Dear House and Senate Education Committees,

 

Thank you for diving into education reform this year with so much vigor. These are necessary and important discussions we should be having. As someone who was in the room as Act 46 was being debated and signed into law, I see many parallels between that process and this one. Having correctly predicted the outcomes of Act 46 (or lack thereof), I have some thoughts to share with you about how to navigate the challenges we are facing today.

I’ll get right to it, Governor Scott’s 5-district plan is unworkable. There are many reasons for this, but there are two that I want to focus on today. First, local schools are the lifeblood of many communities. Strong ties between schools and their communities are important and beneficial to both. The five regional district model risks breaking these local connections as school boards move dozens of miles away.

The second, and potentially even more concerning issue, is that these regional boards are likely to become highly politicized. These new districts would be geographically larger than any political structure we have in the state currently. Running for these seats will require funding, which means donors and political parties will get involved. We do not want to do this to education in Vermont. It’s a far cry from the volunteer, non-political, community-focused school boards we have today.

Act 46 missed the mark because it focused on school districts. The Administration’s plan makes many of the same mistakes. We can gain efficiencies of scale through Supervisory Union (SU) consolidation that were never realized by merging districts.  SUs could be a useful tool for gaining efficiencies of scale as many services have already been pushed up to this administrative level. However, in the current system there are roughly 2 districts for every SU - they are not being leveraged property for their potential to achieve scale.

We will have a detailed proposal coming out in a few days, but our suggestion is to consolidate Vermont’s 52 Supervisory Unions around the 17 Career and Technical education districts. This will start to gain some of those efficiencies of scale that SU’s could offer while retaining community control of schools, strengthening post-secondary opportunities for students, and renewing focus on student outcomes.

I look forward to sharing the full details of our proposal, but I encourage you to talk with people in your communities during the town meeting break and ask them if they really want you to take away their local school board.

 

On behalf of Vermonters,