Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Great. Welcome to House Education on 02/06/2026. I should have when I was announcing the day yesterday, I should have remembered it. Was my brother's birthday. Day three. A little bit late. Anyway, this morning we are beginning with testimony from Bruce Baker, who is an academic researcher, especially into education practices and education theory In 2015 or 'sixteen, you can correct me on the dates, while at Rutgers, Doctor. Baker wrote a paper really focused on Vermont. Think our name was focused in my neck of the woods in Addison County and his neck of the woods in Rutland County, but really talking about sort of optimal district size, the differences between what we consider to be a small school in Vermont, but the rest of the country considers to be a small school, But thought it would be everything in it seemed as apropos today as it was ten years ago. So I thought it'd be good to have him come in and talk a little bit about that work and how it can inform our current discussions. Welcome, the floor is yours. Really appreciate you taking the time to be with us.

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: Thank you, and it's good to be here. Thanks for having me. Will say I'm a Rutland High class of 1983. My parents still live in Vermont and are multi generational Vermonters. I've spent a lot of time looking at Vermont over the years, participated in a 2018 study of school funding in Vermont. And I've just, I've continued to follow what's going on in the state of Vermont and with its schools. And prior to that, about a little over ten, fifteen years ago, I was also working at the University of Kansas where I had spent a great deal of time studying issues of costs associated with small remote rural schools. But yeah, Vermont has a different kind of, has its own set of issues. And I think that's the thing, like every state kind of has its own sets of issues. And I've, I did, just to kind of give some high level summaries, I put together a handful of slides that jump off of what I wrote all those years ago, and then then we can have an open discussion about, you know, how what I wrote back then relates to what we're dealing with today. First of all, I, you know, I I applaud you and empathize with you over dealing with what is probably one of the most kind of one of those third rail issues in in dealing with kind of state governance of education systems, even even in terms of managing local public school districts when issues come up, like like the possibility of closing schools. These are these always seem like lose lose issues, difficult issues that are so hard to resolve. So it's not that unlikely that it looks like Vermont is roughly in the same position today around a lot of these issues as it was ten years ago, albeit with further declining enrollments overall. Have you dropped below 80,000 yet? No, but we're

