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MONTPELIER â The House version of a bill establishing a task force to implement new per-pupil weighting factors to be used in the stateâs public school funding formula passed out of the Education Committee on Thursday morning.
The bill, S. 13, now heads to the Ways & Means Committee for review. Itâs likely to come to the floor next week, as the legislature is seeking to adjourn by May 22.
A side-by-side comparison produced by legislative counsel for the Education Committee shows how the House proposes to amend the Senate version.
Among the proposed changes is a request that an updated, user-friendly simulator be created to showing how districtsâ weighting factors and tax rates would change. Currently, that information is available in a spreadsheet, but uses information from 2018, does not account for several Act 46 district mergers, and is not user-friendly.
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MONTPELIER â All by themselves, education funding and taxation in Vermont are politically challenging topics at the local level and in Montpelier.
Put them together, and then add a mechanism of addressing chronic underfunding of some schools â but raising education property taxes in communities that benefited from the current formula â and thereâs bound to be tension.
That was the case over the past few days, as the Vermont House of Representativesâ Education and Ways & Means Committees held meetings, jointly and separately, to discuss S. 13, a bill chartering an implementation plan for new per-pupil weighting factors in school districts across the state.
Per-pupil weighting raises political tensions for key House committees reformer.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from reformer.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Our Vermont legislators recently commissioned a state-of-the-art study to investigate how best to apportion funds to schools equitably. Unfortunately for the students of Vermont, it detailed serious inequities in school funding. What this study unveiled was an outdated distribution of funds to its districts. For 20 years the tax structure in Vermont has skewed away from fully supporting our most vulnerable students and families. Nearly 60 percent of Vermont schools have had their equalized students undercounted, some by more than 20 percent. This has led to higher tax rates and fewer resources for these schools. This has left lasting scars on our kids, and the deepest scars are in the poorest school districts.
MONTPELIER The state Senate Education Committee hopes to have its version of changing the way Vermont’s K-12 schools count students for budgeting purposes ready by Friday for a committee