The most important things that happened on Town Meeting Day were the things that did not happen.

Actually, not much happened. With the exception of that vote about how Burlington votes (tune in Monday for an examination of the Burlington brouhahas), the voters of Vermont last week endorsed: (1) The status quo; (2) the love of money (part of the status quo); and (3) their public schools, even if those schools cost some of that money they love.

So Mayor Mary Hooper of Montpelier presided over an administration that got bilked out of 400 grand. She gets re-elected anyway. So Coventry Town Clerk Cynthia Diaz has been charged with income tax evasion. Leave that to the feds, said the voters of Coventry, re-electing Diaz by a 3-1 margin.

Roughly the same margin by which voters in neighboring Lowell endorsed a wind power project in their town, either because they are committed to renewable energy or because the wind company will lower their tax bills, or both.

But peanuts compared with the almost 5-1 margin by which voters in Island Pond approved of selling the state airport in town to make way for a pellet plant that could provide more than 30 jobs. Both the Lowell and the Island pond votes are advisory, and do not officially decide either issue.

But the main thing that did not happen was a “taxpayers revolt” against school spending. Au contraire, as they say just north of here, despite the Great Recession, despite objections from no less than Gov. Jim Douglas that the current school financing system was “broken” and “twisted,” despite the tax commissioner’s official advice to raise the property tax rate and warnings that more tax hikes are in store, the voters overwhelmingly supported the school budgets.

According to the Wednesday afternoon count by the Vermont Superintendents Association, 228 budgets were approved as submitted, four passed after reductions from the town meeting floor, three were  postponed, and only 14 were defeated.

It was the smallest number of rejections since 2004.

Furthermore, most of the approvals were by large margins, while several of the rejections were by razor-thin majorities.

Always beware of over-interpretation. The results do not mean that voters are indifferent to their tax bills, or to the cost of public education. One reason the budgets were approved was that they didn’t go up much, if at all. Though final figures are not in, Brad James, the Education Finance Manager for the Education Department said that, “as of 23-Feb, we had received 261 proposed budgets out of roughly 280.” Based on those districts, James said, “overall budget increase for the State was up (one half of one percent).”

Furthermore, said James (via email), “education spending, which is the lion’s share of the Education Fund and is the figure that drives tax rates for individual districts, is down (by one tenth of one percent).”

In other words, all those warnings from Douglas, Education Commissioner Armando Vilaseca, and others had an impact. So did the Recession. As a result, said John Nelson of the State School Boards Association, local boards made a major effort “to keep budgets in line.”

Board members knew that “people in their communities weren’t getting raises and were being laid off,” Nelson said, so understood that spending would have to be restrained “ if they were going to get support for budgets.”

But also beware under-interpretation. The budget votes prove that the current school finance system is not “broken.” It is not perfect. But no school finance system is, not in any state. Vermont’s present system – Act 60 of 1997 as amended by Act 68 in 2003 – works. The schools function. They are, according to the (possibly flawed) standards by which Americans judge their schools, rather good.

They are also rather expensive. But obviously they are not too expensive. According to whom? According to the people who pay for them. If those people thought the schools were too expensive, many more budgets would have been rejected.

In a sense, the effectiveness of the criticism from Douglas et al only prove that the system works. Those criticisms are part of the system. The complaints of politicians (including their hyperbole) are part of any school finance system. Rhetoric, however overblown, neither can nor should be eliminated from any public policy process.

Less certain, but potentially more significant is the possibility that this year’s hold-the-line school budgets signal the start of a long-term spending moderation resulting from declining enrollment.

For years, one theme of the school spending critics has been that costs kept going up, and the number of teachers and teachers aides kept rising, even as the number of pupils fell by more than 10 percent in the last decade or so.

On the surface, not an unreasonable objection. Below the surface, matters get more complicated. A kindergarten-through-sixth grade school with 100 students, evenly distributed among its seven grades, has about 14 kids per class. If a few years later it has only 90 students, still evenly distributed, it can’t get rid of a teacher by combining classes unless educators (and parents) are willing to accept 24-pupil classes, which most educators consider much too big, especially in the lower grades.

So cutting staff in response to falling enrollment – without sacrificing quality – takes time. As Jeff Francis of the Superintendent’s Association said, “you don’t ever decrease capacity at the same rate that you increase it.”