[Chair Peter Conlon]: at about 82 I think. Yeah,

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: so about four or 5,000 down in the last five or so years though maybe, so it's a little more, more and more pressure, pressure on the property taxes, and maybe more pressure to really want to figure out how to do something. And I have been following kind of the year after year legislative attempts to to tackle these issues. I'll just give you a quick run through on what I have on the slide, some of which just relate back to what I had a number of years ago. The high level points are that it's more about school size than district size. You can draw new lines around these configurations of schools, and try to cut spending at central administration and create some shared services, but that's only ever going to be nickels and dimes. But that means issue to solve is also probably the much more difficult politically. I get to, you know, sit here as an as a data analyst in Florida. You're the ones who have the difficult job of solving the political problems. But it does come down to if you really want to have cost savings, creating more optimal school sizes, and maybe setting up some kind of a strategy that involves identifying priority doable projects for consolidating and combining schools to create more optimal sizes that would maybe have some upfront costs on the capital side. But that's where you would see the longer run reductions in that in spending and costs, or at least the ability at the high school level to provide more comprehensive programs for kids. Just, and I just, these are just summaries of national data on the next couple of slides to show that it's when we get down to districts of less than a 100, or even, you know, when you get down into the 300, 100 to 300 student range, that it is the, you know, instructional expenditures spike up to be more than double what they are in a scale efficient district. You know, the broader academic literature tells us, and I wrote about it in that report 10 ago, that district costs level off around 2,000 pupils, you know, very few districts. I don't know how many districts in Vermont now even beat that. Maybe a couple districts even have full scale efficiency. So most of what we're dealing with within Vermont is in that middle space, and and at that the far right hand side here, the very small space, and that's where the costs spike, but they spike as a function of the instructional costs and staffing costs at the school level, not because, I mean, that yellow bar administrative expense at the central administration is many times bigger than the yellow bar is for the largest districts, but it's still a small piece of the puzzle. We can chip away at that bar by redrawing the governance lines around schools into, in what we define as districts using supervisory unions as the primary district governance, as opposed to the, you know, what had been done in the past, you know, consolidating district structures doesn't, doesn't cut the big share of costs. And this is just in, in the dollars per pupil numbers nationally in 2023, the most recent year that fiscal survey, again, I, I had a few days to try to respond and come up with some examples. So I use data that if I, you know, if I were doing a deeper dive on the state of Vermont and what's going on there, I would want to be delving into much more of the Vermont specific data to do these. But even at the staffing ratios, it is the staffing ratios of teachers per 100 kid, which are school level staff, and then even the the gray bar here is school level administration, which if we don't reconfigure schools, we don't affect that. We may affect with just drawing new boundaries to create larger collections of schools that come up to 500 or 600, as opposed to, you know, individual districts only being 200 or 300. Saving on the orange bar is only a small piece of the pie. It's, you know, still worth doing to the extent that we can save whatever we can, while providing equal or better quality of programs and services. And when I talk about cost, my definition of cost relates to it is the cost for providing a certain quality of education for achieving a certain set of outcomes. We can reduce spending, and at the same time reduce the outcomes in quality. That's not what I think we want to do here. I think what we want to do is, is have this better quality for the same expenditure or reduce expenditure by rearranging in ways that keep quality the same or improve it. And as I look across some of the areas that I looked at in that report, one, I think the best way to go is to kind of turn this back to, to your committee and or whoever you might delegate this to, but to come up with a set of parameters for identifying maybe as you would, if you were a district administrator for a large district and a local board of education for that district, identifying priority projects where you think we could achieve significant reduction of ongoing costs with improved service quality by combining certain sets of schools that simply are presently suboptimal in size. And again, I know that the political dynamics of doing that, even if you're a district administrator, aren't easy. But you know, looking back at where we're at in my old county, it appears that my my own alma mater is the one scale efficient high school remaining in the mix, but sliding lower and lower. There are still many very small high schools in Rutland County. I mean, you know, graduating fewer than 20 kids per year. They tend not to, based on my review of what expenditure data are available, they don't seem to be spending as exorbitantly high, but I suspect that what I would see is that they are just not able to offer a wider array of courses and options, which is one of the issues I addressed in the previous brief. So you know, looking for ways to reorganize the delivery of high schooling in in Western Rutland County would still be on my list of things to to consider as an analyst, realizing the politics are very different than what I get to say as an analyst. And I, you know, I think we may still have, I think I also talked about, you know, the the small K-6s, K-8s. I had to pick an enrollment for grade level just to make some quick and convenient graphs. These are, you know, twelfth graders in in Rutland County, sixth graders in schools in Addison County, and we know that some of these schools aren't very far apart, but we also know that they are kind of the hub of their town activity. And I have a couple more graphs of other other parts of the state that that look at based on a national data set, which is reported up through states, but I can't, you know, I'd want to verify this by also looking at the state level data. I just didn't have time in the last couple of days to check the two to make sure they come out more or less the same. Washington County, some very small high schools in at least twelfth grade classes in in Washington County as well, but it may not be as feasible geographically to address those issues in in Washington County as it is in in Western Rutland County. Like I have a kind of map in my head that's, you know, that says, if you put, this is that upfront investment, you put a new high school somewhere between State College in Castleton and Birds Eye, you're less than 10 miles each from from Procter, Poultney, and West Rutland and Fairhaven to combine classes to create a high school that would be of more reasonable scale and operate with staffing costs more in this range rather than this range, to be able to provide a comprehensive program. So it's about schools. It's about school level costs. That may not be what you want to hear because it's such a politically intractable issue. But that would be an opinion that I drew back then that I would again draw now. And the trick is to figure out how to to solve that problem.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: So I I think that I appreciate your graph and sort of showing that the sort of district governance piece of it doesn't yield big money savings, but I think that what this committee discusses and debates is that governance consolidation becomes the tool that can lead to the school consolidation. Our enrollment has been declining so much. So in the areas that you are pointing out, actually don't even need to build a new school. Fair Haven kind of and accommodate Rutland High School's seen such a drop that it could accommodate West Rutland, Procter, and all of that.

