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Their new plan to impose spending caps on school budgets might help accomplish that goal

The cap means officials could not present to voters any budget plan that resulted in a more than 2 percent increase in per-pupil costs. And it’s this language that teachers object to the most. Allen says it’s a blunt policy instrument that will inflict serious harm on public schools.

If a vote for a community exceeds 2 percent per pupil in expenditures, it’s deemed to have failed,” Sharpe says

But the most contentious provision in the bill calls for a hard cap on per-pupil spending increases.

But even diehard proponents of education funding reform say the House Education Committee’s approach could do more harm than good.

“It’s unfortunate, taking away more authority from local school boards and local decision makers and local voters,” Scheuermann says.

The House Committee on Ways and Means will d

bate the proposed spending cap when lawmakers return to Montpelier next week. Sh

arpe says the version of the cap in the education committee’s bill is admittedly flawed, insofar as it fails to recognize various factors that might make a per-pupil spending increases of more than 2 percent necessary for some districts.

150 schools are at 50% or above in terms of IT shifted to the cloud. 7 schools reported moving 100% of their services to the cloud.

Referencing the SAMR model, we still see a significant amount of Substitution, where traditional teaching and learning is simply moved to an electronic platform (i.e. a paper fill-inthe-blank worksheet is now an electronic fill-in-the-blank worksheet), but there are also examples that come up on the higher end of the model too, Redefinition. In this iteration of the creation of local Digital Learning Plans, we hope to bring more teachers to the Modification and Redefinition levels. So, one of our continuing areas of work must be in technology integration, perhaps following more of the models of embedded individuals that we know tend to produce better outcomes in terms of tech to support learning.

COMPUTER SCIENCE Revisited Another area of focus for our work moving forward is the re-development and a refocus of resources that can build teacher capacity around Computer Science as a field and possible career choice for our students