June 19, 2025 Legislative Update

The legislature has gone home after passing a historic education reform bill. At the end of the day, most of the drama played out in conference committee, but the floor debates still featured impassioned pleas from supporters and opponents alike. Despite attempts by progressive legislators in both chambers to reject the conference committee compromise, the education reform bill passed handedly in the House and eked out passage in the Senate.

The vote did not split between big towns and small towns the way that Act 46 did, nor did it fall entirely along party lines. Democrats broke nearly evenly in both the House and the Senate, Republicans lined up in support of the bill while Progressives uniformly opposed it. What does this tell us? That the right compromise for today was probably struck.

The bill is far from perfect, as we cover in our review, but it does keep reform efforts moving. It avoids some of the most egregious pitfalls and I am hopeful (perhaps overly so) that the mistakes it does make can be corrected in future years; among these, a governance reform effort that is too focused on districts and not enough on the overall delivery system and a rigid foundation formula that will put the state in control of 90% of all funding decisions.

There is much work ahead to reach the future state of our education system, and this is just the first step. We are ready to roll up our sleeves and get to work ironing out the details - making sure that both students and taxpayers benefit.

On behalf of Vermonters,