and maybe if you pick belts a little so as part of preparation for the open forums session we provided you with these little slips of papers for writing questions and we're hoping that as you watch the video of aggregating all the spending that's happening across the state special ed spending all that sort of stuff so that's where they are we sort of operates in the tax apartment is more on the revenue side well so i have high level will go through that education fund which is where all the money that is raised for education in the state goes so one of the sources of that fund or money goes into our fund and what do we use those funds for do that so the first thing i would like to point out is that vermont does not have a per pupil funding system so in a lot of states what happens here is state government passes you know ok we're going to find you know thousand dollars homestead property tax rates that family gets all the attention and talk a lot about the sort of bill that everyone gets not residential property tax rate also for people who want second homes or personal properties apartment buildings all sorts of things that the tax rate sort of the lottery fines net prizes and operations of the lottery so whatever he thinks money in the balance goes to the education fund there are a couple other sort of random sources that are sort of a ton of money so a transfer from  to spend those funds in the next year if they're available so i like this picture of the hedge fund because it sort of demonstrates each of those components as a comparison to sort of the whole piece of the price of the biggest piece of the education fund is that not not homestead property tax less where we raise the most amount of money followed by the homestead tax and then the sales and use tax so those are sort of the big three and the education fund that's of the education by the special education process so it's about two hundred million dollars out of the education funds for special education in the state and then followed by a lot of other sort of smaller aid that's given to school goes for special education for greenpeace students and specifically we fund the flexible pathways programs which are currently college romance and some of those other programs to help high school students transition into college off there are additional revenue if you well for local schools that big one is special education and so the state picks up sixty per cent of special education costs for a local school so that's about close like school pathways are a little bit of that money doesn't go to schools that goes to the supposed secondary machines where the kids are taking to the role of course as earned roll in early college and then there's balance this one point three that's what's going to the horrible education spending there is this funky thing that happened last year around health care spending capturing some cost back from schools associated with savings for health care and that those are one point six billion dollars in education spending on an annual  five year that is their budget expenditure so it was adopted locally we think about education spending that's less any other revenue that's coming into the schools so all the schools in the state get federal so we think about education spending which will come into play when we start talking about tax rates and what the budget adopted locally is less any of those sort of revenues that are coming from other sources the federer government state government find  those are sort of the big ones are the federal revenues in a category certain extent these other monies are coming in and that reduces the amount of education spending at the local level so in f y twenty nineteen that's how we have one point have another sort of high level just sort of a snapshot of where the money is coming from again not residential property taxes play a pretty big big component of it spending this is just sort of demonstrate that general fund transfer goes away and twenty nineteen and then is replaced by the sales and use tax and the meals and rooms tax coming into the fund and the purchase and use tax is the same as it was last year and just  of demonstration of where the the rest of the money is coming from and we go back from actually where you see at the bottom is that all of these revenues which doesn't include the homes their property tax only raise about one point two billion dollars and i sort of think of this but they're not fixed revenues but they're sort of predictable revenue so to the extent the rate of the sales tax is adopted by a legislature it is a law and we get an estimate in terms of what we think that is going to raise in the beginning of the year these are sort of thought of as fixed sources and yet you keep them in the legislature is debating we'll be coming up with that number should be that's sort of the balancing piece  education fund so once we town meeting day happens and they're able to aggregate all the budgets across all of the school districts in the state the homestead property tax rate is what the balance is what these revenues are with what those projected expenses are i think that's why i guess a lot of attention is that it's sort of where we're the balancing of the education i would have got that with the legislature has the ability to change any of these raids or any of these numbers and i point to legislative session that's their prerogative but generally we talk about the homes or property tax as that sort of balancing factor in good teacher so there was about one point two at a high level before we kind of dive into what those how the homestead property taxes are calculated generally how the money flows from this just from the state of the districts if the district is off the  calculation plus all the categories right now the homestead property tax raise four hundred twenty nine million dollars it actually looks like more than that on that one but a lot of the people who pay based on income get an adjustment and the total of those  sixty eight point seven so the net has the for twenty nine point one this home state taxes are based on per pupil spend but we're going to you saw that in the video we're going to talk about that a little bit more but the rate definitely comes from what you just vote to spend per pupil and then the tax rate that you see on your bill is based on the per pupil spending you both but also something else called the c l a common do people who pay based on property are just paying straight based on the property value and then some people pay on their income so they see in a manner based on their property value but then the bottom of their bill they see a line called state payments and that's where the adjustment actually another mean change should have been during the legislative session is that they they decided to sort of split the bill so that there's going to be education down one column and unison pull