Q&A: Armando Vilaseca, Vermont Commissioner of Education

A resident of Westford, VT Armando Vilaseca graduated from the University of Vermont with a bachelor of science degree in education. He received his masters in education with a focus on educational leadership from Lesley College in Cambridge, MA.

Vilaseca has over 29 years of experience in Vermont education, having spent his entire professional career in Vermont schools. He began as a classroom teacher at the Georgia Middle School in Georgia, VT and served as a teaching principal at the Reading Elementary School. He then served as the principal for Westford Elementary and Middle School, assistant principal and then principal of Essex High School, a position he served in for 10 years, and superintendent of the Colchester School District. Most recently he has served as the superintendent of Franklin West Supervisory Union.

Vilaseca, a native of Cuba, has also served as a government liaison accompanying a delegation to Cuba to introduce Cubans to Vermont agricultural products. He is a skier and golfer, and is married and the father of a son who just graduated from high school and is a student at Community College of Vermont.
VBM: I’d like to start with your background. How did you come to this point where you’re now serving as the Vermont Commissioner of Education?

Vilaseca: I started teaching in Vermont in 1979, and I’ve spent pretty much my whole career in Vermont. I was out of the state for couple of years in Massachusetts getting my masters degree and working in Watertown. But the majority of my experience has been here.

I started in 1979 at Georgia Middle School in Georgia, Vermont. I left there, got my masters at Lesley College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I came back to Vermont and worked in Windsor County at the Reading Village School. From there, for two years I was a third and fourth grade teacher and the principal in a school of about 44 kids. From there I moved to Westford, where I currently live, and was the principal at Westford Elementary School for a number of years. After that I went to Essex High School as assistant principal and principal for a total of 12 years. From there I moved into the superintendent’s job in Colchester and then became superintendent of Franklin West, which is Fairfax, Georgia and Fletcher. That was just prior to taking this position.

VBM: You came in as commissioner when?

Vilaseca: I came in in January 2009.

VBM: So you’re coming to the end of your first year as commissioner. How has the year been?

Vilaseca: It has been an exciting year where I’ve learned so much about the parts of education I was not aware of and the components of education that were from a policy level. I think it’s been a great year. I’ve had an opportunity to work with some wonderful people. I’ve got dozens and dozens of people that are as good as anyone I’ve ever worked with. I’ve also had the opportunity, Robert, to meet with dozens and dozens and dozens of school board members at board meetings I attend around the state. I visit schools and see kids in action and all the great work that our teachers are doing. I’ve also seen the many inefficiencies in our system, that no matter how good the school board you have, or how outstanding a principal or superintendent that puts together a budget, the challenge is that we work in a system that is inherently inefficient.

Our investments in education are big here in Vermont, but I also believe that those investments are not necessarily strategic in a way to get the biggest bang out of our bucks. I’ve been talking to as many people as possible that I can about the idea of reducing the number of governing bodies in Vermont. We currently have close to 300 governing bodies. We have the smallest schools, the smallest class size for student to teacher ratio in the country, and I think we’re fourth or fifth in the nation in educational spending. I believe and many folks believe that if we were able to reorganize our school districts and our schools in ways that were more reflective of 21-century requirements and needs, and also looking at expanding the boundaries of our school districts, that we could save millions and millions of dollars that is money that we are spending on duplication of services from one district to another.

That then could either go toward improving education or be a way of reducing the investment that we make in schools. In the return on our investment, which is student performance, Vermont is one of the leading states in the country. Our students continue to outperform 45 other states on a regular basis. We’re one of the states that has demonstrated at first, second or third place in international student assessments. They call it the NAEP, the National Assessment for Educational Progress. This is the only assessment we have that can be compared to international assessments of kids from other countries. Vermont this year was second in fourth grade and I think third in eighth grade. If we were a separate country, Vermont would be one of the leading countries in the world behind Finland, Singapore and South Korea.

The return on our investments here in Vermont are, I think, worthwhile. The question is, can we get a better return on that investment if we’re able to reconfigure the structure of our schools in a way that was more efficient but improved the quality of education and increased school choice for parents.
VBM: We have over 60 supervisory unions in the state, which is a lot for the number of students.

