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...

The bill, which does not yet have a number, restructures Vermont’s school governance system by creating a new statewide map of supervisory unions, pushing districts toward larger governance models, and revising parts of the education funding formula, supervisory union boundaries, district mergers, transition grants, education funding, student weighting, and implementation timelines.

Good Morning Chair Conlon and Members of the House Education Committee,

CESAs, or some variation of them, are clearly the most pragmatic and viable solution on the table today when it comes to structural forms of our education delivery system.

Dear Chairman Marcotte and Members of the House Commerce Committee,

On behalf of Campaign for Vermont, I am writing regarding draft 26-0768, which would create a statewide Career and Technical Education Educational Service Agency (CTE ESA). We appreciate the Committee’s focus on strengthening CTE and agree that Vermont must modernize its education delivery systems to better support workforce development, improve efficiency, and expand opportunity for students.

However, we are concerned that creating a standalone statewide CTE ESA moves Vermont in the wrong structural direction. The central issue is not whether CTE deserves stronger support, it does. The issue is whether CTE governance should be further separated from the broader K–12 system at the very moment Vermont is debating larger education transformation.

The crossover crunch arrived this week and it did not disappoint. The volume in both chambers intensified; marking up bills, taking votes, and wrestling with some of the most consequential education and health care questions Vermont has faced in years.

A new statewide poll of 404 registered voters has been released by our friends at Let’s Build Homes. It underscores just how central housing has become to Vermont’s future. The poll finds near-unanimous agreement that Vermont does not have enough homes that average people can afford; nearly 90% say there is “not enough” housing. Housing now clearly outranks other issues on voters minds: 49% name “the cost and availability of housing” as a top issue, ahead of taxes (39%), healthcare costs (38%), and jobs (16%).

Dear Chair Cummings and Members of the Senate Finance Committee,

Thank you for your ongoing work to address the trajectory of education spending through S.220. We urge the Committee to adopt enforceable mechanisms that align spending growth with the sustainable capacity of the Education Fund and provide immediate relief to Vermont property taxpayers.

Since the passage of Act 60 nearly thirty years ago, Vermont’s per-pupil education spending has grown at a rate nearly triple the national average. This expansion has also doubled the rate of inflation and, crucially, exceeded the growth of the consumption tax revenues that support the Education Fund. Because the Fund is self-leveling, any spending growth that surpasses organic revenue growth creates a deficit that is shifted onto property taxpayers.

H.686, seeks to expand and modernize the scope of disclosure and identification requirements for lobbying-related advertisements in Vermont by broadening the definitions of "advertisement" and "lobbying," removing session-based timing limitations on disclosure, and updating statutory language to be technology-neutral, affecting lobbying regulation, campaign transparency, and public communications policy.

S.190 seeks to enhance state oversight of healthcare costs and improve financial transparency within Vermont’s hospital system, healthcare reform, hospital budget regulation, and consumer protection.