But as enrollment continues to decline, more schools may be seeing an opportunity to reduce staff. There has been a small decline in the number of teachers over the last few years. A few very small schools have closed their doors entirely. There is more talk, encouraged by Commissioner Vilaseca,  of consolidation of schools, districts, and supervisory unions, highlighted on Town Meeting Day by the decision to merge four Addison County districts into one.

All small steps, and perhaps reversible. Brad James at the Education Department said he thought the poor economy “moved ahead the time when some boards planned on reducing staff due to declining enrollments,” while acknowledging that this was “merely a supposition.”

But John Nelson of the School Boards Association said he thought the falling school population was “beginning to kick in,” and that this year’s budget “reflected that there is a response from the school boards.”

Even the teachers union – the Vermont-NEA – acknowledged that there might be fewer teachers in the state’s schools a few years from now. Darren Allen, the union’s spokesman, said that while obviously the NEA did not want to lose members, “if there aren’t the kids to teach, then there aren’t the kids to teach.”

It would take at least another year or two of little or no school spending increases to determine whether this year’s moderation was a fluke,\ or the start of a long-term trend. But if it is not a fluke, it is a political tectonic plate shift. Public schools are the state’s biggest expense. The steady increase in school spending has been a contentious issue both in the Legislature and for local school boards. If that increase really abates as long as school enrollment drops (which won’t be forever), pressure on officials and policy-makers would substantially ease.

Not that schools won’t continue to be a political issue. They will still spend a lot of money. Some of the cuts the boards have made arguably lower the quality of education, so when the economy improves, educators may well seek more funds, perhaps arousing opposition. And some Vermonters don’t like Act 60 because it does what it was designed to do – make school taxes and (to a lesser extent) school spending, more equitable among richer and poorer districts.

For at least another year, though, the politicians who try to argue that Vermont’s public education sky is falling don’t have much of an argument. This week, the sky stayed right up there where it belongs.

To illustrate how difficult it is likely to be to reduce the cost of public education in Vermont without also reducing the quality of same, please allow a local example or two.

These postings come to you from Barton, up in the Northeast Kingdom, where 153 children attend the Barton Academy and Grade School, not surprisingly referred to as BAGS by some, a standard kindergarten-through-eighth grade school.

For years, the school employed a professional, highly regarded school librarian, and the pupils had regular access to the library, where they could look up information, browse the shelves, get help selecting a book.

At the end of the last school year, she retired. To save money, the school decided not to replace her, at least for this year. Instead, the head of the computer room would do double duty at the library. By all accounts, she’s doing a great job. She’s capable, energetic, dedicated.

But she’s not a librarian. And because she has other duties, the pupils don’t have quite as much access to or guidance in the library as they did last year, and for many years before.

The decision not to replace the librarian was reasonable. That’s one less FTE (full-time equivalent) employee whose salary and benefits have to be financed by the taxpayers. In a tight economy, with school officials reluctant (as they should be) to raise taxes, leaving that position vacant is, at least debatably, the right choice.

But here is what is not debatable: A school with a fully functioning library presided over by a professional librarian is better than a school without them. It isn’t that BAGS isn’t a good school. Principal George Vanna said the library is “not boarded up” and is open almost as much as it was last year. The younger pupils still get their story hours. But Vanna also acknowledged that he’d rather have a librarian, even if only a part-timer. Maybe next year, he said.

In other words, saving money reduced educational quality. Perhaps not by much. Perhaps saving the money justified the reduction. But reduction it was.

As it almost was up the road at Lake Region High School, where the board decided to save money by cutting both the music program and the Spanish language program from full-time to half-time.

Again, a decision quite reasonable under the circumstances. But – again – a school with full-time music and Spanish instruction is better than a school with half-time music and Spanish instruction. Better enough to be worth the $68,000 needed to keep both programs fully functioning? Who knows? Either way, Lake Region would be a slightly worse school after the cuts (which were partially rescinded earlier this week after a public outcry; the board will try to keep both programs full-time).

The point here is not to express opposition to any of these cutbacks. In fact, it’s hard to see how anyone who served on a school board wouldn’t at least seriously consider approving those cost-saving steps. Whether those programs were worth the money is a legitimate question. But there is no question at all that they were worth something. So eliminating, reducing, or diluting them eliminates, reduces, or dilutes…something, a something which has value.