Vilaseca: We have 63 supervisory unions in the state, which means we have 63 superintendents and some of them have as few as 400 students, while others have over 4,000 students. So we have a huge variance in the size of our districts. I was superintendent of a district in Colchester that had 2,400 students, and the other district I went to, Franklin West, had about 1,800 students. To me those are too small to have their own superintendent and their own centralized support services. What 10 people could do for 3,000 students, 12 people could do for 4,000. Much of the work is duplicating the same work over and over around the state. [One of the centerpieces of the recently released “Vermont Transformation Policy Commission Report” was consolidating the 290 school districts down to as few as 13. You can find the link at www.vermontbiz.com or http://education.vermont.gov/]
VBM: What ideas do you have for consolidating some of those supervisory unions? One of the issues in Vermont is that, though we have a small population we’re kind of spread out. Governor Douglas has mentioned that some US cities have a greater population of students than the entire state of Vermont does, but have only one supervisory union.
Vilaseca: You’re absolutely right there. The state of Vermont has 92,000 students, one third the size of Dade County Florida, which has just one superintendent. At the same time, we have a tradition here in Vermont and in New England, of local control and folks managing their own affairs and their own community schools. But that was really at a time when the local taxes paid for that community school. We’re now in a statewide property tax that does change that a little, the dynamic of how that works. Should a school district continue to have small class sizes and a small student teacher ratio when now you and I, it doesn’t matter where you live in the state, are paying for it? We are paying for their decisions that increase overall educational spending statewide. That issue of local taxes paying for local schools, now with Act 60 creating a statewide education tax, it has changed the dynamics.

We also have a looming crisis, we are in the middle of it, around our enrollment. We’ve lost about 10 percent of our student population since the year 2000 and we are continuing to drop. We anticipate that by the year 2014 to be around 85,000 to 86,000 students, from a high in 1998 of 106,000. You’re talking about losing 20,000 students in 15 years. So that’s another component that I think right now is forcing us to look at how we operate.

From an academic perspective, we also have to look at improving the opportunities for kids. The model that we are working with is having multiple communities, four, five or six towns, be one school district, but all of those schools be open to all of the kids in all of the different communities. That may open up geographic advantages. Some of your home schools may be farther away than the school in the community next to you. If parents could choose where they want to send their kid, it could also provide opportunities around what they call magnet schools. One school may have an emphasis on science and math, another emphasizes the arts, another one may emphasize medicine. That would allow the parents to choose the school based on the interests of the student and what they want to do in the future.

So by expanding the current boundaries of one town and one school district, to one school district incorporating six or eight towns, then it really opens up that whole school choice opportunity for families. Ultimately, that will help our state with a better prepared student.

VBM: So we are talking almost like a countywide school district?

Vilaseca: When you look at what makes sense for Vermont, they are not all related to the county. At the same time, Robert, we have places that, even though they may be small schools, they are so far removed from other communities that it has to be a planned and strategic approach to how we address this. There are some communities that may never have the opportunity to consolidate with another district just because of the sheer distance from one school to another. When we come out with a plan to consolidate, it has to be reflective of our values and needs as well as the geographic boundaries that we live under.

The current system of education was designed in the 1920s when the supervisory union system came about. But we’re expecting 21st century results from a system created 100 years ago. Everything else in society has changed, but people really don’t want to see the schools change, and that’s a challenge.
VBM: I live in the Windham Northeast Supervisory Union, which includes Rockingham and Westminster, and the big issue down here has been how to fund special-education.
Vilaseca: You are one of the highest spending unions in the state.

VBM: I’ve been a newspaper writer for many years, so I’ve heard about the situation a lot. What are your views about special-education and how to fund it? We’ve had students down here that have cost the Supervisory Union over $100,000 a year.
Vilaseca: Robert, you don’t even want to know! We’re dealing with a student whose placement is costing $330,000. We have students in the northwest part of the state who are not even out of district, where they are doing things in district that are very expensive. special-education is really complicated and challenging. Technically, if the student is receiving special-education services, the goal is that they are going to be successful, they are going to lead a productive life and ultimately be like everyone else.

