The Rutland Herald: Gaslight Governing

Originally published online at the Rutland Herald

Gaslight Governing

If you recently read Secretary Saunders' opinion piece It’s Not All About Taxes [Stupid] (more on the stupid part here) you too may be wondering, “What?”

Let’s tackle this bit of revisionist history starting with the claim that Act 73 wasn’t born from Governor Scott’s desire to control tax revenue. This began early in his tenure, “We know our school population is shrinking. We’ve lost nearly 30,000 students in the last 20 years. Yet staffing levels and costs continue to rise, and property taxes continue to overburden families and businesses” (2018 State of the State), to just this month when it was front and center “[...] we expect education spending to require another $200 million, and another double-digit property tax increase that Vermonters can’t afford” (2026 State of the State).

This is absolutely about taxes and no new ideas.

Let’s take another statement from the Secretary lacking the depth and historical detail necessary to lead: “At a moment when nearly every other state is diverting dollars away from public education, Vermont has chosen a different path.”

Is the Secretary referring to the cannabis sales and use tax taken out of the Education Fund in 2024 and redirected to a special fund as a result of the Administration wanting to grant public tax dollars to private entities? According to the Joint Fiscal Office (JFO) Special Fund report this was about $13M in 2025 and will likely grow.

Is the Secretary referring to the Tax Increment Financing (TIF) program, and the newly expanded TIF program to support housing as a result of Act 69 (2025)? In a fiscal note the JFO indicated that “retired and currently active TIF districts have retained $75.9 million in Education Fund increment since 1999 and are projected to retain an additional $158.4 million through 2044.” This is before adding the new law that will reserve up to $2B of the Ed Fund to support housing development over a ten-year period. While we need more affordable housing, it should concern everyone that the JFO indicated that “[t]here are too many unknowns across a wide range of variables to provide an estimate of the cost of CHIP to the Education Fund.”

Is the Secretary referring to the $5M of ESSER funds granted to Vermont Afterschool in 2022 to administer grants to private entities instead of schools? Is she referring to the more than $85M paid to private and out-of-state PK-12 and CTE providers in 2024, compared to $47M paid to public PK-12 and CTE providers?

I could go on.

To be fair, the Secretary does finally ask the right question, one that was never really put on the table at the outset of this policy debacle: Why do rural and economically disadvantaged areas struggle to offer competitive teacher salaries on par with wealthier pockets of the state? Why are there persistent achievement gaps between students from historically marginalized backgrounds and their peers?

Unfortunately, she comes back to the status quo response that we have heard time and again – because we haven’t consolidated our schools and districts; because school boards can’t be trusted to operate them.

A large body of research has suggested that we have likely realized the savings promised from the consolidation movement. Since 1890, Vermont alone has reduced the number of its school districts by 96% and its schools by 88%. If we’re looking for “root causes” of our inequities I think we need more than status quo solutions from our politicians.

Instead, we may need to take a hard, honest look at Vermont’s expansion of school choice as advanced by the State Board of Education's strategic plan in 2005 – the very year that Governor Scott mentions when highlighting Black River High School in his State of the State. Giving 37% of VT towns the choice to bypass public schools for private options is most certainly a culprit when exploring inequities in our current system.

Approximately 16,000 students live in “school choice” towns but only 16% live in our most vulnerable communities (CDC Social Vulnerability Index). Conversely, 30% of students living in towns that don’t have school choice (serving approximately 65,500 students) live in our most vulnerable areas. That sounds pretty inequitable to me.

Is the answer really consolidating their districts and schools?

Finally, the Secretary ends with the question, Will this plan save money? Will this plan actually give kids more opportunities? Will it better support teachers? Will it result in a more predictable and equitable approach to funding our education system?

Like me, you might have thought, finally, we’ll get a straight answer. Instead, it ends with the assurance that “Supporters say the answer is yes.”

Supporters? Not financial projections? Not research? Not even, “I say yes”?

Vermonters deserve more than rhetoric; they deserve real leaders who can take responsibility for their actions.

Jess DeCarolis

Friends of Vermont Public Education