A lesson worth remembering as Vermont thinks about holding down school spending. In addition to Gov. Jim Douglas’s renewed call to “freeze” school budgets (not much more likely to be heeded than last year), Education Commissioner Armando Vilaseca is campaigning to reduce the number of supervisory unions and school districts, and even lots of Democrats speak openly about urging schools to consolidate. In Montpelier, at least, the established point of view seems to be that, in the current Washington health care jargon, something has to be done to “bend the curve” on school spending.

Making it all the more important to be wary of the commonly-heard claim by partisans on all sides that it is possible to cut costs without cutting quality. In theory, it may be. In practice, as the above examples demonstrate, it’s somewhere between hard and impossible.

Besides, some of the cost-cutting steps might not cut costs all that much. Vilaseca recently wrote of his supervisory union consolidation plan that, “my staff and I estimate this would save the state several million dollars a year.”

Kind of vague. Asked for elaboration, Education Department spokesperson Jill Remick supplied a Department study indicating that consolidation in Essex could save more than $600,000, or almost 25 percent, in personnel costs.

To put all this in some perspective, former Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union Superintendent Bill Mathis, who is skeptical about most of the cost-cutting proposals, pointed out (and Education Department statistics confirmed) that only 2.4 percent of the roughly $1.3 billion Vermont spends on public education (not including federal aid) goes to these central administration expenses.

“Let’s say we combined and saved one third of the money,” he said. “That’s less than one percent.”

Not a compelling case against consolidation. Less than one percent of $1.3 billion can be several million bucks. But Mathis’s larger point has merit. Almost everyone agrees that the big driver of school costs is the number of paid employees in and around the classroom, not the central offices. For several reasons (which will be examined in subsequent posts) Vermont has a lot them – teachers, teaching aides, counselors, librarians, technologists. The quickest way – if not the only way – to “bend the curve” of school spending is to have fewer of these educators.

Raising the threat of worse schools. A little-mentioned factor in this discussion is the real question of whether that “established point of view” in Montpelier is all that established among the electorate. Last year there was no “taxpayers revolt” against school spending at town and school meetings, as relatively few school budgets were rejected. With the lingering recession, it would be no surprise if more were defeated this year even though, in response to falling enrollments, schools around the state are cutting back.

Nobody likes high property taxes, but those were not a bunch of raging liberals who pressured the Lake Region School Board (raging liberals are not plentiful in this precinct) to put back the money for Spanish and music classes. A few made clear that if it took higher taxes to preserve today’s level of educational quality, then taxes should be higher.

Quite possible a minority outlook. But nobody’s really taken a poll on the matter, and there was the comment not long ago by one man whose politics are relatively centrist and who has no children in the public schools. When someone pointed out that Vermont spends a lot of money on education, he asked, “where else should we spend a lot of money?”,

It’s the middle of August, give or take a day or two, and you know what that means: Summer’s almost gone.

Say it Ain’t So.

OK, it ain’t so. Officially, summer will be around for seven more weeks, and even in Vermont, there is lots of nice, warm, weather to come before the snows and the temperatures fall.

(In fact, there is something perverse in the delight many Vermonters take in dreading September and October, which are the best months to be alive in these parts. But that’s a whole separate subject).

Still, there is this one irrefutable sign of summer’s impending end. Even before the first maple leaves turn red, the stores have started their ‘back to school’ advertising campaigns. So let’s forget the weather for now and concentrate on the schools. With the 2009-2010 school year on the horizon, the News Guy will devote most of the next several posts to examining the cost and quality of public education in Vermont.

They are both high. As has been noted here before, Vermont schools are: (a) good; and (b) expensive.

There is some dissent about (a), which will be dealt with in a later post. For the nonce, we will proceed on the assumption that all those test scores showing Vermont kids doing better than their peers in most other states mean what they seem to mean – that the schools are doing a pretty good job.

There is almost no dispute about (b). Not that the pillars of the education establishment, meaning essentially the School Boards Association and the Vermont branch of the National Education Association (that’s the teachers union) go out of their way to call attention to the high cost of schools. But when asked, they don’t out-and-out deny it, either.

One more observation before we get to the news. To state that “the schools are doing a pretty good job” is not to state that the schools are great or that they could not be better. But people have been arguing about how to make schools better at least since Plato put in his two cents, and for now we will not get into the philosophy-of-education battles.

Now here is the news: Vermont’s public education system is about to get a jolt. That education establishment may get roughed up a bit. When the fur has stopped flying, the result is likely to be either profound change in the way public education is run in this state or…well, or no change, possibly meaning reaction and heightened opposition to any change.