Then there are the extreme children who have some severe needs in special-education, which are the cases that are more expensive. We have an obligation by federal statute to meet those needs. At the same time, if we had a better system, it could be done for far less expense. Let me give you a couple of examples that I’ve been involved with. I may need a 10 percent speech and language pathologist for my school. But I’m a small school operating on my own. I can’t find anyone who’ll come for 10 percent. So I would have to end up contracting with a speech and language pathologist for 30 percent because that’s all they are willing to come out to my school for. So now all of a sudden my costs have gone up because I have to pay more than I need in order to have someone come to a rural school. If that school was part of a larger school district, that maybe had one or two speech and language pathologists working in all the schools, then their costs would go down because they would only be asking for and paying for what they needed.

Autism is a huge issue, and it’s one of the most challenging disabilities right now because we are learning so much about it. But, we don’t have enough people in the state to be top experts in every school. If we had larger districts we could have experts and support staff in the district that would help support the schools, help with the IEPs (Individualized Education Program), help with the educational setting, but would not require every district to hire their own. Those are just two examples.

Special-education transportation, if we had a contract with eight or 10 communities, the cost would go down. You would be able to coordinate transportation, and not everyone having to buy their own bus and running school routes where you go right by kids in another community that could use the transportation.

Vermont has one of the highest ratios of support personnel in schools. That’s another area that we need to look at. By expanding the boundaries of the school district maybe we could reduce the number of instructional assistants that we have in schools. This is one of the areas in school budgets that have been going up over the last 10 to 12 years. It has probably been the leading personnel increase in schools. We’ve seen a decrease in licensed teachers but an increase in instructional assistants. I read just recently that about 70 percent of instructional assistants are tied to special-education. special-education is a requirement that we have to do by law, it’s something that morally and ethically we need to do a good job with, but at the same time can we look at this for different ways of finding efficiencies in order to better meet the needs of our kids.
VBM: With fewer students, are we looking at all at consolidating some of our schools?
Vilaseca: Yes. Just north of you in Weathersfield and Perkinsville, we consolidated schools. In Lamoille County, Waterville and Belvidere combined schools. There are other districts that are looking at that because enrollment is dropping. Consolidating governance structures could save us lots of money, but consolidating some of our school buildings is another way to save money.

One of the challenges, especially in the smaller schools where you have fluctuating enrollment, is you have a teacher that you have to hire for one or two years and then you lay them off because your enrollment dropped. If you were part of a much larger contract area, then instead of having to lay off teachers, you may be able to move them around in the district, because you have a much bigger district. Then you could keep good people instead of having contract people come and go.

When I was a principal at Reading village school in Windsor County we had a one-day-a-week phys-ed teacher and a one-day-a-week music teacher. We had to hire those people individually. It would have been great if they could have been hired in the district and then the district portions those people out to the individual schools. It would end up being a lot cheaper. I had to pay more than what I was getting in order to have a person coming to teach one day a week.

The district has an economy of scale that I think businesspeople would appreciate. But still on a Vermont scale, Robert. We’re not talking districts of 20,000 or 40,000. We’re talking about districts of 3,000 to 5,000 students.
VBM: You mentioned that special-education is federally mandated. What percentage of special-ed costs are paid by the federal government?

Vilaseca: Vermont Senator Stafford was really one of the people responsible for the federal requirements around special-ed. He was also talking about the federal government paying 60, 70 or 80 percent of the costs. But that has never been the case. I believe the federal government right now is paying somewhere between 17 and 20 percent of the costs of special-education even though it’s a federal requirement. So that’s where it becomes sometimes a little bit touchy with schools. Especially places like Bellows Falls where they might have a $150,000 student, but the reimbursement to the District is limited and the state is picking most of that up. That’s the case of a federal requirement unfunded by the federal government, and then it falls on the back of the states. This is a national concern of all of the secretaries and commissioners of education around the country.

