The Burlington School District budget proposal is out. Ten people across the district will be laid off this year. 4.5 of those people will be teachers. Two of these ten positions are English Language teachers.
EL teacher Susan Blethen said the department is “meeting our obligation of teaching English”, but that they haven’t always been able to meet the needs of kids at higher levels due to staffing.
“Choosing to reduce the staffing now,” Blethen said, “is kind of sad, because that’s doing a disservice to the kids in the higher academic classes.”
Principal Sabrina Westdijk said the departments and teacher roles are not public yet, but those at risk, largely due to staff seniority, have been notified.
Burlington High School has yet to feel the impact of these losses and has been largely protected from some of the budget crunches other school districts have experienced in recent years.
Two years ago, the state passed Act 127. Act 127 used an equitable, rather than equal, funding formula. Instead of giving all districts the same amount of money to educate students, schools with higher-need students like English language learners, special needs students and low-income students were given more money. This means districts with higher concentrations of need, like the Burlington school district, receive more state funding.
Champlain Valley School District was hit hard by this because the district is made up of more affluent families and ended up losing state funding, a large part of the massive reductions in force. The CVSD lost 82 positions in the last two years and CVU students have felt its effects.
CVU Senior Cecilia Marino has been dedicated to band all four years of high school- joining symphonic winds as a sophomore and part of the jazz band since freshman year. She’s been vocal about her disappointment at these cuts in her school.
“It just doesn’t seem like there’s space anymore. There’s a lack of communication between the people who made the cuts and the impacts of the cuts,” Marino said.
Marino explained that the reduction from a full-time band teacher to a part-time one was damaging to the program.
“The band room doors are locked half the time, right? So there’s not that space for practicing. But also I have to go find another teacher at the end of every white day to find a key and unlock it for jazz band, so people can get their instruments and so the thing can start, because our adviser doesn’t come from [their job] where he teaches full-time until 3:30,” Marino said.
Polly Vanderputten is a BSD school board member in addition to a French and Spanish teacher at South Burlington High School and said that reductions in force last year have made it harder for students at SBHS. School counselors have more students and scheduling conflicts have become more frequent. In addition to this, the Japanese program and the Big Picture program were entirely cut.
“The Education Support team was cut, but then brought back halfway through the year because of the high need for it,” Vanderputten said. “These are just a few examples of how budget cuts can diminish the overall quality of education for students and families.”
Superintendent Tom Flanagan was clear that the BHS teacher reductions are ones that reflect BSD enrollment, something that is rapidly declining.
“I think maybe in our next strategic plan, we need to be thinking about what we can do to increase enrollment? Because it’s hard budgeting every year for reductions,” Flanagan said.
Flanagan went on to say that when looking at the bigger picture of expenses in VT, declining enrollment is a natural byproduct of an expensive state. The cost of living is about the price of education, as well as the cost of diversifying business, creating housing and keeping healthcare costs down.
“You know, the governor is directly responsible for doing [these things] he hasn’t done now. He’s blaming education for costing too much, and I feel like that is disingenuous,” Flanagan said.
As this trend continues, the idea of closing an elementary school in BSD becomes even more of a reality. Westdijk is raising kids in BSD K-12 and she made the point that closing a school might start to become the “least bad option.”
“You can either suffer death by 1000 cuts, right, by spreading that across all kinds of departments and programs, and that’s when you start seeing programs disappear,” Westdijk said. “Or you could say, look, instead of cutting from everywhere, we close a school, we isolate that to one place, preserve everything else, and we know that we can still serve our community and our families because we have enough space to absorb those students.”
The ten positions being cut this year at BHS might just be the beginning. Currently, the Vermont State Legislature is debating a new foundation formula that could replace Act 127. While this is still under debate, it could potentially take away local control of budgets and reduce funds for BHS.