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: But

[Chair Peter Conlon]: superintendents are busy, school boards are busy, and the challenge of being able to do it voluntarily makes it challenging, whereas if they're under one governance unit, they have more tools in the toolbox to make it happen. So that's, I shouldn't speak for the committee, that's kind of where I come from on that. I agree with that.

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: Yeah, I would agree with that as well, right? Having that centralized, having a a county level governance there gives the option for some some centralized leadership to say another option for Procter being Outer Valley. Right? But yet some way to at least create a process that addresses the school level issue.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Yeah. Representative Long has watched it.

[Rep. Emily Long]: Thank you for coming and sharing all this data that you have with us. I have a question. It seems in your graphs here in the end of the presentation are mostly focused on the high school level. Much of the impetus behind the work we're doing right now really has to do with costs and property taxes, and it's driving a lot of this conversation. And I am very mindful of the very rural part. I live in a very rural part of the state of Vermont, and I'm very mindful of the challenges around closing small rural schools. And most of our smallest schools, which, you know, there's a whole debate about quality of education and all that. I'm sort of just talking about finances right now. And most of them don't have huge budgets, right? Because they're small schools, they have smaller budgets. But when you talk about middle and high schools, that changes a little bit because they usually fed by many of ours are regional district, high schools that serve multiple towns. Is it fair to say that that is essentially the area where we're going to see the most benefit by consolidating schools themselves. I'm staying away from districts right now because we're still talking about that on that side, but you're focused on schools. So is it fair to say that that's where we're gonna see the most benefit, including increasing opportunities for our kids.

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: I think, yeah, reducing the number, consolidating the schools where consolidation is feasible and leads to those costs. There, there are some small remote schools that are small by necessity, right? So that once we figure out how to identify those priority areas, even if it's through a mechanism of, of kind of regionalized governance, to consolidate schools and reduce the average annual operating costs in those areas. Then I think, and I've written about this in the past as well, that it becomes necessary for the state aid formula to compensate for the additional costs of continuing to operate those schools that are small by necessity, a small remote school somewhere in the Northeast Kingdom or elsewhere, or even in an area that's more isolated as a function of transportation access through the mountains. Right? They're gonna be schools small by necessity. If we can reduce the cost pressure in those areas by combining the schools that are small, not by necessity, be it high schools, middle schools, or elementary schools. That I think frees up some of the money at the state level to be able to continue to help with the costs of the schools that are small by necessity. My choice of my choice of focusing mostly on high schools here, I think just came out of conversations I had. I didn't have a chance in the last couple of days to really kind of set up a systematic review, But I wanted to come up with some illustrations, and I know, you know, when I have my, you know, weekly conversations with my parents, we we talk about especially in the springtime, my dad brings up the the short graduation list of high schools in in Rutland County. So So that's what

[Chair Peter Conlon]: yeah. Could you talk a little bit about the difference between sort of small schools as we consider them in Vermont and what is considered a small school in research, in your world of research?

