A third-grade student in Jennifer Montgomery’s class raises her hand at Coventry Village School on September 5, 2019. File photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
While studying economics and education at Yale University, Grace Miller found a surprise agenda item: Vermont‘s unique school funding formula.
The 22-year-old from Newport and her classmates learned about the “Brigham decision,” a 1997 Vermont Supreme Court case that found the state’s education financing system unconstitutional.
In response to the case, the state Legislature passed Act 60, which created a financing system that allowed cities to pay equal tax rates for equal expenses, regardless of local property wealth.
When Miller learned this story in class, he was shocked.
“They said Vermont had this crazy court case. And you know, they now fund their education system in a really unique and really equitable way,” she said. “I had never heard of any of that.”
Inspired, Miller decided to delve into Vermont’s education funding system as part of her college thesis. Her topic: Do school district mergers, like those prompted by the passage of Act 46 in 2015, save money?
Not exactly, he discovered.
Grace Miller studied Vermont school mergers for her dissertation at Yale University. Photo courtesy of Grace Miller
Miller’s analysis focused on 109 school districts (49 that underwent mergers and 60 that did not) tracking spending in a variety of categories before and after the mergers.
“I did not find any significant savings in per-pupil spending between the merged and non-merged districts,” he said, summarizing his findings.
In Vermont, lawmakers hoped school district mergers would streamline governance, improve educational outcomes and opportunities, and create cost efficiencies.
Miller found that the merger reduced administrative costs: about $387 per student. The merger also reduced the costs of contracted services (such as part-time special education help) by $2,169 per student, according to his analysis.
However, Miller found that the cost reductions were largely offset by increased spending in other areas, particularly wages, benefits and transportation.
And overall, according to their analysis, merged districts saw a slight drop in tax rates in the first year after the merger, compared to non-merged districts, but there were no significant differences in tax rates after that.
Understanding that his quantitative work could only go so far, Miller also sought to understand mergers qualitatively, interviewing superintendents and principals about their experiences.
One effect Miller found was rhetorical. People started thinking about “our district” instead of “our school,” he said, leading to more equitable decision-making across the district.
But some school leaders said the mergers, and with them the merged school boards, made “the conversations more difficult” with more decision-makers involved. The mergers also led to budgets with a higher total dollar amount, which could be a surprise to voters even if per-student spending didn’t actually increase.
In one case, two principals in the same district gave conflicting opinions about whether their merger saved money or not, Miller found.
“A lot of people just said the merger was of no use,” he said.
Regardless of individual opinions on the mergers, Miller found that school and district leaders were passionate and eager to speak out in a year when school spending has dominated local and legislative conversations across the state.
“Education funding is the topic of conversation and everyone has a lot to say,” he said.
When Miller began her senior project, she said she was “surprised at how difficult it was” to obtain data and find contacts for school leaders across the state. With the help of the Vermont Agency of Education, she received information on school district spending between 2009 and 2023.
Few people seemed to agree on the exact purpose of Vermont school district mergers, Miller said.
“Everyone is on a different page and the lack of quantitative data does not help at all,” he argued.
And if an additional goal is to improve student outcomes, Miller said more research will need to be done to determine whether that has happened, starting with deciding what the best metrics are to measure those outcomes.
Having just graduated this spring, Miller moved to Tennessee, where she will work as a public school teacher. She said she hopes to work more in education finance in the future, perhaps in graduate school, recognizing that her work as a student could only go so far.
Part of that push to dig deeper comes from a desire for a larger library of research on Vermont’s education financing system, he said. After all, the topic is personal to her.
Going to school in the Northeast Kingdom North Country Supervisory Union, “we are very aware of how the state and others interact with our district compared to others,” Miller said.
North Country residents decided not to merge, leaving about a dozen individual school districts. That leads to greater local control, Miller ventured, but also to a perhaps unwieldy network of districts.
“We have kind of a crazy system,” he said, “and I can see the thought process of trying to reorganize these educational governance structures.”
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