The cost of education is going up.
2024-01-09
Dear friend,
How was your week?
The week began with Martin Luther King, Jr. day. In response to my letter (read: friends of the King) on King's April 16, 1963 letter from the Birmingham jail, one constituent wrote back:
That's a nice tribute to MLK, and it's great you are spreading the word.
How about another idea, try going forward from now without using racial characteristics to describe anyone. It's hard, but with thought and practice it's very doable.
If you try this you'll find yourself becoming less racist yourself, and others will be affected.
Don't beat yourself up for slipping, just vow to do better next time.
What do you think?
I want to build on this resident's idea, and refer back to what I wrote in the piece on King -- racism is taught and reinforced by leaders whom it benefits politically.
Similarly, it benefits us regular people living in small towns to build stronger networks and find areas of common cause. Why is it the network TV that streams us information about the upcoming civil war? (See A burn permit for Red vs. Blue.)
As I wrote in Ignorantia juris non excusat, I'm very concerned about Big Tech's drain on our wallets and our downtowns.
On both topics, it is clear that working-class people pay more each year for less. Meanwhile there are elites who are making record profits. Here's Sebastian Junger writing on this topic in National Review:
Online manipulation helps burden the average American with $6,000 in credit-card debt and $60,000 in overall debt. At the median real income (inflation-adjusted) of $37,500 a year, trying to pay that off requires a lifetime of hard work — and usually fails. The consumer economy could be thought of as a very efficient system for making young people dependent on things that are bad for them and then monetizing those dependencies for a lifetime. Fast food, lack of exercise, compulsive shopping, and excessive social-media use are all associated with poor health, anxiety, and depression. Happily, those disorders can be further monetized by developing costly drugs that allow people to continue their bad habits and addictions without having to die.
It’s hard not to wonder whether American corporations deliberately addict people in order to increase profits — or do people seek out the solace of addiction because the American economy can seem rigged against them? Either way, the results are catastrophic. After remaining stable for decades, a measure of income distribution called the Gini coefficient has reached levels of unfairness not seen since the Roaring Twenties. America has one of the most skewed Gini coefficients of the industrialized world, on a par with ancient Rome’s. (Pre-tax, the U.S. Gini coefficient is even worse — on a par with that of wildly corrupt countries such as Haiti, Namibia, and Botswana.) According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 10 percent of Americans now control half of national pre-tax income and over three-quarters of the national wealth.
In this context, the vaunted division between liberals and conservatives can be seen for what it is: cover for the real division in America between elites who benefit from this system and the vast majority who don’t. Political rhetoric to the contrary, liberal and conservative elites have far more in common with each other than with their own bases: They go to the same galas, invest in the same stocks, send their kids to the same private schools, and vacation on the same islands. It should be seriously considered whether the power class in this country has deliberately manipulated the debt class into battling itself culturally so that its members can’t collaborate politically.
From: Smartphones, handguns, and the destructive use of freedom
I've been looking for a bigger-picture understanding of the economy, because something has to change. It's buzzing along and most State tax revenues are coming in strong (VT Digger: After bracing for hard times, Vermont economists predict healthy state revenues).
But what I hear from working families is that things aren't working for them. Wages are up and there are plenty of jobs, but costs are going up even faster and forget building ($500,000+ before land costs) or buying a home (statewide median price $327,000).
Aging infrastructure in the boiler room at Twin Valley Middle High School in Whitingham
Add to that the increasing cost of education, and its impact on your property tax bill this August.
Here are some of the factors.
Health insurance costs up 16%
The 2007 moratorium on state spending for school construction, and the deferred maintenance that's adding up. Our assessment shows $6 billion in statewide school construction needs in the next two decades.
Many districts are budgeting eye-popping numbers for facilities work in FY25. PCBs, water quality, and PFAS are all in the mix of adding costs.
Pandemic-era federal spending (ESSR) has dried up, but student needs are higher than ever. Schools are spending more resources on mental health and social services for kids who are unhoused, hungry, chronically absent, anxious, abused, neglected, addicted to social media and other stuff.
Increasing wages across the workforce have helped salaries for teachers and school staff under collective bargaining agreements with districts. With teachers retiring or going into other lines of work, and facing the classroom challenges just mentioned, districts are paying more to retain good teachers.
Inflation -- affecting equipment, buses, heating fuels, and supplies.
Complicating matters further, this is the first school budget year under Act 127, known as the Pupil Weighting Bill, passed by the previous Legislature in 2022. This legislation was intended to send more money per pupil to districts with higher per-pupil costs.
Districts that are receiving less state education aid under Act 127 received a five-year buffer mechanism. Anticipating that some districts would see significant multi-year tax-rate increases under Act 127, the act included an artificial limit of 5% on those increases. School district spending increases of between 5% and 10% are not borne by the district but are spread statewide.
Remember that aging infrastructure I mentioned a few bullet points ago? While some school districts are trying very hard to trim their budgets, some districts across Vermont are seeing a green-light in Act 127 to include additional spending in their budgets to meet those deferred needs.
Flood-damaged elevator in Montpelier's Capitol Complex awaits repair.
And wait, there's more.
Strong pandemic-era revenue from state sales and meals-and-rooms taxes buoyed the Education Fund for a couple of years. That revenue has leveled off, and this year's budgets will rely proportionately more on property taxes.
There are additional factors, but I feel that I've covered a lot for one email.
Long story short, a major theme of the 2024 legislative session here has been increasing costs and the increased tax burden that is coming.
What should we do about it?
We clearly need to have hard conversations about reducing education spending. Unfortunately, previous efforts like Act 173 that were intended to do just that haven't panned out. Why? The Agency of Education is way understaffed and isn't keeping up with changes.
The Legislature may need to take more leadership on strategies like consolidations, closed schools, larger class sizes, block grants, and spending thresholds. If you have input for me on hard choices I should be considering on this statewide and local issue, I'd love to hear it. Please send me an email or let's set up a phone call.
One thing I'm proposing is that we keep looking at the big picture. We'd have an easier time raising tax dollars if we were building more small businesses and keeping more of our consumer dollars local.
One way of doing that I'm proposing is to open up an arcane part of Vermont law -- 8 V.S.A. § 2451.
I'll cover that in another newsletter, but if you want to read ahead, check out the bill I introduced: H.789: An act relating to establishing the Data Trust Study Committee.
Have a great weekend!
warm regards,
Rep. Tristan Roberts
Vermont House of Representatives
P.S. Supplies!
One more picture -- what teacher ever has enough room for storage?
