Voluntary mergers in Vermont’s new education reform – Valley News

MONTPELIER — After weeks of false starts and discarded plans, the House Education Committee passed an education reform proposal Thursday. But it’s a far cry from what was envisioned in last year’s landmark Act 73, and will almost certainly face political hurdles in the House, Senate and from Gov. Phil Scott’s administration.

The proposal, H.955, which passed with only Democratic support, would create study committees in seven areas of the state to facilitate voluntary mergers of the state’s 119 school districts. Rep. Peter Conlon, D-Cornwall, the House Education Committee chair, praised the committee’s work before calling the vote.

“For the field and school districts and Vermonters out there, we are respecting — I think, very much so — the different ways we deliver education in Vermont,” he said. “We are respecting local voice. We are respecting an aversion to forced mergers at the state level.”

The proposal marks a compromise after weeks of political gridlock among committee members over perennial issues like school choice and preserving local voice in rural communities.

Education reform has consumed much of the political oxygen in the Statehouse this year and last. Gov. Phil Scott, buoyed by Republican electoral gains in the November 2024 election, ushered in plans to consolidate Vermont’s 119 school districts and reform the state’s education finance system.

Leaders in both parties have endorsed plans for reform, citing the ever increasing cost of education and the need to expand access to educational opportunities.

But Thursday’s committee plan is out of step with the more ambitious ideas floated by Scott, his Agency of Education and even Conlon himself, which would have mandated school district mergers. Conlon’s initial plan in February would have forced the merger of the state’s 119 school districts into 27, each with student populations between 2,000 and 4,000.

Yet after several weeks of deadlock, the committee pivoted to a proposal with voluntary mergers. Conlon’s plan for forced mergers “didn’t get a lot of love” from colleagues or constituents, he said.

The Senate, meanwhile, continues to hammer away at the details of their own proposal, which doesn’t look likely to follow Scott’s vision for education reform either.

The House proposal has a long road ahead of it, and will likely change significantly as it proceeds through the House and Senate. Lawmakers in both chambers will scrutinize the plan’s emphasis on voluntary mergers, and question whether the plan could find the types of savings the governor has called for.

“For me, there are misses in this,” Rep. Joshua Dobrovitch, R-Williamstown, said Thursday. “I feel like we’re not actually providing the relief that our taxpayers want in a timely fashion.”

The bill will next be taken up by the House ways and means and appropriations committees.

To merge or not to merge

The House’s proposal borrows from the school redistricting task force, the body created last year to draw up school consolidation maps. That group’s recommendation last fall bucked calls for forced mergers and instead suggested new regional entities that would share services among member school districts.

The proposal advanced Thursday would overlay seven cooperative education service agencies, or CESAs, over the state’s 119 school districts and 52 governing units.

Those regional entities, already in use in southeastern Vermont, would then facilitate the sharing of services in special education, professional development, human resources and other areas for member school districts.

Grants from the Vermont Agency of Education would help stand up those agencies, and they would be managed by a board of directors appointed by member supervisory unions and supervisory districts.

Study committees would then be formed within each CESA, which would work towards a voluntary merger process for member districts. All member school districts would be required to participate in the committees.

The study committees’ work would run through 2027 and 2028. Residents in school districts queued up by the study committees for a merger would then vote on whether to merge.

The law does offer preliminary guidance for how study committees could consider merging districts.

One proposal in the legislation, for example, would have the Addison Central, Addison Northwest and Lincoln school districts merge with the Mount Abraham Unified School District.

Another would see the Franklin Northeast, Northern Mountain Valley and Missisquoi school districts merge into one.

But voters in a district in any proposed merger would have the final say under the legislation.

The legislation would also change the effective date of the foundation formula, moving it back from July 1 2028, to July 1, 2030.

Act 73 will shift spending decisions away from local districts and their communities and to the state via a foundation formula, which would then provide each school district with a set amount of money based on the number of students enrolled.

Policy v. politics

Scott and leaders in his Agency of Education have made it clear they do not support the House’s proposal.

Scott said Wednesday he was “appreciative” of lawmakers moving anything out at all, but the proposal was not something he could accept. He’s previously threatened to veto the state budget if lawmakers don’t follow through on his education reform demands.

“If we end up in the same position that we’ve ended up in years past with increasing property taxes that dysfunction won’t allow us to fix, the voters will decide what to do with that,” he said Wednesday.

Education Secretary Zoie Saunders last Friday told lawmakers in the House Education Committee that the direction of both the House and Senate’s proposals were “concerning.”

“Each of the proposals that are put forward are not fully benefiting from scale. And we know we need to move to scale,” she said. “And if we don’t, the smaller districts will be at an inherent disadvantage.”

In the end, Conlon said he was bound by the political realities in the Statehouse. He said barriers like support for school choice and local control were too difficult to clear.
“The world we are trying to maneuver and move around in is not just policy, it is also politics,” he said.

This story was republished with permission from VtDigger, which offers its reporting at no cost to local news organizations through its Community News Sharing Project. To learn more, visit vtdigger.org/community-news-sharing-project.