Section 4: New Education Law in the State of Vermont, USA

Pre-reading questions:

1. How many states make the USA?

2. What is the state of Vermont famous for?

3. What other states of this country do you know?

It is a placid state usually, but these days Vermont is riven with cries of class warfare. The reason is Act 60, a, law which transforms education finance by taking from rich towns and giving to poor ones.

Until this academic year, each town in Vermont (like many towns in other states) paid for its own public schools with local property taxes, determined by resident tax assessors. The state contributed a portion of its own tax revenue – 30%, one of the lowest figures in the country.

«Gold» towns such as Stowe, with popular ski resorts, or Manchester, with dozens of designer discount stores and three ski mountains, easily topped up the meagre state contribution to pay for extra-splendid schools. Poor towns («receiving» towns in the jargon of Act 60) were obliged to rely on higher property-tax rates; even then, since there was not much property to tax, their budgets were slim.

The figures tell the tale. Manchester spent $5, 844 per pupil in 1998, little Whiting in central Vermont spent about $2, 300. But Whiting had to tax its property-owners 35% more heavily than town with plenty of rich properties. The case of one Whiting pupil, Amanda Brigham, was eventually brought before the state Supreme Court by the American Civil Liberties Union as an example of unfairness in spending on schools. And on February 5th last year the court found the system unconstitutional. It ordered the legislature to act quickly to implement the law. And, as the first sign of that, management of school spending was taken out of local control and transferred to the state.

In June the legislature passed a sweeping reform bill that sought to correct the inequities by pinpointing certain towns as richer than others, and adjusting the property tax accordingly. In the richer towns, where property taxes had been relatively low in the past, those taxes have now risen sharply; in poorer towns they have fallen.

The reform has hit some people, as well as some towns, harder than others. Many farmers, living near the richer towns, with many acres of land but low incomes, or people living in the richer towns who do not even have children, and others are up in arms.

The law has already been larded with more than 70 pages of «technical corrections». It is so complicated that even legislators have trouble understanding or explaining it. Vermonters remain almost evenly divided in their support or rejection of the law.

§ Vocabulary notes