve education.” Ummmm.
Contention
Hey Don. Yea, it was the most contentious debate of the day, 10 hours in !!
I talked with Valerie Stuart at length about the bill that her House Education Committee has come up with. One of their motivations is that there is a 30% turnover rate amongst superintendents in the state. Per year, I think she said. That does seem extraordinarily high. Don Webster last Wed. night addressed the preparatory town meeting held by the school board, and said that he thought the bill was the result of the House Ed. Committee trying desperately to find ways to reduce the state education budget, but Valerie denied this.
I am not in the labyrinthine world of Vermont education financing, so have precious little understanding of any of this. Don & David Schoales seemed to be asking for the process to be slowed down in order for the state to understand the proposal and its implications.
I will say, having sat in on two school district meetings recently, that I am very impressed in general with the quality of education that I’ve seen discussed in those meetings. It seems worlds better than the public school system that I grew up in in the Hudson Valley.
This doesn't sound good
The logic fails on this one. Removing local control may save money and superintendents, but if that’s the case, a state-wide system would be cheaper and more effective than regions, and a national system would be even more so.
This seems like the proverbial slippery slope, and seems like something ALEC would write in an attempt to bust local school control and help shift it to be more easily controlled by one central entity. Knowing the educational system a bit I’d guess that the one entity would be a totally non-biased board set up by Microsoft and Pearson to advice on which products to buy and sell in the education marketplace.
Hopefully people have read that Windows 8 has been made the official platform of choice for the Common Core.
The same argument about consolidation is going on in other states on the Municipal side of things.. NY state is currently showing adds suggestion towns just give up and form regional governing bodies.
There may be problems with retaining superintendents, but but I doubt that it because we don’t have regional school control. It’s probably because Race to The Top and No Child Left Behind make unrealistic, impossible goals and put extreme pressure on the administration to succeed or be fired/closed.
I predict that soon there will be a company that you can hire to do all your town and school business for you. Just send them a check, and stop thinking. Like automatic bill payments, this will free our minds to think of other things, like puppies on the web, and whether any celebrities are doing stupid things.
Come to think of it, we should start that company, and make all the money from all the towns in the country. We would take almost $40 million from Brattleboro, and similar amounts from all over. Just need to convince them that it is in their best interest to take over the disfficult and confusing task of running a town or school. : )
Portmanteau
What a great new word you’ve made up….*disfficult
Combining insult with injury, and adding a touch of complex struggle.
Don’t change it or this comment will hang disfficultily in abstraction
Typing is disfficult
I think I’m still in my typing-too-fast mode from this weekend.
I agree. It wasn’t intentional, but on reflection, I will support the local use of the word. (If you’d like to meet the national standard, you will need to be able to use it properly in a sentence and know why you used it.)
push for consolidation - anecdote
Windham South is currently being administered by an interim superintendant, the last permanent one having fled in medias contract. The local boards were prevented from hiring a permanent replacement before seeking to consolidate with some other supervisory union in the area. Not one had any interest in merging, so eventually the state agreed to allow a search for a new superintendant.
The state is pushing hard for consolidation of districts & supervisory unions, & will probably force the change before very long. I don’t know anyone who wants it. We have an excellent school, & our board vaults through hoops keeping costs down, frequently bringing in a budget that’s a tad lower than the previous year’s. I’m really not sure why the state ed dept. is so wedded to this concept. Economy of scale sounds good in the abstract, but in our town’s case, & I strongly suspect in many other towns’, it would cost us more to give up our local system without any real compensatory educational advantage.
Beyond education matters, the state is imposing a lot of new rules & standards that are pushing up municipal costs, forcing small towns ever closer to non-sustainability. None of these inovations sounds unreasonable in the abstract, but the cumulative effect is forcing tiny communities to spend up to more unban levels when there is no practical need to do so.
It seems that it should still be possible to at least slow down this disturbing trend; we use our votes to do that. Is there another way to work together to pressure the state?