From military bases to school closings
One of the best ideas we’ve heard so far for trying to right-size our educational infrastructure – the number of school buildings in particular along with consolidating the number of supervisory unions – is one pioneered a few decades back when the federal Department of Defense was in the early stages of cutting back on the excessive number of military bases it had accrued coming out of World War II and the Cold War that followed.
Newer technology and a diminishing threat from the Soviet Union made having so many airbases or military facilities of some sort or another unnecessary and costly after a time. But justified or not on national security grounds, such bases were politically and economically significant to the communities they were located in. They meant jobs and a sense of vitality for those communities, many of who feared they would turn into ghost towns if the air force or the army moved out.
Many of those facilities were successfully transformed into industrial parks or put to other uses, even if a few years of painful adjustment came first. That’s easy to say, but not easy for the people who lost jobs in the short term. But in the long run, it was the right thing to do.
One of the techniques used to decide on which bases would be shut down was through a bi-partisan, blue ribbon commission that studied the options and came up with a recommendation that Congress had to endorse, straight up-or-down. No wiggle room for backroom politicking by influential legislators to save the base in their home state or district. All or nothing.
As has been repeatedly said in recent years, Vermont has an unsustainable trajectory in education spending going on. We are spending more money to educate fewer students and employing more teachers to do that. At more than $1.4 billion in expense, that soaks up about half of all tax revenue in the state. That was a bad deal two years ago, and it’s a worse one now. We need to find another way to deliver high quality educational services at an affordable price.
Expecting communities to voluntarily give up a local school is a pipedream. Because of Act 68, this is a state problem. The state should take the lead in determining which schools make sense to run and keep open, and offer some kind of carrot to those communities whose schools will be shut because they aren’t needed anymore or because other alternatives are available. A respected commission of credible citizens, educators and experts should be able to explore, county-by-county, which schools no longer make sense to run. They should be tasked with preparing a list of schools the state no longer needs, and the legislature should vote that in or not as a total package.
Such a strategy takes the poisonous local politics out of it, whereby a majority of the legislators can take a “big picture” view of what is right for the state as a whole. And if in its wisdom the legislators vote such a package down, voters will know who to punish at election time for taking money out of their pockets.
Such a commission could also take a look at Vermont’s excessive number of supervisory unions with an eye towards trimming them down from a ridiculous 63 to something more like 14 or 15. Maybe Chittenden County has a big enough population to rate two SU’s, but the rest of us should be able to survive nicely on one per county, and reap a few million dollars in savings on salaries, supplies and heating fuel, for starters. That may not seem like a lot of money, but right now the state is looking at a $66 million budget shortfall. A million here and a million there adds up to something, eventually.