GRAFTON — A few weeks back, the disagreement between Gov. Jim Douglas and the Vermont Department of Education about the allocation of $19 million of federal stimulus money for public education received some publicity.
This money came to Vermont as a result of the leadership of U.S. Sens. Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders in Washington. In order to assess the wisdom of sending federal stimulus monies to the state for public education, we need some context:
• Vermont is in a fiscal crisis. As of February, the state's General Fund is short $150 million. Commissioner of Education Armando Vilaseca has asked Vermont's local school boards to cut their spending in acknowledgment of the state's fiscal crisis.
School boards all across the state have done their best, and then voters further pared down their school budgets in some annual town meetings. We call this process local control of education budgets.
• Over the past 14 years, Vermont's student enrollment has decreased by 12 percent.
• Over the same period, the number of teachers (not including aides and support staff) in Vermont has increased by 37 percent.
• Over the same period, inflation-adjusted spending on K-12 public education in Vermont has increased by 37 percent.
Which all means we are spending more to hire more teachers for fewer students. This pattern of spending cannot be justified and will lead to fiscal disaster, for all of us.
How does injecting (in a one-year shot) $19 million into a public education system that is necessarily reducing its spending do anything but harm? What about the next year? There will be no $19 million of stimulus, and budgets will have to be cut by boards and/or the taxpayers.
Gov. Douglas is proposing to use the money to reduce the state's already existing liability to the teachers' pension fund (a General Fund liability), a reasonable use of a one-shot injection of federal funds.
The state will be in better fiscal shape as a result. If the stimulus money is spent to inflate local spending that voters have already trimmed, it will make it more difficult for towns to stabilize and plan their budgets, and by undercutting local decision-making.
Our efforts must be to bring our state to fiscal health and stability. Our futures depend on it.
A single jolt of federal money in local budgets will only encourage spending that can't be sustained in the long run, and that is a terrible waste of precious public resources - our tax monies.