down other columns and it's  still going to be complicated but at least you'll be able to see if you're getting an adjustment applying to your education or muni her boat and that's going to be kind of helpful for helping people  cents so there was a huge variation across the line and there was also a variation a lot of variation in the quality of the education to be delivered because some towns have a lot of pretty taxed sometimes didn't have much so they do very now but it's not nearly as much as they did the very rich per people spending towns get to vote on the humalog that they want to spend per pupil and actually change from  is that now when you go to vote it should say on the ballot do you approve of her pupil spending amount which is an increase or decrease from last year and that's that's an incredibly profound improvement because really long time people thought that it was their total budget that the term the directory and that is the most dangerous misconception it is not the total budget it is what spent per pupil so if you are spending the same total from here to here that your number of pupils goes down your per pupil spending is going up and in a lot of towns maybe not burlington but a lot of world towns the number of he'll yeah those are actually something that i'm working on right now the word yield is not a good name for it because you'll makes you think oh you multiply a dollar by all the property in the state and you divide by the number of kids that's how much you have dollar yields like the for yield but that's not how it works at all so the tax department along with the joint fiscal office which is the legislature's analysis to assembly we showed you before there's all this revenue which is known and then there is and there are pieces which are not know which are the property tax pieces so we have to make sure the education fund is filled out and then there's also we have to try to ensure that that average bill increase for those who pay on property those who are paying on income and those in the residential areas the average build increases the same so it's a difficult balancing act but that's how we we come up with these yields so the property yield in the current fiscal year is ten thousand to twenty and the base rate in statute forevermore is the dollar and used to change from year to year like income below is twelve thousand three eight the base not residential property tax rate is a buck fifty eight and that is this state wide every town you're but then the legislative session starts in january i should jump in that calculation that they're doing and speak our best estimate of what we think education spending is going to be for everybody july of two thousand and nineteen and there's a lot that's unknown like what education spending is going to be what property values are going to be and we're trying to project that so we come up with these yields and the numbers and actual rate they come out in the commissioners letter then the legislative session starts the numbers change and then most importantly around team town meeting they actual budgets are passed so then the numbers you start to get really real that gets adjusted freestone by dividing dividing by the c l a they get the actual rate that you see in your bill so if you're late it's ninety three percent which means that property in your town generally listed for ninety kind of lays it out and so we take the district expenditures which we think are going to be four point five million dollars last whatever offsetting revenue is going to come in from the state and the federal government which gets you the education spending number of about four point three relationship between the per pupil spending and the yield that is the tax rate and that ratio then we take the c l a and we divide the equalize tax rate five as you like and we come up with the one step rate that shows up on the bill so and then just at a high level in terms of what the sort of tax rate was me so if we take average we use a two hundred thousand dollars house a value i'm alive and then times is very we tax on one percent of the hous value so there's a two thousand dollars that's the taxable value times the tax free dollar fifty means your tax bill would be three thousand dollars so in this very hypothetical situation if this was to go up by a penny it would mean that about a twenty three and twenty dollar increase on the tax bill in this situation actually goes up to one hundred thirty eight thousand dollars this year that one hundred thirty eight it's not the statutory amount it's some it's something other tax her because really should we just see the point which property taxes just disappear like they fizzle out and so we say hey you can go apply for it if you're up to about it now because you might get a little something but really that's just a phase out point changes from year to year so it's for households w about one hundred thirty eight thousand for households of income over ninety thousand and only covers up to two hundred twenty five thousand dollars of property value that's all you'll be sensitised for if you're under ninety thousand it covers up to four thousand dollars property value each current year tax bill yeah this is another complicated thing but the line i told you about before the state payments line is your property tax adjustment that's based on the prior property tax year because we know your income from that you fill out an application for a do we know you come from that era we know what you paid a property taxes a year so we can do the math we can calculate your adjustment and then it gets applied to your current here bill so there's a lag in the system so if something happens in your town where your tax rates spike you're just meant it's not going to be sensitive to that until you next year  the state to recognize the fact that certain kids cost more or less than others to educate on average so i do know that we are trying to normalize if you will sort of each pupil  fact that there may be spikes or drops in one year period especially in smaller schools so when we wait the students for the good byes people calculation we assume that an elementary this is the long term membership if we counted all those kids there were seven hundred ninety four students and then of those students this is the sort of spread in terms of elementary and secondary poverty students at english language learners w fly those weights and it's a little funky the scale the way it is to try to reflect we count all the pupils we weighed all of them and then the number of replies pupils is more than the number of actual people so that we have to scale it back so that the number of school district budget is flat so one possibility is that there's fewer students so why is the spending per pupil calculation with peoples in the denominator if they're if that number goes down and the per pupil spending goes  another