At the Sept. 10 Pioneer Valley Regional School District School Committee meeting, the superintendent argued that Massachusetts’ Chapter 70 formula is flawed because it funds “the student” rather than “the school” as a unit, and a school’s real costs — staffing, heating, building upkeep — don’t shrink with a smaller student body, so the state should fund the school itself.
This claim is based on her premise that “a student is not a part of the educational delivery system.” Ask any teacher: students learn from each other through discussion, group work, teams, bands and social interaction. If students aren’t part of the delivery system, we’d be funding only buildings and staff, regardless of enrollment.
This approach has three problems:
First, it ignores the potential capacity of the building in relation to actual students occupying it. Pioneer Valley’s regional school was built for approximately 800 students. A building is considered fully utilized at 85% of design capacity. It currently has an enrollment of 230 to 240, under a third of that. Funding a school and disregarding enrollment would treat an empty building like a full one and remove any financial pressure to fix that mismatch. The Six Town Regionalization Planning Board’s plan addresses this by growing the district, thus reducing the inefficient cost as a share of the tax base while bringing back courses and extracurricular activities lost over the years.
Second, it ignores the opportunity cost of addressing scale. Pioneer Valley and Gill-Montague sit 11 miles apart. Regionalizing into one district results in a high school of about 306 students and a middle school of about 376, keeps both buildings in use and lowers per-taxpayer costs by addressing the scale problem locally. Asking the state to permanently fund inefficiency results in other Massachusetts taxpayers having to cover a problem these towns can mitigate themselves.
Third, it overstates what choice and tuition revenue covers. The superintendent states that choice-in and tuition students are nearly pure revenue, since the state’s flat choice rate ($5,000) and Pioneer Valley’s outside-tuition rate (about $25,000 for Vernon, Vermont, students) come with little added cost. That’s only true near full capacity. At PV’s 30% utilization, extra students don’t strain space, but the true cost of running that space is far above what tuition and choice revenue collects. PVRSD’s secondary per-pupil cost is upward of $33,500. Filling seats at $5,000 to $25,000 brings in revenue, but it doesn’t cover what those seats cost; it offsets only a fraction of the secondary school’s high costs. Town assessments are whatever is left after state aid and all other revenue, tuition and choice included, are subtracted from the total budget. When that revenue doesn’t rise to match an outside student’s real cost, the shortfall is paid entirely by Bernardston, Leyden, and Northfield taxpayers.
Neither state nor federal funding closes that gap. The state’s minimum-aid guarantee is calculated from member towns’ own resident enrollment, not outside enrollment. Federal funding for low-income and special-education students is sized the same way and typically funds specific programs directly rather than offsetting town assessments. Should Massachusetts taxpayers be expected to cover the funding gap for out-of-state students from Vernon, Vermont?
Fixed costs are genuinely higher in small, rural districts with lower incomes and population density. But the answer to a building with more space and staff than its enrollment needs isn’t a formula that funds it regardless of enrollment. It’s regionalization: putting that same space and staff to more efficient use by increasing secondary grade-level enrollment, giving students access to more teachers and course offerings, and spreading costs over a larger tax base.
The $60 million rural school aid proposal is a public finance trap, an attempt to treat a worsening dynamic enrollment decline with a fixed funding amount. Calculated as a snapshot rather than accounting for 30 years of decline and its continuation, it would direct more money toward rising inefficiency instead of fixing the underlying scale problem. Yes, we should advocate for more rural school funding, but with sound economic reasoning behind it. Suggesting the economists who built the state formula did not understand rural schools is presumptuous. Perhaps the economists understood exactly why enrollment, building size, staffing levels and opportunity cost matter.
Greg Snedeker is vice chair/secretary/treasurer of the Six Town Regionalization Planning Board.