As legislators returned to Montpelier this week we saw some of the hastiest decision-making this year. To be fair, that is usually the case as the cross-over deadline looms large over committee work.

A counterproposal for 2025 education reform focused on the learnings from Act 46 and recognizing Vermonter’s preference towards local control of schools.

Executive Summary

It is now quite clear to most close observers that Vermont’s education system is unsustainable. School spending has increased 42% since 2014 while our student population has shrunk. This has pushed the state to the second highest cost per student in the country. At the same time student performance has declined.

Governor Scott and Secretary Saunders have proposed a bold plan to change the trajectory of our education system and re-imagine what education in Vermont will look like in the years to come. We appreciate the audacity of the plan they put forward. There are some things that make a lot of sense like the new foundation formula and the increased focus on oversight and accountability. There are also things that miss the mark, like unwieldly regional school districts.

After more than a decade working on education reform in Vermont, we know what is likely to work and what is not. We pointed out many of the pitfalls of Act 46 before the bill even passed the legislature. The current plan repeats some of these mistakes.

Our largest concern with the five-district model is that it eviscerates local control. Vermont’s schools are more than just buildings where we educate students, they serve as de-facto community centers. This is not unique to Vermont, I just read a report last week from MassInc talking about the importance of school-centered neighborhood vitality. If we move the responsibility for a school many miles away, we risk losing the connection to their community.

The tragedy is that we don’t have to. School districts, at their core, really only require a volunteer school board to operate. There are no meaningful cost savings to be had there. The major opportunity is our 52 supervisory unions. Currently they are the impediment to larger economies of scale as most of our overhead has already been moved up to that level. We get into details with our proposal below, but consolidating these structures makes much more sense than taking away local school boards and severing the connection between schools and their communities.

I hope to work with legislators and the administration to Vermont-size our education delivery system and to re-align our current incentive structure to achieve better outcomes for students, more engagement from communities, and stable and predictable costs for taxpayers.

On behalf of Vermonters,

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.

A bill gained traction this week in the House Government Operations Committee that would be a step backwards from a statewide comprehensive ethics framework. The bill, H.1, proposes to exempt the House and Senate Ethics Panels from the requirement to consult with the State Ethics Commission regarding any complaints referred to them by the Commission.

Close your eyes. Imagine: What do you think education will look like in five years? How about in ten years?

For most of us, education, while having undergone incremental changes, has mostly stayed the same. We picture students sitting at desks with a teacher at the front of a classroom in a brick and mortar school. Students are grouped into grades largely by age. They may take yellow school buses to and from their homes. Minus the laptops, smart phones, and a few other tech gadgets, the environment would not be totally alien to someone from many decades past. We have an opportunity to change all of that and afford students an individualized learning experience that meets them where they are, regardless of age or grade level. And we can do it for little to no cost (maybe even with some cost savings).

We heard from developers, both subsidized and market rate, this week that things need to change if we are going to hit our target of 7,000 new units of housing annually. It's not one thing, it's all the things. Lengthy appeals processes delay projects and drives up costs. The cost of materials skyrocketed during Covid and has not come back down. The shortage of labor is really impacting both the cost of doing business as well as construction times. Cost of financing development is also too expensive, particularly for developers as they can face interest rates double that of homeowners to cover construction costs.

The Education establishment provided mixed feedback on Governor Scott's education reform proposal this week. They generally focused on the need to provide "sufficient funds" for education and predictability in funding. Of course, the teachers union already took a shot at the Governor because they rightly concluded that cost-savings would be generated by staffing reductions (both teachers and administrators). We already know that a driving factor in Vermont education spending is our ultra small class sizes; it seems like others are also catching on. They also took the opportunity to attack the 3500 students in tuitioning districts who chose to take their tuition dollars to independent schools.

This week Governor Scott gave his budget address for FY2026 and we learned more details about his plan to overall Vermont's education system.

This week we received the broad strokes of Governor Scott's plan to transform Vermont's education system. It is undoubtedly the boldest policy proposal he has ever put forward; doing away with local control and 52 supervisory unions and consolidating our 119 school districts down to 5.