Issue Position: Schools, Including Preschool and College, Should be Funded

Emilie's vision: Schools are the centers of our rural communities. Teachers are respected and adequately resourced. Every child is met in their particular needs, and leaves school with the appropriate tools to serve their community, participate actively in democracy, and thrive in the workforce.

Our public school system was founded with three specific (and sometimes competing) goals--to prepare citizens to participate meaningfully in the work of democracy, to prepare youth for the workforce, and to get children off the streets and factory lines and into a caring environment. Even after 150 years of layered reforms, communities still require these three services of their schools: citizenship, training for the economy, and childcare. When we invest in our schools with these three purposes explicitly in mind--rather than implicitly at odds with each other--we can craft community-driven institutions that support today's families while building a future generation's opportunities. When we have realistic conversations about the place of schools in our rural communities, and how they serve as the connectors to our future and to each other, we can see that everyone benefits from a system that has historically been one of the best in the country. In today's economy this means:

We need to realign our school funding to include the full spectrum of youth: birth through 22.

We need to acknowledge that schools can and often do serve as community centers, and they need to be resourced appropriately.

We need a school funding formula that is equitable to those receiving funding, progressive to those funding it, and stable enough for long-term planning.

It is especially important to unpack the issue of framing and narrative about our rural community schools. Vermont prides itself on local control--our local communities control our town meetings and our community schools. As we find solutions to some real demographic shifts--people moving away from rural regions, an aging population, a shrinking middle class--we need to look to the long term health of our communities. How do we ensure that all of our students have equitable access to education regardless of location or family income? How do we make our funding formulas transparent enough that communities feel investment in them? Given changing demographics, how do we use our existing infrastructure and investment fully? And most importantly, how do we have community conversations about these issues so we can move beyond zero-sum equations and towards a state that puts children at the center of its communities' futures?

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