Vermont : 75% Rise in Homeschooling Could Hit Public School Budgets Hard - Granite Grok

Vermont : 75% Rise in Homeschooling Could Hit Public School Budgets Hard

Homeschooling

When things don’t go your way, you change the rules. That’s the look I’m getting from Vermont, where parents announcing their intent to homeschool is up 75%. The problem? “State law at present allocates funding to school districts on an “Average Daily Membership (ADM).” 

Related: What’s the Final Word on the Fake Vermont COVID19 Spike That Never Was…

Public Schools are funded by head count. If there are fewer heads, they would get fewer dollars.

 

Vermont Secretary of Education Daniel French wants a change in state law to allow funding of school districts this year based on last year’s pre-pandemic enrollment, he said in an Aug. 24 recommendation to the Legislature.

“Ensuring districts receive at least the same ADM [Average Daily Membership] count as last year would promote some measure of stability in the district budgeting process during the emergency period,” French wrote (see full text below).

 

Interesting.

No one in the Vermont government gave a damn about any measure of stability in education or the state economy when they began to randomly declare businesses (and even certain products) essential or non-essential while locking everyone down.

Thousands of people across that state lost their jobs, and many will not get them back. They went from self-sufficient to state-dependent by state order almost overnight.

Education “went remote” whether it worked for parents or students—no concerns about stability. The result is a 75% increase in homeschooling and a significant rise in private schools’ attendance.

Taxpayers need to step up and tell Vermont to go to hell, or they will never learn the lessons necessary to prevent arbitrary acts of malice for what is turning out to be no good reason. If they don’t, the state will continue to step all over them while delivering an increasingly poor product.

 

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