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: Yeah. So the way it works out in the research is that a small district is a district with fewer than 2,000 pupils. A small elementary school optimization occurs like between three hundred and five hundred students in an elementary school, and high school between six hundred and nine hundred to kind of optimize, like, the provision of services and school quality. Right? Very few Vermont schools reach any of those thresholds. But I think an important point, and the reason why I made those two graphs is to show that even though we know that costs totally, you know, can totally flatten out when we do cost efficiency analysis academically, the cost totally flatten out at around 2,000 students. They only go up gradually as we go down to about five or 600 students, and then they spike up for the very small. So I think the research, when we dig into it more deeply and look at these cost curves, and we don't have as much evidence at school level on that, although we have more ability to generate that now, and I'm gonna start doing some of that. There is some flexibility in Vermont to reduce some of those very, very small schools and or districts to just kind of small. And that's where the biggest drops are in the expenditure associated with providing school, Right. So I think that again, and that was one of the one of the issues in Kansas, albeit there, you know, Kansas is a flatter drive between districts in Western Kansas than most of Vermont. But there are many districts that are just, would just be such a long haul, 100 miles to the next place, populated location that actually has a school, as opposed to nine or 10, which is so, yeah, I think it's that that spike in the very small, which also creates opportunity, and that's where we can create some change in Vermont structures to the extent that you can get the political, that's been the long term battle is getting the political will to consider these things.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Question over here, Representative Harple.

[Rep. Leanne Harple]: Just in terms of talking about the opportunities, a lot of this data too, though, was done before we were doing flexible pathways and work based learning and community schools. I guess that's my question. Were those initiatives that small schools embracing already started when the sort of your findings came?

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: I don't know that they were, but I also don't know that those would necessarily, I think there'd be some greater scale efficiency in managing and organizing those types of programs, even with, you know, with the larger high schools, being able to do the combinations with the high schools. I mean, maybe that you can operate them exactly the same, even with dispersed high schools, in which case it's neither here nor there. But I think also we've had a greater, we've had a, we've had more advancement in access to online curriculum for advanced courses. But I think that we've also seen substantive differences in the quality of online versus in person courses for in math in particular, through in a number of studies. And we got a bigger experiment in that during the COVID era, when we moved so much more to move everything online for a while.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Could you talk a little bit about experiences of other states, and how they might be or might not be applicable to Vermont. As you say, is rural, remote, but not at all in the same way that Vermont is. Right.

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: So I don't know, I mean, that's the thing. I think Vermont is trying to solve a problem here that others haven't solved either. Nebraska, like Kansas did a substantial consolidation of districts in the the 1960s, where they took 1,200 or so districts and redrew them into 300 or so districts, but they didn't in that process, they actually went through constitutional change to grant themselves to create a state board, which would then have the authority to do what they hadn't been able to do previously. But it was district consolidation, drawing new lines around the schools as they already existed. And with some population shifts over time, there have been some school closures, but it wasn't a dramatic centralized reorganization of school. They also, and this, this is a little bit of a Vermont similarity, although the geography is still totally different. What we've seen in a lot of places, even when we've seen overall population decline in Vermont and student enrollment decline in Vermont, but there's also like a, there's the internal shift too, in that there's been greater stability within Chittenden County, and more decline elsewhere. And then within Chittenden County, as I understand it, there's been, you know, more decline in like Burlington City, but there's greater growth in say CDU or South Burlington. Right. So we have these kind of suburban growth, urban stagnation, rural decline, which complicates things, and Nebraska did a substantial district consolidation of Western Nebraska, but it was also just redrawing lines around schools as they existed. So I think, off the top of my head, I can't come up with examples of a state that has effectively and successfully done what you're trying to do here.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: That's perfect.

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: And, you know, it's hard. It's really hard.

[Rep. Emily Long]: It is hard. Yeah.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: I think that maybe speak to the fact that it's, I mean, although the examples you just cited go back decades, but that it is not, you're not going to achieve much quickly.

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: No. I have this thought in my head that maybe if you had some kind of carrot to say, look at the high school you could have. Yes. If we combine that, you know, maybe that would and if you identified a handful of projects to throw those carrots to, maybe that could happen, but that's just my own little kind of wish list, my own personal opinion of how to make some of these things happen.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Yeah, we would agree. I don't know if you've priced out the cost of a new high school lately, but it sounds like- It's

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: a few 100,000,000, yeah. How

[Chair Peter Conlon]: familiar you are, everybody always brings up Maine as a good comparison to Vermont, especially rural Maine. But they also went through a somewhat tumultuous consolidation period that also included building new regional high schools.

