David Clark has been serving off and on on local school boards - first on the Westminster School board and currently on the Bellows Falls Union High School board - since 1988, which informs his historical perspective. You can read more of his commentary about public education and his journey on the roller coaster of local school governance on his website, thisishowitreallyworks.com.
WESTMINSTER-I'm gonna come right out and say it: The two major stumbling blocks to improving public education in Vermont are the teachers' union, the Vermont NEA, and the Vermont School Boards Association (VSBA), along with their conjoined twin, the Vermont Superintendents Association (VSA).
This is because like all responsive unions - and it is Vermont's largest by far - job No. 1 for the VNEA is keeping as many teachers as possible in the clover, and job No. 2 is the kids.
Over at the VSA and VSBA, job No. 1 is to keep school boards as thoroughly bamboozled as possible, in order to shift decision-making authority from those all-too-complacent school boards to the superintendents.
There is even an official buzz phrase coming from these entities: "policy governance."
The concept of policy governance is that school boards exercise their statutory authority by creating policy and then step back while their administrators carry it out.
But what it really means in practice is that school boards need to get the heck out of the way and let the education professionals handle it because those boards are, in fact, too stupid to tie their own shoelaces.
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How this works out in practice is in situations like the recent one, where a large and well-respected Burlington law firm went behind those boards' very backs and cajoled superintendents into signing school districts on to the law firm's private PCB lawsuit against Monsanto.
This board member knew nothing about it until the press called me to ask when my board had taken such a consequential action. And when the news finally came out, the Bellows Falls Union High School board elected to do nothing about it.
Occasionally, however, individual or small groups of board members and their superintendents will get together to collude behind their boards' backs.
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Case in point: the recently concluded Windham Northeast Supervisory Union teacher contract negotiations.
I voted in opposition to the contract that the boards have just adopted because I believe that school boards must have an informed understanding of the financial dynamic that affects the 70% of their budgets, which is teacher salaries and benefits - otherwise, those boards are building their budgets in the dark.
Those budgets were built in the dark.
Property taxes, ironically, make up only about a third of the state Education Fund. The rest of it comes from other sources such as rooms and meals tax, the sales tax, and the property transfer tax, as well as that most regressive tax of all - the lottery.
However, you can bet the ranch - and, in fact, you already have - that those property taxes will continue to see double-digit year-over-year increases right into the foreseeable future because those salary costs are locked in now for the next three years.
School boards are walled off from the most critical basic information necessary for them to make informed decisions. As a result, we have ended up with a new contact that runs at three to five times the inflation rate, compared to the old 10-year average, where it was only about twice inflation.
Small wonder the WNESU's Negotiations Committee wanted to keep it zipped until the last possible moment.
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Rep. Scott Beck (R–St. Johnsbury) nailed it when he said, "Vermont doesn't have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem."
School boards are the interface between their communities and their schools. However, when board members habitually look the other way when this stuff happens - and, if I were a guessing man, I'd say they look the other way so often that the chiropractors will never go broke - this becomes the new normal, and that's the continuum now.
James Baldwin once wrote, "Responsibility is not lost, it can only be abdicated."
This is what it looks like in real time.
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