scenario is that the revenue sources may have changed so when you do that education spending number and the amount of offsetting revenue that money from the federal government money for special education from the state big chain and that increases education spending which shakes into a higher tax rate if you become village another revenue source i didn't really touch on this but sometimes there are districts that have money left over from prior years and there may be a decision to is different so if the c l a drops and that property tax rate may increase even the spending has changed a majority so this is where it sort of gets complicated where there are like the state wide funding formula so everybody else in the state has decided to spend a lot more money and your district has and it's possible that your tax rate will go up because we need to raise enough money across the state to make sure that we find of all of the schools in the state so there is a sort of global impact peacetime decisions that are made outside of because the state has less revenue from one of those sources either the hybrid sales tax or if there was one time i know it was used in a prior hearing that meaning that the local property tax has to go up to make sure that there's enough revenue coming in to the what we do now is if you spend money on a specialist to fulfill their individual lies education or five o four plans which are somewhat different if you spend money on those you can get reimbursed for those expenses you can get reimbursed up to fifty thousand dollars and then you can get an excess bending for each individual service under which there is no real incentive to find efficiencies and services there's no real incentives to look at ways to  ninety percent of expenses over fifty thousand dollars so let's say you're spending forty five thousand dollars on a student there is a perverse incentive to spend more because you're going to get almost all of  reimbursed so we commissioned a couple of studies i won't go into the nature of those studies but one was on funding and one was on special education practice uva ended the funding study and a group services to more kids for less money now i was a skeptic when they first presented them and i always am when people tell me that i can have my cake too if i don't have it tomorrow this year but that's kind of what we were presented with the second report we had the energy report had something similar which is under the census based on what you give people greater flexibility over how they spend money and you give them cut the rate of social security we're going to cut the rate of medicaid by block granting to the states giving them more flexibility and somehow lo and behold poor people wind up with less so i was a s but in the case of education spending for special needs kids there are federal mandates that say you have to maintain the same level of support otherwise the federal government steps in a maze so and then that will remain even as we go out and sue in years and will allow all districts to under certain circumstances certain orbited circumstances be able to ask for more money but basically we're going to institute practices that will make spence's go down and their districts will be able to live this is the simplest way to think about this it's a five year law that we have so i would ask you to look down at the bottom first there's a couple of parts of this that have gone into effect on  ask agency of education is now out there in the supervisory union working with to communicate best practices to try to bring costs down especially that's happening as we stand th little bit visor it units and task forces are going out into the us underneath that we hired some staff it a week to take us through this transition to a new funding prior to this act if you were in a town that had a choice school choice and there was an independent school in that town or the birth of a cavalier were actually they take all the students of special well let's say you were you were in manchester and you wanted to go to the maple street certainly you did i want to go to your public school and your parents didn't want to go to the public school you wanted to go to this nice independent school maple street maple street school and all the other independents as it stood last year they could decide not to take you because you had a disability they'd they might not say that's what it was they might say it's fed they might say it was they don't think they could be of service to you any number of ways they could not allow you to go what this was his was say you can school you now have the right to go so that was a major change nothing to do with funding that civil right but look up to the top line for twenty eight hundred twenty nine hundred twenty nine hundred twenty twenty that is last year in the coming year and into the next year we're going to have to save reimbursement model that we currently have especially but we will be beginning the process of redoing a change in practice su's around the state dept for twenty twenty twenty one through that's the first year of the census and that's where we begin the process of instituting this census grant as opposed to the system of paying for individual expenses so in essence we estimate what a district is going to need based on past years and we want grant to that district that  instruction so you know you have a severe learning to see something like that you are guaranteed by the a b a special instruction what this does is it creates a rather character category that includes those but now it also includes other things for her and here's the key under this will be able to use that larger block grant for students who struggle which includes english language  do cultural work with the students the translators we met with that or apparatus they also the same thing we need more resources but as everyone knows early in the new skete pay a great deal already to fund those services and we get very little from the state and federal government with this change will do is mean that we computers that money for english language learners kids who are reading both learning level grade level so if we need a higher teaching tutors suddenly this one can pay for that and if we need to hire english language specialists that can come out of this is w now here's the thing he mediately when you hear that or when i heard of the first time i thought if we're going to expand the pool of kids who could use the money we're going to have less money especial but remember that's protected by federal statute so the state cannot spend less than what it takes to put me on with a five zero so in essence what we're doing is giving greater flexibility to flexibility you allow the school district to get money to kids when their needs show themselves at first so you can prevent kids from going on the right if you don't have the funds to deal with