Friday's crossover deadline built momentum on a number of fronts and the House Education Committee spent this week doing something it has struggled to do all session... converging on a path forward. The answer, it appears, is shared service providers that are being called Cooperative Education Service Areas (CESAs).
Here's what happened this week...
| This is a truncated version of our weekly legislative update. To receive the full version, please sign up for our legislative updates (it's free!). |
House Education Finds Its Lane: CESAs Take Center Stage
After weeks of division over the pace and scope of Act 73 implementation, the House Education Committee spent the majority of its committee time this week drilling into the mechanics of CESAs and (for the first time this session) something resembling consensus emerged. The committee is coalescing around a two-track drafting strategy: codify broad CESA powers in statute while using session law to mandate an accelerated slate of merger conversations that would be facilitated by the newly formed CESAs.
CESAs would be created a regional entities with boards composed of one appointee per supervisory union (membership would be mandatory). They would be required to provide at minimum three core services: special education (including tiered systems of support and low-incidence/high-cost services), business and administrative services, and facilitation of voluntary school district mergers.
The key tension (which presented itself in every session) is how prescriptive to be. Some members want clear mandates and enforceable timelines. Others warn about unfunded mandates and overwhelming the nascent organizations. The committee landed on a pragmatic middle ground: mandate participation in merger conversations, but not outcomes.
The committee also heard from operators in the field who made the case tangible. Sheri Souza (Superintendent, Mountain View SU) and Jill Graham (Executive Director, Vermont Learning Collaborative) presented real-world cost data showing that the shared services model averaged 42% savings. Startup costs are modest by state standards. The initial planning phase could be covered by an existing $10,000 grant; scaling up requires a director position at roughly $200,000 (salary and benefits).
CTE emerged as the week's largest wild card. Members broadly support improving career and technical education access (particularly through regional middle/high school models) but governance, funding, and timing remain in limbo. Multiple members warned that CTE could become the biggest unresolved obstacle to a workable foundation formula. A draft five-region map anchored to CTE catchment areas was reviewed as a geographic starting point for CESA boundaries. While the scale is different than we recommended, the CTE alignment is a pragmatic organizing principle since those service regions already exist and it creates the potential for vertical integration between K-12 education and CTE.
The committee also grappled with the relationship between governance reform and funding reform. Several members want a foundation formula to emerge from this session for its predictability and equity benefits. But others worry that implementing a formula before structural changes are in place could produce problematic property tax impacts. We wrote a letter to the Committee this week addressing some of these concerns.
The bottom line: the House appears to be settling on CESAs as the vehicle that threads the needle between doing something meaningful and avoiding the political landmine of forced consolidation. Whether that's enough to satisfy Act 73's ambitions (or the Governor's line in the sand) is another question. But after weeks of circular debate, this is real progress.
Chronic Absenteeism: New Protections for Vulnerable Students
The absenteeism bill (H.930) picked up two notable amendments this week. The first adds incidents of hazing, harassment, or bullying to the list of excusable absences and requires the Agency of Education's (AOE's) model policy to include tailored responses, re-entry supports, and protocols addressing bullying. This draws from a 2023 working group report that recommended nuanced attendance approaches for victims.
The second requires explicit provisions for children with disabilities in the model policy. Personal accounts of how truancy notifications pressure worsened a child's condition and led to homeschooling: "The threats in the letters felt like pressure, not help." The amendment directs AOE to address absences of children with disabilities in accordance with state and federal law — an important safeguard for neurodivergent students.
Government Accountability Pilot Gets the Green Light
House Appropriations voted unanimously to advance H.67, a government accountability pilot. The funding was doubled from the original $150,000 to a one-time $300,000 appropriation spanning FY27–FY28, enough to hire a two-year limited service position or contract a consultant. This is a small investment with potentially outsized returns by creating a repeatable framework for the legislature to evaluate whether programs they pass are actually delivering on their promises.
Ethics Commission: Fund Guidance First, Enforce Later
Appropriations also reviewed the State Ethics Commission's staffing request and reached a clear position: fund a municipal-focused attorney now ($125,000) to restore advisory services that were suspended due to lack of capacity, but delay full enforcement authority to July 1, 2028. This pushes out an implementation that was delayed by Act 44 last year to September 1, 2027 (after originally being set for the same date in 2025). The commission must first produce a plain-language ethics handbook (delivered by March 2028) before enforcement begins.
Rep. Martin LaLonde was direct about why: "I think there needs to be more guidance for what is expected of legislators… because there's a lot of open questions as far as the language that is in the code." The committee wants clear rules before there are consequences for breaking them. While this may seem reasonable, a statewide code of ethics has been in place since 2022 along with a summary and guidance provided by the State Ethics Commission. This delay comes across more like an attempt to avoid accountability than an actual concern about jurisdiction or clear definitions.
Property Taxes: A More Sustainable Path
The Ways and Means Committee finalized and voted out H.949, the annual yield bill that sets FY2027 education property tax rates. The headline policy choice is what to do with the Governor's proposed $104.9 million one-time funds. Rather than spend it all in one year (which would produce a ~3.8% average bill increase this year but a brutal spike next year), the Committee chose a two-year taper, applying roughly half (~$52.45M) plus the estimated FY2026 Education Fund surplus (~$22.3M) to lower FY27 bills, while reserving the other half to offset FY28 increases. The result: an estimated average property tax bill increase of about 7% in FY27. Not great, but considerably better than the ~10% increase Vermonters would face without any General Fund intervention. However, this avoids the self-inflicted cliff that we talked a lot about in last year's yield bill.
Education spending grew ~4.2% this year while non-property revenues grew more slowly, and property taxes continue picking up the difference. The two-year taper buys time, but it doesn't solve the structural problem. We recently wrote a letter about the impacts of this dynamic and how it is increasingly transferring the burden of paying for education onto homeowners. As the Joint Fiscal Office put it this week: if education spending continues to grow faster than non-property tax revenues, property taxes will keep making up a larger and larger share of the Education Fund.
Looking Ahead
- Legislative Counsel is drafting CESA language for House Education review. We expect refinement and field feedback next week.
- CTE governance and funding remain the biggest unresolved variable; we are watch the Commerce Committee and Senate for movement here.
- Foundation formula sequencing decisions will determine whether funding reform travels alongside or behind governance reform.
- S.190 (reference-based pricing) and S.197 (primary care) are heading to the Senate floor next week.
I am encouraged that the House finally found a lane this week to advance conversations around governance reform. I am, however, discouraged that the predominant viewpoint in both the House and Senate seems to be acceptance that larger districts inherently perform better on a cost or outcomes basis. The data does not support that assumption and we need to be careful in our policy-making choices to avoid the pitfalls of previous reforms. Still, there is a lot to feel positive about in the bills that are moving across the floor in the House and Senate. We will continue to dig in next week as we detail what made the cut.
On behalf of Vermonters,
|
|
||
|
NOTE: The original version of this post incorrectly cited 115% as the final excess spending threshold in S.220. The wording around the Senate's draft governance bill was also updated for clarity.
| Sign Up for Legislative Updates |
| To continue reading, please sign up for our legislative updates (it's free!). |