This was a busy week in the legislature as the Town Meeting Day break loomed and the sorting of what bills will make the critical mid-session crossover deadline began in earnest. This is the milestone by which a bill must be voted out of one chamber (House/Senate) in order to be considered by the other before the end of the legislative session.

One area that may get an exemption is the Governor's Education Transformation plan - there is already talk of legislators remaining in Montpelier until June to hash this out. This week we sent a letter to the education committees weighing in on this issue. After weeks of analyzing the proposal from the Administration with the help of our Advisory Council, we have some thoughts... Campaign for Vermont has been involved in education reform for over a decade and one of our co-founders helped to write Act 60 and 68 which established the current funding models. We predicted the pitfalls and shortcomings of Act 46 and the need for funding reform as early as 2014. Some of the same mistakes are being repeated here.

Our full proposal will be released in the coming days, but but it will more or less be a hybrid of the Governor's proposal and our recommendations from 2014. Sadly, not much has changed in the intervening decade aside from a 40% increase in spending while student populations and performance have dwindled.

Inside the state house, legislators are grappling with the complexities of massive consolidation. One of the most recent examples of this is school bonds (which was a major issue during the Act 46 mergers). Essentially when districts are merged everyone takes on the pre-existing debt of the previous districts. Those brand new high schools in Burlington and Winooski? All of Addison, Chittenden, Franklin, and Grand Isle Counties would get to pay for that under the 5-district model...

In addition to that, the Vermont School Boards Association provided evidence this week that school boards with strong community ties result in better student performance. The concern, which we echo, is that boards further removed from the communities they serve will lead to less focus on student outcomes and a larger bureaucratic apparatus. A recent report from MassINC suggested that the benefits go both ways and that communities thrive when they have locally-engaged education leaders.

Housing

Competing (sort of) bills for housing are under construction in both the House and Senate. There is a lot of focus on the appeals process for land use permitting (Act 250/Act 181) and striking the right balance between predictability for developers and environmental protections. The interim Act 250 exemptions are already showing results as projects scale up. Many small to medium sized developers kept projects at 9 units or below to avoid triggering Act 250. With the interim exemptions in place, they are adding units to projects already in the pipeline to take advantage of the higher caps.

Financing is also a concern, both for owners and for developers. While mortgage rates have started coming down, the rates for construction loans for developers (to pay for materials, labor, etc.) are still quite high. In some cases up to 10% for some projects, which ultimately gets passed along to consumers.

Health Care

There are several concepts for health care floating around in the legislature. Many of them seem to have legs and are not mutually exclusive. One of them is reference-based pricing, which works by setting a predetermined maximum amount that an employer or insurer will pay for a medical service, typically based on a benchmark like Medicare rates, which acts as a reference point; if a provider charges more than this set price, the patient may be responsible for the difference, essentially encouraging providers to price their services closer to the reference point to attract patients and maximize reimbursement.

This works best when there is an open market of shoppable services, which doesn't really happen in Vermont. There is little transparency about pricing, thus making shopping for services difficult. Next door in New Hampshire there is a pretty robust health care transparency tool that encourages shopping for services called NH HealthCost.

Workforce

Discussions started in the House this week about early college and career and technical education (CTE) programs. There is a recognition that change is needed to both the funding models and curriculum-alignment to meet workforce needs. The Administration's education plan envisions CTE's being controlled by Boards of Cooperative Education Services (BOCES) which is essentially an administrative structure that is formed for the exclusive purposes of providing districts and supervisory unions specific education services. These would act independently for the current education structure and part of the funding for CTE's would flow through the BOCES from the statewide Education Fund.

The current system essentially penalizes high schools that send students to a CTE because they have to pay tuition, which means it comes out of the local school budget. Under the new foundation formula being proposed, it there would be a cost sharing split between the high school and the CTE but the foundation payment (for the high school) would include a bump for CTE students to create a financial incentive for the high school to identify students that would benefit from a CTE learning environment.

On behalf of Vermonters,