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: Yeah, I'll have to go back. I'm gonna run some of these same graphs on Maine. I wasn't under the, you're right. So they, I mean, building some new regional high schools is definitely a step. I don't know how much of that, like what share of the high school population of Maine ended up being affected by those changes. I, but even any step in that direction is important.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Looking around the room to see if there are other questions or discussion points.

[Rep. Leanne Harple]: Wait. So are we looking at this time for questions and saving our discussion points for committee discussion? Because like, yes, I would like to discuss this, but I don't know if now it's right.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: If it's anything that you think Doctor. Baker might provide some insight, go ahead and bring it up.

[Rep. Leanne Harple]: I mean, I guess one of the takeaways that I have is that it really Getting rid of supervised reunions, which is something a lot of people in my area actually won't make a difference. And then the other thing that I'm hearing, maybe I guess my question is clarify if this is correct or not, is that in some of our more urban areas where they have lots of really big high schools that are somewhat close together, it makes more sense to combine those into even bigger high schools and then send the money that we would save from that, which is where the actual cost savings are, to our more rural areas to save the schools that really just can't close without a detriment to people's sort of transportation and lifestyle and community style out there. Is that close to what kind of a good takeaway would

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: be? Let me modify that a little bit. Combining the bigger high schools isn't going to generate much savings, right, because they're already over in the left hand side of those pictures. You've got to combine small high schools and or small middle or elementary schools that are feasible to combine, right? So, and that's where we will create savings. But we can only do that where it's actually feasible and reasonable to combine like geographically in terms of transportation access and safety for bringing kids from to to a more centralized location, and and whether or not we have capital or need to invest in the capital to have a school that we can bring those kids to. You gotta so there are you gotta combine very small schools into not so small schools to move them from the spiked cost area to the lower cost area. But there will be some remaining very small remote schools that it's simply infeasible to combine or consolidate, and the money saved from combining those that it is feasible to consolidate is, you know, where we can help to subsidize the cost of providing equitable and adequate services in places that you just can't possibly consolidate, but still serve, you know, 10 kids per grade level.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Let me clarify. So under the other half of what we're trying to do here is also how we finance education by moving to a weighted foundation formula and identifying those schools that are smaller sparks by necessity and providing additional funding to them through grants.

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: Right. I think we addressed that in the 2018 report that I did with the University of Vermont and American Institutes for Research as well. That yeah, and that was always an issue in, well, Kansas just provides these small district, they don't take out the ones that are small by choice as opposed to small by necessity, but they provide a substantial boost to very small districts to to operate. But you don't want to do that for ones that are small by choice. We want to consider how we can make that more efficient.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: I'm gonna do Representative Brady, then back to Representative Harple.

[Rep. Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: I'm not sure how to phrase this as a question, but I wonder, like your perspective, national research, looking at stuff around the country, we're running obviously headlong into the capital investment facilities issue here, and we haven't even had a state aid program now in almost twenty years. But I wonder how much you see nationally the lack of investment in facilities. I I remember a few years ago there was this fanciful moment where we thought the federal government might do something around infrastructure of schools. And for all the infrastructure work the Biden administration did, it still didn't touch schools. It feels like such a huge cost driver of many of these challenges. I don't know if we obviously have scale issues of every kind in Vermont, so it becomes exacerbated in such a small state. But I wonder if you can speak at all about kind of the national landscape about facilities and the federal and state interplay or states that have done innovative things or the way this crushing a lot of states, because it takes that investment to do some of this work well.

