Act 60 (Vermont law)

Act 60, known as "The Equal Educational Opportunity Act", was a Vermont law enacted in June 1997 by the Vermont legislature intended to achieve a fair balance of educational spending across school districts, independent of the degree of prosperity within each district. The law was in response to a Vermont Supreme Court decision in the Brigham vs. State of Vermont case, wherein the court ruled that Vermont’s then existing educational funding system was unconstitutional, because it allowed students in towns with higher total property values to receive a higher level of education funding per pupil than students in towns with lower property values. Act 60 was followed by Acts 68 and 130, which addressed some imbalances caused by Act 60.

In most local jurisdictions outside of Vermont, public school funding is determined within a school district by the following steps:

In jurisdictions where the total value of property is large, compared with the funding to be raised, both the total taxes and the tax rate per unit of value are small compared to jurisdictions with a high level of funding to be raised and a small property value base. This is the basis for the education funding inequity addressed by the Vermont Supreme Court in Brigham vs. State of Vermont.

To address the funding inequities among school districts, Act 60 and its amendments, Acts 68 and 130, established a system to pool the state's educational budgetary requirements from across jurisdictions and pay for them, in part, with pooled property taxes from across those same jurisdictions.

The provisions of Act 68 determine an individual district’s education spending as that part of an expenditure budget without a specific funding source. It includes:

Education spending is that part of an expenditure budget without a specific funding source. Pre-Kindergarten through twelfth-grade education funding may be calculated for school districts according to:

Then:

According to a handbook example explaining the matter, the amount needed in the education fund in Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 to pay for grants and education spending was about $1.353 billion, which required revenues for the education fund from the following sources:

These sources left a $364-million gap in school funding for FY 2012 to be raised through property taxes on homesteads in Vermont.

Each year, the Vermont legislature sets a base amount that a school district will be expected to spend per pupil. Homestead property tax calculations are based on the amount per pupil that the district must raise over the base amount to fund its budget. In each school district, the property tax liability is established by the following method:

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