Opinion: Act 127 & real spending per pupil

By Steven Martin

After attending the April 18 meeting on the revised school budget, I felt compelled to communicate my thoughts on “cost per pupil.”

One of the changes within Act 127 is that it no longer requires that the statewide total number of “weighted” or “equalized” pupils must equal the number of actual pupils. This “simplification” successfully hides the true spending/cost per actual pupil in the system. It is difficult in any of the budget presentations I have seen, to find any reference to an actual number of pupils. Apparently the public does not need to know. I suspect that we will only talk about “equalized” or “weighted” pupils, and may soon drop the adjectives so that “weighted pupils” will become simply “pupils” and the common meaning of the word pupil will be lost — good riddance.

Act 127 is neither simple nor open and that is the first clue that mischief may be afoot. If you are like I am and want to judge for yourself, the explanation is in this brief from the legislature’s Joint Fiscal Office. Though complicated, it has some magical properties.

My examples below use data found on page 11 of the Harwood Unified Union School District Annual Report and FY2025 Budget, and page 3 of the HUUSD revised budget presentation dated March 27, 2024. Act 127 changed both the formulas and the adjectives, thus what were “equalized” pupils in FY24 are now referred to as “LTWADM” (short for “long term weighted average daily membership,” a.k.a. “weighted”) pupils for FY25.

The total number of actual pupils in our district on October 1, 2023, was 1,823, according to the district annual report. (The highest actual pupil count in the last three years was 1,838). Before Act 127, the state converted our district FY24 actual pupil count to 1,720 “equalized” pupils. Under the Act 127 new and expanded weighting system, this would have been 2,548 “weighted” pupils. Currently, using the multi-year average of pupils, the FY25 number for HUUSD is 2,647 “weighted” pupils. These are all calculated from about the same number of actual pupils. 

Before Act 127, the calculation used to determine the HUUSD cost per “equalized” pupil for the current year FY24 was presented as $22,388. We see that, if we had merely applied the Act 127 weighting to the exact same data, we could have dropped our cost per “weighted” pupil to a mere $15,113. An amazing 33% cost reduction per “equalized/weighted” pupil just by coming up with the simple new formula within Act 127. Same budget, same spending, same number of actual pupils, but resulting in an amazing $7,275 drop in cost per “equalized/weighted” pupil. It seems almost too good to be true.

On April 30, our FY25 HUUSD revised school budget of $48,888,319 will be voted on. Using the state's magical Act 127 formula, we were shown a cost per “weighted” pupil of $15,626. I arrived at Harwood as a 7th grader in 1966 when it opened and graduated with the first class to spend all six junior and senior high school years there. That was 52 years ago, so my math may be rusty and my logic skills obsolete, but those skills suggest that if the budget request is to approve spending $48,888,319 actual dollars to educate 1,823 actual pupils, then the spending per pupil requires one simple calculation. That calculation is $48,888,319 divided by 1,823 pupils and it results in spending of $26,817 per pupil, not the $15,626 presented.

And since our education property taxes will go to Montpelier and they will almost certainly return only some of them to cover our HUUSD school budget, our cost per actual pupil may be even higher than $26,817. It might make one wonder what spending/cost per pupil systems other states use when we compare our spending with theirs and if they are remotely comparable?

Those are the bare facts as I see them and the links to where I found the data. It would be interesting to see what the budgeted spending per actual pupil is in all the different Vermont school districts. If compiled in a table for review by taxpayers, I suspect some very interesting questions might arise. But using the magical and transformative powers of Act 127, we are presented with a cost per “equalized” pupil of only $15,626, a fuzzy number that may look a little high, but once you add “it's for our kids,” it may tip the fence-sitters to hold their noses and vote yes on the revised budget. I can't do it.

I find the presentation of information that the public has been getting, while possibly technically correct, to be misleading at best and deceptive at worst. IMHO, this provides another reason to consider voting no on the revised HUUSD budget on (or before) April 30.

Waterbury resident Steven Martin is a 1972 Harwood graduate.