VBM: At this point in Vermont, education is paid for through the property tax, and the attempt is to spread that evenly over the state. Is that system working?
Vilaseca: You look at Act 60 and then its revision Act 68. Under that you have a statewide tax rate, which this year is right around 88 cents (per $100 of assessed property value). Then there is a local tax that goes along with that based on the local school budget, and that’s how they come up with the education tax. What it’s done is to try and level the playing field statewide. In the past, towns that had an IBM or a ski area like Killington and Stowe, might be able to afford a lot more at a much lower rate.

The ski towns had a lot of money coming in from outside that kept the local taxes down. But some towns don’t have the resources to raise money the way other towns might, and that’s the reason Act 60 and Act 68 came about. Right now it seems that the property tax is the most stable way of paying for education. Incomes and sales taxes can fluctuate depending on the economy. That’s why property taxes have a three-year average so it eliminates the spikes and the drops. Some would say it’s regressive because it’s not based on income, but it does have an income sensitivity to it where people can get rebates and credits in their school taxes based on what they earn.

So our funding formula is maybe as fair as any in the country. But the issue is nobody really likes to pay a lot of taxes. When you look at Vermont’s system of education being so fragmented and so spread out, and then with our governance structure, it becomes very hard to have an efficient system. But when I go around and look at funding systems in other states, we are better off than many of them.

VBM: What’s your view on charter schools?

Vilaseca: If I was in Philadelphia or New York City, I would say that charter schools would be an option. In Vermont, with our rural population and the way we are spread out, charter schools would probably not work. Charter schools are typically an alternative to a public school, but there’s still a public school open. In a lot of our towns it’s not much of an option to have a charter school in the same town as a public school and you may have only a few students.

It’s really a much more urban idea where they have low performing schools. In Vermont even our lowest performing schools are performing at a much higher level than the low performing schools in many other states. What a charter school can do is give the school flexibility, say requiring parents to volunteer five hours a week at the school, or requiring students to spend more hours at school or to go to school on Saturdays. Because they are a charter school they can do that.

I would like to be able to give public schools in Vermont the advantages of a charter school and see if we could reduce the number of requirements and rules and regulations that schools have to follow to allow them to be a little bit more innovative. One of the things that we have to come to terms with is that one size school can’t fit all kids. That’s the charter model. And usually, if you’re making a choice to send your child to a school based on its emphasis on science or the arts, you’re more invested in it. Because you had a choice in that.

VBM: What about the use of public money for faith-based education?
Vilaseca: I don’t support that. However, Vermont probably has one of the more liberal statutory requirements around using public dollars for private schools. We have Burr and Burton, St Johnsbury Academy, Thetford and Lyndon Institute, which are private schools but are the local schools for those communities. So we spend around $35 million a year on private schools that local students can attend. We have 90 communities in the state that have school choice, though they can’t be used for religious schools.
VBM: The Ethan Allen Institute funded a commission on rebalancing education costs and values and they recently released a report on that. I’m not sure if you’ve read the report but we do want to get your comments on it.
Vilaseca: I’ve only looked at it a little bit. They did encourage using vouchers for both religious and nonreligious schools which I don’t support. Public schools are the backbone of our country and even the playing field for everyone. Vouchers can be good, but if we take them and start using them in religious schools it becomes an issue. I have the report on my desk but I really haven’t had a chance to look at it.

VBM: Is there anything that we haven’t discussed yet that you want to comment on?
Vilaseca: Obviously the whole issue of the governance piece is the main point that I want to bring up. In Vermont, and everywhere really, people complain about taxes and the cost of education. But in reality, this is what we’ve chosen. We’ve chosen a system that is very decentralized and inefficient. After 30 years, I’m getting tired of people complaining about this but refusing to do anything about it. Hopefully, the folks who run businesses in Vermont will read this article and contact their local legislators and have them address this issue.

Robert Smith is a writer and photographer living in Westminster, VT. He is the editor of The Green Mountain Outlook, a weekly newspaper published out of Bellows Falls, VT. He can be reached at robfs52@yahoo.com.