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: So on the facility side, and unfortunately, I mean, the facility side is what, this capital investment is often overlooked. The the extent of deferred maintenance and and use of use of facilities. I know, you know, my my own high school is still used as an as the junior high and was built the year after my grandfather graduated. So I mean, the the the the age and and actually, it ends up being this ends up being an issue. Most states don't provide much support for capital at all. Kansas does have an equalized formula to support capital because it was part of the litigation that forced that. California has a pass, you know, every so often passes a huge state bond for investment in K-twelve and community college capital, but they actually have a habit of just allocating it out as 60%. Well, historically, they just adjusted it, but 60% matching aid to any locality that can pass a bond issue, which of course then leads to inequity and who can even access this matching aid. But they at least have this like knowledge that there is a need to reinvest in the capital of schools and districts and community colleges continuously, because they don't, they don't last forever. They don't operate efficiently forever, and that's one of the, you know, the investment in capital also then affects what happens with your ongoing operating costs. The more deferred maintenance you have, the older your HVAC systems are, the less well insulated your buildings are, the higher your the the greater the extent to which the facility's operating costs eat into all of your other instructional expenditures. I just did a report on California facilities where I mapped that out, and I had done one previously on Arizona. I could probably look at the same graphs on Vermont, because I have the data available, to look at what is spent on direct capital investment versus what is spent on the annual and annual operations and maintenance of your capital space. The less you're spending on the direct capital investment, the more the annual expense on operations of those facilities eats away at that budget that's also supposed to be paying for teachers, administrators, salaries, and benefits, and programs, and services. So and and I did do actually took a bunch of pictures on my last drive up through Vermont about a year ago just to kinda document. And here's the these are the these are Vermont schools here and now. A lot of a lot of older buildings used, many of which probably have significant deferred maintenance issues, and most of that is put back onto towns and local tax rates, not just in Vermont, but in most states. There was a Missouri district that lost its schools to a tornado for Ruthersville, and the state had no aid no aid process, no state aid at all for capital. So the district was, was out of luck unless the state came up with some emergency funding, which I think they eventually did. So, yeah, capital is, is important, and again, that would be the additional benefit of if you put it, if you build some regional high schools, you're building a facility that is now designed to operate. Not only would you combine kids and reduce those core staffing costs to maybe even half of what they are in each of the constituent schools, but you would have a more efficient facility in terms of its annual maintenance and operations costs. You know, that's gonna erode over time. I mean, you can't just let that facility sit for another thirty to a hundred years and expect it to to operate with the same efficiency. But, yeah, capital investment it was my hope when the ESSER money came down that larger amounts of it, because it was one time money, if you put it into staffing and things like that, you were spread over a couple years, unlike the stimulus a decade earlier. But if you put it into staffing, you're eventually gonna have to cut those things. But if you put it into improved renewed HVAC systems and other other systems in schools, you'd have the ongoing benefit for at least five to ten years of the reduced operating costs of those, of HVAC and other things.

[Rep. Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: If you have that information about Vermont, as you were talking about, I, yeah,

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: I think I I'm gonna try to run those graphs, I'll send them along if if I they think it'd

[Rep. Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: be really helpful. I think we have a pretty good handle on the facilities' needs, and we've done a lot of work as a state around that, but a perhaps less clear handle on the current just operating challenge of facilities and what we're spending on that. And we know from work the last task force did just this summer and fall that that is one of our biggest cost drivers in Vermont school budgets. So understanding that part a bit more, I think, could be really Thank you.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Representative Harple, follow-up.

[Rep. Leanne Harple]: Yeah, I guess a of throwback to what I was saying before, which is that it seems this is all super complicated. Sorry if this isn't like the most I've been teaching. But like it seems like really what we're talking about is an allocation of resources here. It seems like the schools that are smaller of the size you're saying, maybe those could combine for savings are small because of where they are, because of the sparsity in their communities. And I think that that's my real sticking point is that there's disagreement among urban versus rural communities about what is the limit for how much a community needs a school. And the other part is this allocation of resources. The major reason I can see that shutting down a small or mid sized school would save money is also because you're getting rid of the building, but you're also getting rid of all that faculty, all those benefits. We know that the savings are going to be in health care. And so yes, because of the way that Vermont funds its education as a state, on paper, it looks like we're saving money. But in fact, in those communities, a whole bunch of people just lost their jobs. And it's not just teachers, it's paraeducators, it's bus drivers, it's nurses. Maybe the bus driver is who he would still need his transportation then because of the mother heat issue. And so it seems like there's more resources for those kinds of jobs to replace them in more urban areas than more rural areas. And so it seems like, just like in the economy, we're asking the wrong people to take the biggest hit. Again, I don't know what the question is, but

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: Yeah, hear totally what you're saying. I mean, certainly it's probably more feasible to combine schools and districts in more population dense areas, but again, that's not where, that's not where this greater savings is. Those are subtle shifts if you go back to the graphs. The bigger, and, and it's not that every small, I'm not really talking about the small remote, I'm talking about the places that are small, but not too remote from another small place.

