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Editor’s note: This commentary is by Mark Tucker, who is superintendent of the Washington Northeast Supervisory Union.

I read with interest David Moats recent piece in VTDigger and found myself nodding in agreement with almost every point he made. One in particular said, “One of the reasons politicians at the state level would like to assert control over the schools is that the education fund is an enormous pool of money, and they would like to get their hands on some of it for purposes other than K-12 education.” From my perspective, that horse has already left the barn. Policymakers have for years been cost-shifting activities not directly related to K-12 public education into the education fund, taking advantage of the fact that the ed fund must, by law, be replenished 100 percent each year, largely through a fresh infusion of property tax collections. Correcting that behavior is, in my opinion, a more efficacious exercise for getting a handle on the cost of public education and the property tax rate.

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The basic problem is, as Moats noted, there is no agreement on the purpose of the ed fund as it is currently designed. Fundamentally, policymakers can’t seem to agree what is education and thus should be paid from the ed fund, and which other activities that occur in our schools should perhaps be funded in another way. To give just one example, what has happened over the past several years, at an ever-increasing rate, is a shifting of mental health treatment costs stemming from childhood trauma away from the human services and mental health domains into the education domain. This is not an isolated problem – if you ask any school superintendent in Vermont what are the major cost drivers in their budget increases, you will find childhood trauma at or near the top of their list.

But how big is the problem? In a report I wrote for the secretary of education and the secretary of human services last fall, I documented a cost obligation in one of the schools I serve of an additional $600,000 to provide non-instructional, behavioral support for just 11 students, all of whom have significant childhood trauma histories, none of whom can function effectively in school without extra adult support that is geared to each of them individually. This additional cost for 11 students (out of 180 in the entire school) amounted to nearly 20 percent of the overall school budget, and 100 percent of this additional money came from the ed fund, in one way or another.

Let me be clear that I do not wish to deny these supports for the children who need them, and I am absolutely certain that the best place for providing these services is in the school system. But the problem, as I see it, is that these extra costs, which are difficult to explain without demonizing the children, inflate the school budgets that we present at Town Meeting, making it increasingly difficult to pass the budget. These costs accumulate across the state and, as a result, the ed fund has become this seemingly bloated source of taxpayer angst that makes it an easy target for cost-cutters.

Three points on this: 1) these increasing costs are largely not of our making in the school; 2) the best way to meet these mental health needs is direct intervention in the classroom environment by trained mental health staff, and 3) because of point #2, this problem is immune to any real attempts to manage costs through staffing reductions (i.e., staff-to-student ratio adjustments).

I can only account for the impact of these costs on the two schools I serve – I can’t tell you the totality of the problem statewide – but it seems obvious to me, given the experience of one small school with 180 students, that the cost-shift from mental health onto the ed fund has to accumulate into the millions of dollars annually. That Vermont is willing to meet the needs of these students is commendable. That some blame the schools for the cost of doing what no one else will do to meet these needs is inexcusable, a blame founded in misunderstanding that does nothing to help the children who need us the most.

There has been some recent interest in the Legislature to try to get a handle on this question, and there may be a study coming to assess the impact of the cost-shift. I think this study is a good idea, if only because it may alter the discussion away from the generalized complaint that, “the ed fund is too high and property taxes, too,” towards a more rational discussion in Vermont about how are we going to pay to meet the mental health needs of the students coming into our public schools. It’s not as if the need will go away if we stop using the ed fund to pay for mental health services, and the money will have to be raised somehow. In the end, policymakers could still decide to use the ed fund to pay for these mental health services, but with an accounting of how much it actually costs to do this, we might get to the point where we can stop blaming the schools for spending too much on education, as if everything we spend goes towards books and pencils.

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