Joint Fiscal Office illustrates how foundation formula assumptions drive Vermont base cost

Ezra, a Joint Fiscal Office analyst, briefed the Senate Finance Committee on the mechanics behind the administration’s proposed foundation formula and how individual assumptions ripple through to statewide costs.

"The base is the core amount of funding per student before applying any weights for any special circumstances," Ezra said, describing a prototypical district model supplied to the Joint Fiscal Office that aggregates prototypical elementary, middle and high schools and spreads central office and maintenance costs across 3,900 pupils.

The administration’s $13,200 per‑pupil base, Ezra explained, comes from an evidence‑based staffing and resource model developed by Dr. Dale Pikus (Piketasuddin/Pikes in testimony) and further processed by consultants for the Agency of Education and APA. The modeling uses prototypical school sizes (for example a 600‑student high school in the prototype), set staff counts and unit costs (salary plus benefits) to compute total district costs and then divides by the 3,900‑pupil prototypical district. Ezra said the raw per‑pupil number from staffing and resources was about $12,845 before a 2.76% inflation adjustment that produced the $13,200 figure.

Ezra illustrated sensitivity: reducing high‑school class size from 25 to 23 students raised staffing cost per high‑school pupil from $8,865 to $9,210 in the prototype. Modeling a smaller, Vermont‑median high school (about 325 pupils) while keeping minimum staffing floors increased high‑school per‑pupil staffing to about $9,996. Because central office and maintenance costs are then shared by fewer pupils, that raised the district per‑pupil base. In Ezra’s worked example the statewide per‑pupil base would rise from $13,200 to roughly $13,613 and produce an estimated $52 million annual increase statewide under those assumptions.

Committee members pressed on model choices: the prototypical district size of 3,900 pupils; whether the model’s school sizes reflect Vermont realities; how unit costs and benefits were estimated; and whether the model had local professional judgment panels. Ezra said the evidence‑based model has been used elsewhere but acknowledged Vermont’s rurality and smaller school configurations pose translation issues. He also noted the consultants used prior inputs from the Agency of Education and that additional district‑level rollups were not provided to JFO.

Ezra flagged other policy questions: how pre‑K should be modeled (it was not explicitly modeled), whether weights should be adjusted if the base changes, and how frequently the base should be updated (indexing by inflation vs. periodic professional reevaluation). He emphasized that staffing comprises the largest share of education costs and therefore changes to personnel assumptions have outsized fiscal impacts.

The committee did not act on the presentation; members asked for follow-up data, including district-level rollups, salary/benefit assumptions used in unit costs, and scenario modeling for transition paths from current configuration to the prototype.