[Rep. Leanne Harple]: So can you give examples of where in Vermont that would be? Which schools would you recommend?

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: They're in the I think there's work to be done in Western Rutland County with the high schools. Rutland, And in Addison County with some of the small, but I haven't looked at that as closely, but I certainly think

[Chair Peter Conlon]: the whole- I will say yes, you are correct.

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: You know, so, and that's what I wrote about years ago, but I totally agree that there are some small remote schools that are small and remote by necessity, and they would benefit from this because it would free up money from the state to actually give a more generous or whatever the appropriate small remote size adjustment is, like what we were estimating back in the 2018 study. So that, yeah, and again, I, I also know that even though Procter and West Rutland are close to each other, there is you know deep history and pride in having their, I mean I, you know, went to rehearsals for the Marble City Twin Band for years at Procter High School. It's a beautiful building. I mean having your beautiful building that is the hub of your town is, I mean, it's hard to figure out how to grapple with those things. And yes, you're absolutely right that this probably does result in at least changes to the allocation and potential reductions to not just, not just numbers of teachers, but the maintenance and operations staff of the schools. Right? And so people doing the snow removal. I mean, it's, you've listed some of the other staff, but there's, yeah, I mean, removal, cleaning, maintenance operations. I mean, there are other potential employment consequences associated with this. I do think that there may be positive economic development consequence results from having a more comprehensive kind of shiny new high school, as well as ways to kind of bring into that new space, the culture and history of the communities that contributed to it. I kind of suggested in sidebar conversation with someone recently, you know, make a marble entrance and a slate entrance and the county people get the rep.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: This

[Rep. Emily Long]: has made me think about a specific example that I can share. And I'm curious about whether you've seen this in any of the research where there's a school district that I represent that was considering and proposing to close two out of three elementary schools and combine into one school. The numbers of those schools in being put into one school required some capital investment. So there's, there's that cost. Then there's additional costs for, transportation and all that. So we we know those additional costs, but but you expect to see what representative Harple shared about, a reduction in cost because of staffing. But frankly, when the numbers were run, there was actually no way to reduce the number of teachers, classrooms and teachers, because the numbers were just right where you needed that second classroom and combined, literally there was almost no savings in staff. And then when the communities heard, saw the numbers, because when the numbers were run, when they saw them, they said, well, doesn't make sense to lose our local school and not save any money. And so it was put on a back burner.

[Rep. Leanne Harple]: Yeah,

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: what I would guess in that case is again, may have been small schools, but they were small enough to operate the size of a single section of kids that was sufficient, so you were just adding another section of kids. But if you were at a school that's so small that you're well below what would be if you've got eight to 12 kids in a class, and eight to 12 kids in another class over here. Although again, I guess, you know, let's, so that you could combine and have 20, you don't want to get up over 25. Mean, certainly there's no reason to go that far. But if you have very, very small schools, the kind that I think I'm seeing in the, in the Western Addison space, and certainly at the high school level, what I'd see in Western Rutland County, you can combine them and, and offer decent class sizes in one section, which does mean over time reducing the total number of staff, maybe with additional, you know, buyouts or other, you know, we'd have to kind of, I would hate to see this play out as, as was being laid out. I don't know the names around the table, but as as mass layoffs. The other thing that can happen is that, you know, as you combine these schools, you may, if you created this unified high school in Western Rutland County, you may find that the the average wage per teacher goes up 10%. But if you're reducing the total number of teachers and all these other costs by more than that, you're still in the long run gonna level off. You just may not see the the full scope of the savings in the first year, especially if you're trying to protect the interests of staff who've been there for a long time, and really not just, you know, engage in a doge like activity, which I would hate to see.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: And I might add just to, there's another point here as a resident of Western Addison County, but as we've seen declining enrollment, sometimes it's about educational quality and not just because-

