Regional Formula Set for Discussion

State Education Officials Travel Here for Public Meeting on
Anticipated Changes in District Assessments

By IAN FEIN

With selectmen across the Vineyard weighing in on expected changes
to the way their towns pay for the regional school districts, education
officials from Boston will travel to the Island next week to field
questions about the state-driven shift.

The officials are hoping to bring clarity to an existing state law
that has gone unnoticed on the Vineyard for more than a decade, but will
likely play out during town meeting season this spring. Changes under
the law - which uses wealth rather than enrollment to determine
each town's share of a regional school budget - would cause
a significant shift in the financial burden for the various towns that
make up the two regional districts on the Vineyard.

According to the state's wealth-based formula, Aquinnah
taxpayers this year would have saved more than $160,000 between the
Up-Island Regional School District and the Martha's Vineyard
Regional High School District budgets, while the town of Oak Bluffs
would have saved almost $400,000 in its annual contribution to the
regional high school.

Tisbury taxpayers, meanwhile, would have owed an additional $310,000
to the high school.

The public meeting - which will feature Cape and Islands state
representative Eric T. Turkington and associate education commissioner
Jeffrey Wulfson - is set to begin at 7 p.m. Wednesday in the
cafeteria in the regional high school in Oak Bluffs. A volunteer group
of finance committee members from across the Island is sponsoring the
forum. Officials from every Vineyard town have been invited to attend.

"These issues are obviously of great interest to both regional
school districts and the member towns on the Vineyard," Mr.
Wulfson said earlier this week. "And given all the changes that
are taking place, we think it's important that local officials
understand the formula and have their questions answered."

With the potential to put neighboring communities against one
another, the looming changes have been a tense topic of discussion among
Island selectmen in recent weeks - particularly up-Island, where
the regional school district has been a divisive issue for years.

On Wednesday, high school district committee chairman Susan Parker
urged town officials to consider the issue carefully.

"These changes we are facing reflect serious policy choices
that the state made more than a decade ago," Mrs. Parker said this
week. "I hope our town leaders will study this with open
minds."

A Chilmark taxpayer, Mrs. Parker noted that her town this year would
have seen the largest percentage increase in education spending under
the new formula - owing the two districts an additional $120,000
- but she said she recognized merit in the wealth-based
distribution.

"I'm not looking to raise my own taxes," she said,
"but I can understand the logic behind this formula."

The changes reflect the state's philosophy on public education
- codified in the 1993 Education Reform Act - that wealthier
towns should pay a larger share of education costs than less affluent
ones. A specific provision in the 1993 state law - unnoticed on
the Vineyard and in other parts of the commonwealth - required
that regional school districts use the wealth-based formula as the
default way to divvy up school finances, unless every member town agreed
to use the existing enrollment-based agreements that formed the
districts.

Vineyard school administrators only learned of the statutory
requirement this summer, after the state department of education
proposed regulations that intended to lay out proper procedures for
compliance with the law.

Because selectmen in Aquinnah and Oak Bluffs have expressed their
preference for the state formula in recent weeks, school administrators
are expecting to present wealth-based budgets to town meeting voters
this spring - regardless of the pending education department
regulations. At a special town meeting later this month, Aquinnah voters
will decide whether to officially request wealth-based budgets.

Opponents of the anticipated changes note that even though the
existing enrollment formula requires unanimous approval from all member
towns, the wealth-based formula still requires two-thirds approval. So
if more than one town in the up-Island district, or more than two from
the high school district, vote against the wealth-based assessments next
spring, a lengthy process of budget resolution will occur that might
require a series of special town meetings.

Another concern among Vineyard town officials is the accuracy of the
data used in the state formula. The education department calculates each
town's wealth through a combination of property values and income
statistics. Those numbers were often outdated by as much as a decade,
but the state legislature recently enacted changes to ensure the formula
uses the most up-to-date data available. This year, the education
department used equalized property values from 2004, and personal income
data from 2003.

Island officials are concerned that the state gathers income data
based on the mailing addresses from income tax returns. Tisbury
officials note that residents from a variety of towns maintain post
office boxes in Vineyard Haven, potentially skewing the supposed wealth
of the town.

Mr. Wulfson this week said the state was aware of the issue, but had
not seen any documentation that it actually compromised the numbers. He
noted that legislators from the Cape and Islands have lobbied
aggressively for the inclusion of income data as well as property
values, and that state tax returns represent the best records available
to track income.

"Given the pressure to use income data, at the moment we
don't think we have anything better to use," Mr. Wulfson
said.

Town officials have also acknowledged that the pending changes have
the potential to further divide fault lines up-Island, and to
unwillingly draw the high school into a similar debate down-Island.
Though the subject of bitter debate during its creation in the late
1950s, the Vineyard high school in recent years has been relatively free
from the conflict and inter-town quarrels that have plagued other
regional districts in the commonwealth, including the small one
up-Island.

The West Tisbury finance committee late last month considered
authoring a November special town meeting warrant article calling for
the town to withdraw from the up-Island district because of the expected
budgetary changes, but decided such an action was premature.