There was lots of activity this week across multiple fronts as legislators push to get their priorities across the finish line before the end of the session, which is rapidly approaching. Legislative leaders have already indicated that they expect to come back in late May for a veto session, so they are currently targeting the second weekend in May for adjournment; this effectively gives Committees two weeks to get bills back to the floor, if they are to pass this year.

Action Alert!

Last week the House punted on education reform when they passed H.454, which delays making any structural changes to Vermont's education system until 2029. Even worse, it puts the same folks who designed and run today's failed system in charge of building the new one. You can find our full analysis of the bill here.

The House passed their landmark-ish education reform bill yesterday. It's a mixed bag of results that punts on governance reform while making significant strides on education finance.

The House's grand education transformation initiative offers a mixed bag of deferred governance changes that put the people who designed and run todays failed system in charge of building tomorrow's education delivery system. The bill does, however, make historic changes to the way we raise funds to pay for schools that should introduce better transparency and accountability for taxpayers while also putting downward pressure on spending.

This week the Judicial branch jumped on the H.1 bandwagon, saying that if the Legislature is going to exempt anyone from ethics oversight, it should be them!

Good Morning House Ways & Means Committee,

Thank you for your work on the new foundation formula, this will be an important step forward for education policy in Vermont by reducing the complexity of the current system and providing transparency and predictability to voters about how the school budgets they vote on will impact their tax bills.

The long-awaited education reform package moved out of the House Education Committee on Friday; the governance reform component is reminiscent of the Act 46. The study group the House is putting in charge is made up of the same administrators that both designed and run the current system. Do you think they're going to give us a different product this time around?

This week tensions boiled over between Governor Scott and the Legislature over the mid-year budget adjustment for FY2025. The Legislature's version of the bill faced significant opposition from Governor Scott, who criticized it as "irresponsible" spending. At the heart of the dispute is the motel voucher program, which is set to expire in April for the summer (the FY2025 budget only funded the program for families most in need through the winter months). Legislative leaders, lacking the votes to override Governor Scott’s veto, shifted focus earlier this week; they pressed the Governor to extend the motel shelter program for a subset of unhoused persons, reflecting a narrower approach to address the "immediate needs" amid budget disputes.

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,