[Rep. Emily Long]: Let's go. Opportunity was what drove the conversation more than dollars in this case from these boards. But, you know, you need both. Yeah. And

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: you do the type of analysis that you were talking about. Right? And you realize, well, this particular situation is not actually going to save what we thought it was. So, yeah, and I think that's part of what needs to be these centralized discussions. Do those analyses, figure out where the priorities are, where you actually can achieve the savings and how you can phase into that without without causing significant harm.

[Rep. Emily Long]: Just for clarity, these were elementary schools. Just wanted to make sure he understood that. It wasn't high school level.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: It was elementary. But it it you know, all of these factors, it's it's really, from a high level, kind of interesting to watch. You've got sort of consolidation for cost savings purposes. You've got consolidation for quality, education quality purposes. And then our next step in Western Addison County is saying, is this elementary school that's in bad shape and needs millions of dollars worth investing anymore when there's another elementary school that can accommodate all the students five miles down the road? Right. So it's all a big matrix that you gotta kind of figure out.

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: And it's possible, again, when you think about the governance of this whole thing, be be it your committee or a pass off to the to the agency to create a guidance matrix that would then be used by the the new kind of whatever the district level organizations are for them to provide upward, you know, here, here are, here's our review given that matrix, and priority projects that could be considered. Providing more uniform guidance on how that matrix looks, what are the different considerations in the process might be helpful to get the ball rolling.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: And, you know, we went through a lot of this with Act 46, which, you know, in the district that I just described, where we are combining due to quality, combining due to savings, and combining due to construction needs, previously, every one of those schools had a separate board. So again, it sort of brings us back to why a more regional governance unit can move the chess pieces around a little, in a way that's a little less fraught or time consuming.

[Rep. Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: Our second biggest district, Essex Westford, closed an elementary school this year. That Certainly was challenging, but would have been far more challenging under a different government structure. Burlington is talking about a closure of a school next year based on demographic or plans to start discussing that closure based on demographic information.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Great, committee members, anything else? Doctor. Baker, thank you so much for, we gave you short notice and you came prepared and really appreciate it.

[Dr. Bruce D. Baker]: Thanks for having me. I'm happy to come back at any point, answer whatever additional questions, and I'll try to, you know, run some additional numbers and graphs and see what I see. And the federal data are often not great for the state of Vermont, especially on the expenditure side. So I'm not these graphs I suggested will work, but I'll give them a shot. So thanks. Stay warm up there. We need it.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Thanks. All right, thanks. All right, so, committee, we're me just kind of talk about scheduling. So my thought was to give everybody time to digest map conversation over the weekend. I didn't want to dive right back into it today, but we will sort of devote a significant amount of time next week to it. So think about testimony, we'll and then we'll also have conversation. So think about what questions you might have that you feel need to be answered, that we can get through testimony. We've got some sort of topics of discussion to bring forth. And, you know, we're gonna get stuck again on, like, okay, now we're this far, how do we take our next step? But anyway, just give it lots of thought. The rest of the day today, we have testimony at one. She wrote about 02:30 at the latest, and that will conclude for the weekend. Really appreciate the conversation yesterday and everybody's reaction to it. And I would just, again, as you hear more and more from constituents, continue to say this is a starting point. I'm not if wanna say, I'm not sure I agree with any of this or for me, it's however you however you wanna respond, just the the basic point that, you know, this is as I keep saying, this is not how it should be. It's how it could be, and we could alter that as we see fit. I also would say solicit input from your own superintendents and whatnot to just sort of get a sense of both, not just the map, but the policy behind it as well. We can really help you inform the conversation next week and, of course, school board members and whatnot. With that, we stand adjourned until one. Unless there was any questions