their behavior the not be so my bottom line is i think as this goes forward you see it go out to twenty twenty one twenty five that's when the calculations are complete we know exactly what  together we believe will bring education spending down for special needs while servicing everybody here and he means and allowing more flexibility and  mandated to pay those each expense under a certain rate so what you have to do is change the practice so we've got additional people hired elite who are going out into the s how to communicate these practices from the d m g management which should help reform the way specialist to live so between what you're talking about which is diagnosing and then changing the way we deliver services and getting rid of the perverse incentives sometimes to spend a little more by having the great we hope all those things together will decrease special ed said ok this is where it gets complicated and she didn't say it as a joke so i'm going to touch on just a few more topical items that i think might be of interest and one of them that came up in it it's it's lost at some of the presentation which was the coming local appraisal and this is really a message partially for people like you part of the city council members but also our school board members we are long past due for the next three appraisal citywide and i think the school board member city councillors and the citizens have to understand what might happen because you can't get away with holding that offer eventually the state by law might be obligated to step in her choir it i think we know that shooting county has been growing property values are guess i would say one overarching thing increasingly people in the legislature say oh well when we passed back sixty and we have a statewide system and get the public has kaiser moved on from those states the public has largely forgotten that time in the late ninety's were the discussions about a complete state wide plan where we all view the education system as a we're all in it together system people have really drifted from those memories of that discussion and so almost all the complexity we see up here is a result of one primary objective which is the state and by the state i mean the legislature governors and all the people like those people have said we do not want to kid in a small rural poor town have a terrible education just because they grew up in a particular area all of this complexity in my opinion that is the explanation and there are some who would say well those people should move to another place with better resources but of course life isn't so easy and i say that not as an excuse of the status quo because there are changes we should make but life would be easier if we were all in it for ourselves as discrete communities but we've chosen a different path as a state one of the right but one of the things that we struggle to do other states in terms of trying to better manage costs and have school districts work with one another to learn from each other it's that school budgets across the state are not all created equally and by that i mean if someone were to ask how many character obsessional doing this kind of work are there in every single elementary school in the state no one can tell you that answer if people ask for lots of expenses and expect district by school district  will tell you a brief horror story i was sitting in the appropriations room as we were finalizing the budget we were saying we have to get this done we have to get to the place where everyone is using the same system and they say some state employees said well it's going to take four more years and i said four years to get two hundred school districts on the same accounting system and i said so let me put it in perspective in one nine hundred forty one united states entered world war two mobilized an agricultural economy into a wartime economy took on fascism on several fronts and won world war two and if we could do that faster than we could get two hundred school district then someone noted that the effort to do this that actually started four years earlier i said are will throw in world we're one of them had one done so because news is we're actually on track to start accomplishing that and it's not something i'm making light of it but it does take time we now have a group of school districts that are the sort of i would roll out and that will continue to accelerate that will be good news for policymakers and the public so you can evaluate how are your school district handles these expenses relative to others two things we did last year one we're moving towards a statewide health benefit for teachers this is hopefully going to help both parties in collective bargaining negotiations focus on education core activities while still enjoying a public health benefit we also set in motion a task force to look at the question of ratios of staff to students this is something that some have cited as like an easy thing right so the governor this past year i'm not being critical or partisan put out a statistic that said if we moved from four and a half or so students per faculty and we made it up to five we could say seventy million just like that but the problem is in order to achieve those numbers you would have to go  to you have to you know go to florence elementary or the sorry sustainability academy and remove point zero three of a teacher then you have to go to rutland elementary and take out point one one you know if it doesn't work so easily to just pull out get a time so the question we're trying to do is say how can we look at districts all through the state figure out who's best managing their personnel to deliver a high quality education not do it in an arbitrary way that has a really negative impact on the education at school or one question that has frequently come up and i think jeff has put it on the list of topics is the prospects for moving to a system based on income only i can't really tell you what the prospects are i do not suspect that even if it had the legislative willpower to get it to the finish line i cannot suspect that our current governor would sign it into law but i will say just in the simplest terms what the the of homeowners already the thirty percent who do not are the thirty percent of the highest income households so if you were going to move to an income based system theoretically the point would be to relieve pressure on middle income payers in particular in order to do that you have to bring in more money for somebody else so it's that thirty percent theoretically from where you would draw additional resources over simplifying a little bit that kind of holds true you have to balance the possible income gains if you raise the income payments of those higher theory for higher income thirty percent households with the potential changes in behavior of those same households especially people at the very highest then