Editor’s note: Saucon Valley School Board members Bill Broun and Cedric Dettmar co-wrote the following op-ed.
Saucon Valley strongly supports our district’s vital role in offering high-quality, relevant vocational and technical education. Several of us on the school board are the children of skilled laborers who themselves worked and thrived in the trades. We understand that vocational and technical skills remain bedrocks of American prosperity and economic opportunity. We also recognize that the best career path for many kids is to join the workforce upon graduation from high school. Having the training and skills a vocational/technical education affords is as vital to their success as superb math, language and science classes are for children with college dreams.
Our longtime affiliation with Bethlehem Area Vocational-Technical School has served Saucon well for decades, and we have every intention of remaining part of the small group of districts that form BAVTS.
Every 30 years or so, the articles of agreement that serve as the legal instrument creating BAVTS are renegotiated.
The current agreement (between the Saucon Valley, Bethlehem Area and Northampton Area school districts) expires next year, and the Bethlehem Area School District-dominated Joint Committee that oversees BAVTS has set a proposed new agreement to run for another 30 years. But their agreement comes with a very expensive “accessory”: A monumental new expansion of BAVTS with eye-watering costs to the tune of $52 million (over $100 million including the cost of financing). The expansion will seat hundreds of new students while Saucon’s high school attendance is falling and our BAVTS attendance is not expected to rise. Most of the new seats will be filled with Bethlehem students. And worryingly, the new agreement leaves in place a very old funding formula that calls for Saucon to pay over 50 percent more than the other districts for each student we send. This applies to all large expenses, including the huge BAVTS expansion.
This is exactly the time when agreement adjustments make sense. In fact, because the agreement requires majority votes from all BAVTS school boards, this is actually the only time we hold the power to ask for changes. Once agreed, we’re in until 2055. Some of us will be dead by then. But Saucon will still be on the hook.
Some suggestions for changes to the agreement weren’t even Saucon’s ideas. The Joint Committee majority’s current proposal to renew the articles, for example—and people really should read it themselves—reduces the number of quorum votes needed to pass actions from six to five (something which could potentially weaken smaller districts’ voices in BAVTS). We can live with that. The agreement depends on mutual trust, after all.
Saucon also proposes a perfectly reasonable, fair modification to the agreement where the cost for each student is the total cost of running BAVTS divided evenly among all the students. Our proposal is very similar to that of a neighboring vo-tech, Upper Bucks. A Saucon student would contribute exactly the same amount, not more and not less, to the overall expenses of BAVTS as her friend from Bethlehem, sitting in the same classroom and in the same program. Compared to paying the same per student as the other districts, Saucon would have to pay $3 to $4 million extra for the expansion and even more when large building maintenance projects are required over the 30-year life of the agreement.
The overwhelming majority of Saucon Valley citizens feel we should not be paying the equivalent of a special “suburban tax” to subsidize students outside our school district. This is the kind of price gouging that residents of Hellertown and Lower Saucon, including senior
citizens living on fixed incomes, should not have to experience. We’re more than happy to pay our share, but not by subsidizing other districts. We were elected to provide for the educational needs of Saucon Valley and protect the best interests of its residents.
The Bethlehem-controlled BAVTS board has gone to great lengths to push Saucon Valley to sign up for a grossly unfair agreement, and our school board is overwhelmingly opposed to buckling under.
We have been especially disappointed, too, by numerous reports of BAVTS students from Saucon being brought into this negotiation in ways subtle and not so subtle. These young people come home to parents in a panic about losing access to quality vo-tech resources, and naturally, parents are outraged. It’s not how you negotiate in good faith, and this is not how you ask for your partners to trust you in the future.
Saucon’s newly constituted school board appointed a three-person team to work through the renegotiation process, but Bethlehem has been unwilling to negotiate or, so far, even talk substantially about our needs, and instead is threatening to press the self-destruct button while blaming Saucon for being “difficult.”
We call for negotiations. It’s that simple, and there is plenty of time (until June 2025) to work out a deal, no matter how many times chicken little claims the sky is falling.
An example of how BAVTS people are injecting themselves into this negotiation among the districts is one Sept. 5 email presented publicly to our board last week by a Saucon student. In it, BAVTS directors claimed that Bethlehem and Northampton are “past that point since these
discussions have been going on for about 18 months, primarily due to SV delaying any discussion and feedback to the BAVTS JC [joint committee] throughout this time.” This is an inaccurate recounting of the events of that time. Saucon was clear about what our board wanted
last September and it was Northampton that was not ready for a discussion in October. Then in November last year, both Saucon and Northampton voters replaced many long-time board members.
Not surprisingly, some on our new Saucon board have a keen interest in the updated 30-year agreement that will cost our district over $10 million. It’s incredibly high-handed to decide that you’ve “had enough” of negotiations because you’re tired of discussions when you have refused to have serious discussions at any point. We don’t feel we have the luxury of deciding to take a breather from the needs of our students in Saucon. Compromise is work, and the fact is, it simply isn’t asking for much given the circumstances.
But Bethlehem says they won’t negotiate and they say they want to dissolve BAVTS, and that will sadly cost Bethlehem Area taxpayers far, far more than our proposed fair deal ever would. That’s their choice, not ours. We’re ready to talk—in good faith, with a positive, problem-solving mindset focused on the future and our wonderful students.
We urge Bethlehem and Northampton to work with us to hammer out a fair agreement that represents a moderate solution in the best interest of all of our students. It shouldn’t be that hard.
Bill Broun, who lives in Hellertown, is a freshman member of Saucon Valley School Board. He is a professor at East Stroudsburg University and a novelist.
