Hard Data for Hard Choices

Funding Education in Vermont: An Empirical Analysis
by
Hugh Kemper   

   

The debate about education -- and its funding -- in Vermont often amounts to a kind of groping and stumbling through a fog of statistics and rival assertions.  We lack consensus on a solution, not least because there is no shared, objective definition of the problem.  We don't know exactly where we are.  Or how we got here.  Hugh Kemper, a friend and contributor to this site, has spent -- in the best citizen/volunteer tradition -- a great deal of time and energy attempting to correct this deficiency.  We are pleased to publish this report based on his diligent research and analysis (along with an executive summary and end notes ) and to do what we can to see that his study reaches the widest possible audience.
    Before going to the study, itself, a little background might be helpful:

 One week before the 2005 town meeting, some of his neighbors asked Hugh Kemper to run for the board of Flood Brook Union School in Londonderry. They were concerned, like many around the state, with property taxes and school spending. Kemper had retired to Vermont after 31 years with J.P. Morgan and his neighbors thought that, given his background in finance, he might be able to encourage the board to act with more fiscal discipline and prudence. Kemper agreed, reluctantly, to run.

    He was elected and, as he says, “the first couple of school board meetings confirmed my constituents' concerns.  The board was in the final stages of concluding a three-year teachers’ contract calling for a 6% annual cost increase covering wages and health care. My research of compensation agreements at 15 neighboring schools along with trends in total public and private sector compensation in New England and the United States suggested that the figure should be closer to 3.5%.  I argued strongly against to no avail and quickly gained a reputation – which couldn’t be further from the truth - of a cost-only guy who did not care about the welfare of the kids.”

   The following year’s negotiations with the support staff only added to Kemper’s frustration. They too, despite his objection, were awarded a three year compensation package that cost Flood Brook 6% p.a. while market research suggested an increase in the order of 3% would be both fair and equitable. “So at this point,” Kemper says, “we are locked into 6% increases p.a. for three years for staff costs that represent 85% of our total budget. These compensation agreements along with a meteoric rise in special education costs resulted in budget increases over the FY06, FY07 and FY08 of 8.4%. 9.5% and 9.5% respectively."

     At this point, Kemper and some key constituents concluded that what was needed was a comprehensive analysis of school spending, not just in his own district, but across the entire state.  And he undertook to conduct such a study.  His objective was, simply, to walk Vermont’s voters down the same path he had taken from the day he agreed (with a reluctance that now looked prophetic) to run for the school board and for them to learn what he had learned.
  “My aim has always been to make people understand that this is not about being anti-education.  It is about returning education spending to reasonable, justifiable levels.  My focus has always been on the need for an objective, fact-based framework for rationalizing Vermont’s education spending.  My motivation was locally driven, but Flood Brook is a microcosm of the challenges facing all of Vermont’s schools.  We need a statewide initiative.”

    Kemper’s personal commitment to this cause can be measured by the study he has produced.  He says that he can’t be sure exactly how much time he has put into this remarkable effort.  “You have to factor in a ‘discount’ given my lack of familiarity with the data bases,” he says. “I spent an enormous amount of time just trying to understand the distinctions between ‘current’ expenditures versus ‘localized’ expenditures versus ‘block grants’ and so forth, then reconciling the differences among these depending on the source of the data.  Truth be told, I feel like I spent most of last February, March, and April doing nothing else.  May was for writing and vetting.  Which bring us to where we are today.”

    The results are here, in a form that any voter, school board member, legislator, teacher, union negotiator, and cabinet officer can follow and understand.  The study deserves the widest possible circulation and discussion.  And Kemper has earned the thanks not just of those neighbors who asked him to serve in one of life’s more thankless jobs, but of voters and taxpayers around the state.