Prioritizing the magic in education

By John Freitag

Editor’s note: This commentary is by John Freitag. He was facilities manager for the Strafford School District for 34 years and in 1994 was named “outstanding support staff” in Vermont. He served three years as PTA president at the Newton School and has closely watched and covered school and school funding issues for over 30 years as Strafford correspondent for the White River Valley Herald.

The upcoming legislative session will be all about affordability. We need to be careful, as the saying goes, “not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.” The “baby” in terms of education in Vermont is the magic that takes place between teachers, staff and the children in our schools combined with the active involvement of parents and the support of our communities.

In the short term we have to avoid further detrimental consolidation of our elementary and middle schools as a knee-jerk reaction. Instead, we could provide immediate significant property tax relief by limiting the education fund to supporting our pre-K-12 schools and not the many unrelated programs which over the years have been added. Currently, the only way voters feel they can register their feeling of being education fund taxed out is to vote against their school budget.

In the long term we need to provide real savings that have minimal impact on the actual learning taking place. We could start by reducing our current 52 supervisory unions serving Vermont students to a much smaller number. However, if we are going to do this, we also need to reduce the workload. This could be done in two ways.

First, have teacher and staff contracts be negotiated on a statewide basis. Contract negotiations take away the time of a great deal of administrative, board, teacher and staff from providing educational services. Negotiating contacts on a statewide level currently takes place for state employees, and recently health care benefits for teachers and staff have been moved to a state-negotiated level as well.

Second, we could see what policies and procedures could be adopted on a statewide rather than a supervisory union or district level. Keeping the focus of superintendents and their offices as much as possible on actual education and supporting their principals who provide their schools administrative leadership should be the main goal. 

Both these short- and long-term proposals will face pushback from interests who want to keep things as they are. Proponents, who have programs currently in the education fund, would rather not have to compete for funding with other items in the general fund. The Superintendent’s Association is not interested in shrinking their membership and the VTNEA does not want to give up the bargaining advantage they have when negotiating on a district level.

Yet, with a sharp dropoff in federal aid to education on the way, and with many taxpayers feeling strapped, changes will have to be made. Preserving and enhancing the magic of learning that takes place in our schools must be the priority.