The House is set to vote on the next phase of Vermont's education reform effort today. The bill they are putting forward is a grab bag of policies that House members managed to agree on.

This week the State Auditor's office delivered a sobering accountability check on Vermont's (former) flagship health care programs and the government accountability pilot moved to the Senate with fundamental questions about scope and institutional design still unresolved. Meanwhile, the climate policy infrastructure took a step forward with H.740's greenhouse gas registry advancing, though the familiar gap between policy ambition and funding commitment surfaced once again. The House's education reform bill also took another step closer to a floor vote.

Let's walk through it.

Good Evening Chair Kornheiser and Members of the House Ways & Means Committee,

There has been some discussion in committee this week about the impact on the foundation formula if districts are left at their current size. This has sparked concerns about viability for small districts, but I would content that the viability of the entire system in jeopardy.

The bill, H.955, advances the next phase of Vermont’s education system transformation by creating regional cooperative educational service areas (CESAs), requiring all districts to participate in structured studies of possible union school district formation, delaying major parts of the State’s broader education finance transition, and commissioning further work on prekindergarten funding, education governance, shared services, district reorganization, education finance, and early childhood access.

The House Education Committee finally advanced their education reform bill after months of discussion. Of course they couldn't resist drawing maps, even if they are "only advisory" in nature. While the bill does not force arranged marriages (school district consolidation), per se, it does require that you attend the dance (merger study committees) and it chooses who your dance partners will be (which other districts you have to discuss mergers with).

In theory you could choose to dance with someone else or not at all, but that will probably be frowned upon. Okay, enough with that analogy... let's talk about what happened this week...

A bottleneck of bills hit the floor in both chambers this week. The House and Senate floors were busy passing major legislation on homelessness, health care, housing, and the FY27 budget. Meanwhile, the Agency of Education delivered pointed critique's of both chambers' approaches to education reform (color me shocked) and Ways and Means began inventorying the enormous technical to-do list that sits between Act 73 and anything resembling a workable foundation formula.

Let's walk through it.

The bill, H.949, sets Vermont’s fiscal year 2027 (2026-2027 school year) education property tax calculation (known as the yield amount), uses one-time funds to moderate near-term tax increases, and makes several technical education finance changes.

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.