The agent of this impending struggle is Armando Vilaseca, the state’s relatively new (he took over late last year) Commissioner of Education. He thinks the “governance structure” of Vermont’s public school system is clumsy and inefficient, and he’s determined to change it.

Goal One: “Reduce the number of districts to between 50 and 60,” he said in an interview.

Considering that there are now 307 school boards in the state, with a school board member for every seven students, that’s not just change; it’s close to revolution.

But waitaminit. Didn’t Vilaseca’s predecessor, Richard Cate, make almost exactly the same proposal back in 2007? And didn’t he effectively get his head handed to him? So why should the result be any different this time?

The answers are yes, yes, and maybe they won’t be ,but maybe they will because Vilaseca seems to be politically shrewder than Cate. The former commissioner put his consolidation plan in writing (perhaps a mistake; it creates a specific target of attack), and then failed to follow up effectively.

Vilaseca is nothing if not persistent. He hasn’t been drumming up a lot of publicity for his campaign, which could explain why it’s flying just under the radar. But neither is he staying quiet. At almost every opportunity, educators, say, he keeps telling members of the education establishment what some of them don’t want to hear.

At one recent meeting with school board members, an educator said, Vilaseca said to the assemblage, “there are too many of you.”

School board members, not surprisingly, do not think there are too many of then, a fact which illustrates both the peculiarity and the strength of the obstacles Vilaseca faces.

Almost nobody serves on his or her school board for the money. Unlike most political squabbles, the vested interest opposing change in this one is not economic. Not for the school board members, who earn small stipends for their troubles. Not for the superintendents, most of whom would keep their jobs even with fewer districts. Not even for the teachers, because consolidation of districts doesn’t mean they’d be paid less. Even consolidation of schools, another possibility, wouldn’t cut their salaries, though it might cut their numbers.

The real opposition to Vilaseca’s “governance” agenda is Vermont’s tradition of…well, it’s called “local control,” but that’s not really what it is. After all, even if (and this is not under consideration) Vermont moved from 300 plus to 14 county districts, school governance would still be “local.” It just wouldn’t be town-centered.

Precisely what bothers many Vermonters, including school board members, who consider themselves (with some justification) to be honorable representatives of their towns and stewards of the schools. Their distrust of centralized authority is a real Vermont tradition, and in and of itself a healthy one.

“I understand that people are very concerned about the fabric of their community,” Vilaseca said. “At the same time, I understand that fiscally, we can’t continue on the way that we’re governed.”

The problem is that even if the number of school-children in the state were not declining (and it is, though not for too much longer), the present set-up is inefficient and expensive. It isn’t that the board members cost much, or even that their small support staffs over-burden the taxpayers.

But the price of town control is often the reverse economies of scale. Or the un-economies of scalelessness. Five small school districts, each buying its own books, pencils, computer systems and cafeteria lunches spend far more than the five of them would if they were one unified district buying greater quantities from the same vendors.

Furthermore, if the superintendants of the 60 supervisory unions only had to report to (and attend the meetings of) one school board, rather than schlepping around to five, six, or seven of them every couple of weeks, those superintendents might have the time and energy to…uhhh, you know, ..do their jobs.

Not to mention burn a lot less gasoline.

Vilaseca acknowledges that he lacks one important weapon in his fight.

“I’m missing one huge element,” he said. “I don’t have the numbers to support it when I say this will save us money. I need to have a good study, non-political, looking objectively at the whole system.”

The budget bill passed by the Legislature calls for a study of school governance, but it has to be done quickly, and only by elected officials. Not exactly what the commissioner has in mind.

So he has a ways to go, and of course he may not get there. The School Boards Association is opposed to his consolidation plan. But the supervisory union officials are not. As for the teachers union, Vermont NEA spokesman Darren Allen said that while the union worries that talk of consolidation can be “used as a code to fire teachers,” it has “consistently said this is a conversation which should be had.”

The lure of the status quo is always strong. So far, there is little indication that most Vermonters are unwilling to pay the high cost of public education in Vermont. What appeared to be a rather clumsy effort by Gov. Jim Douglas to gin up a taxpayers revolt against school spending earlier this year was a big flop.

But the costs keep going up, and the difference now may be that the state has an Education Commissioner, who does not report to the governor or use the governor’s anti-teacher, anti-school, rhetoric, but who won’t stop saying that there are too many school boards, even when he’s talking to the school boards.