those who have multiple homes and change their primary residence easier than those who only have one residence and if someone goes for a month resident paying an income and says oh my god now i'm getting really soaked i'm going to become a second homeowner who my primary residence to wherever else you don't have that revenue coming in so that's the risk assessment that the strongest whose's have to make will people change their behaviors in a way that will actually not allow for predictable revenues to pay for school so i i say that not as a deal killer but just as a reality check of what the tension is there and then the last thing i'll finish some people think that we've got lots of titian all classroom teachers are people we're teaching math science history and then our problem is we have too many electives all over the state teaching chinese and latin and all sorts of other stuff what those those  even in some cases gone down the c s times what has really driven the pressure of my opinion over the last twenty to thirty years a change in what schools are doing schools thirty years ago were paying teachers they were buying lab equipment books you know all the kind of basic stuff that you had everybody in this room i think matches from when we went to school today walk into any school in burlington or anywhere else in the state most of them are really doing much more than that they not only providing that core education they are also providing a great number of human service of course to kids who are coming in with a whole set of different problems that that is not free and it's not just the special education costs th describe it's it's it comes in the form of paraprofessionals who are actually not there specifically for a night the student but we're helping manage difficult classroom dynamics it's coming in the form of additional psychologists and social workers  a bunch of positions which haven't really liberated over the last ten years and so now when people go to their property tax bill in their minds they think oh gosh i'm paying a lot more research to any cost are teachers and they make too much money but really what's happen year that that tax payment you're making is really for education costs and i wish we could go back to a time many years as those individual decisions were being made and be perhaps a little bit more deliberate about how we were going to pay for some of those things because what we've done is really great in a lot of getting us towards public schools many cases when in fact the public school is not just doing a very very hard and good job of public education delivery but it's also why we're paying really for education and human services and what you might be able to do about that so those are some themes that i got to touch on bill touched on what hardest things to get done this is a multi year effort and special that is your socks one of the primary income levels by shifting county standards they actually are often the ones with the most eyes percentage of people who are even sensitized but actually are willing to spend the least on the public school so statewide there's going to follow people or more become sensitized or more you could argue that not all states are probably getting all the expenses saying that's probably also of course we also have to study if you compare it somewhere like wyoming which has a roughly similar population they are unlike us in that most of their population is in a few small places where as we have our people spread out and we have a history of living operators school so i did i believe we are in a transition point that your question gets harder when we've had clashes with the governor over the last two years around some of these issues in part it was based on a surprise factor the surprise factor was an expectation that the governor who had always talked about local control school budgets still believed in that basic principle and so when we entered into the normal in the session mix which we did ministration legislature we operated under a affirmative legislation to recreate it in essence and that weird sort of understanding in these regions committees of the house in the senate there we're not going to be in the business of the system with those so we went back and forth back and forth finally we heard her out of line was given three hundred thousand dollars will do things so we didn't do it then but in this special ed said under this new model you have greater flexibility different categories of kids you can spend that money you might have after july first twenty twenty so if you look on the ship today you will see something called the advisory group and there are three advisory group reports so what they're going to do is consider things exactly like your request so if we've got the traditional spending on special ed you know we've got these other groups they're going to do some of that work to be here out how do we estimate margin so they're going to deliberate we're on january fifteenth this coming january and they're going to give us another one on the following year and another one on the following chain and so that question is one that they're going to do essentially what they're going to be doing is refining refining and refining  to make for the sense it's sort of it's not just going to be your historical spending on special ed it's going to be also estimates of these other kinds of spending and bill come up with a sense of the thinking is enjoys that benefit of dollars coming yet how that might be fine it just makes it a different conversation with our peers and my people here who might not have that same population base so one of the other things that should be alongside discussion about changing weighting students is whether they are whether it is appropriate to be able to use other sources of funds for particular uses so in the old days people were concerned that a community that had a commercial base would get extra money  that people are much better schools and other places when it comes to helping integrate refugee students into the classrooms which we know comes with an expense i don't think that's quite what this edition of x sixty was created in terms of people a fusion those are supports just of his if you read in the school so that's something that later you know something we all work together on figure out how we how we slice out our districts across the state will try to game whatever system we create x sixty was that some communities can get money from pilot sources and others can't what i'm saying is look at on its head the issue is really about are there expenses which some districts have that others don't which are sort of extra ordinary to education and that might justify being able to use other sources of revenue so a pilot could theoretically be one of those sources but probably something at the state level would be more equitable and so in a sense the pilot m