With millions of dollars under threat, Vermont Education Secretary Zoie Saunders instructed the state’s superintendents on Friday evening to individually certify compliance with a new directive from the Trump administration purporting to ban “illegal D.E.I.” But by Monday evening, after concerted pushback, Saunders reversed course.

“Our communication on Friday was intended to make you aware of the directive from the U.S. Department of Education regarding Title VI and to reinforce that diversity, equity, and inclusion practices are lawful and supported in Vermont,” Saunders wrote. “In no way, did AOE direct schools to ban DEI.”

The U.S. Department of Education offered little clarity as to what kind of programming they considered permissible or not under Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act when it issued its demand last Thursday. And in initially telling schools to certify their compliance, the state Agency of Education appeared to exploit this vagueness to thread a legalistic needle.

Vermont’s schools could both certify and continue to pursue whatever D.E.I. services, programming, and training they had already planned, the state’s Friday guidance said. Nothing about the Trump administration’s certification process, state officials said, actually changed the state’s legal commitments under federal law.

“Based on our initial legal review, the certification requires us to reaffirm our compliance with existing law that (the Agency of Education) has always followed in our administration of federal funds,” agency officials wrote in their guidance to schools.

At stake is one of the largest pots of federal money that the K-12 system receives: Title I funds, which target high-poverty schools. That money totalled nearly $43 million in Vermont this year, Lindsey Hedges, a spokesperson for the Agency of Education, said last week.

But the agency’s guidance alarmed local officials and advocacy groups, who felt that it passed the buck to already-stressed local districts and risked sending mixed messages about the state’s commitments to equity work.

On Monday morning, Saunders, Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark, and educational leaders met to discuss Vermont’s response. Soon after, the associations representing Vermont’s school boards, principals, and superintendents, alongside the Vermont-NEA, released an open letter to Clark and Saunders. The agency’s guidance, they said, was “unworkable.”

Asking “individual superintendents to certify compliance,” they wrote, “based on a cover letter (that they have not yet seen) that clarifies the legal boundaries of their certification will lead to a patchwork of responses that could put Vermont and local school districts at risk.”

Instead, the education groups wrote, Vermont should take its cues from such places as New York, where state officials have said bluntly they will not comply. Schools annually affirm compliance with federal civil rights laws, an attorney for the New York State Education Department said in a letter to federal officials, and since they had done so as recently as early January, no further certification would be provided.

Vermont’s schools, too, already affirmed compliance earlier this year. To sign a new certification now, then, would implicitly accept the Trump administration’s new interpretations of federal law, said Erin Maguire, the director of equity and inclusion for the Essex-Westford school district.

“We have already signed that this year, and so for me, that means that this new certification request is necessary to transition to a different interpretation of Title VI,” she said. “I couldn’t understand why else it would be needed.”

Later on Monday afternoon, Saunders and Clark released a joint statement, apparently defending the state’s initial guidance.

“The political rhetoric around this federal directive is designed to create outrage in our communities, confusion in our schools, and self-censorship in our policy making. But we are not going to allow the chaos to control how we feel, or how we respond,” Saunders wrote. “Our priority is to protect Vermont’s values, preserve essential federal funding, and support schools in creating positive school environments free from the type of bullying and manipulation we see in our national politics today.”

But while both Saunders and Clark reiterated several times in their statement that schools were not expected to change their practices, nowhere in their roughly 500-word press release did they specify whether schools were still expected to submit certifications.

The joint statement left many educators scratching their heads — or assuming that the state would still require schools to sign on the dotted line.

“The response is: We hear you, and we will parrot all the nice things to say about equity and inclusion… But no, we’re gonna still make you comply and sign this certification with language that nobody really knows what it means,” Winooski superintendent Wilmer Chavarria said after reading the latest communication.

Then, two hours later, the Agency of Education sent yet another message out to superintendents. In it, Saunders acknowledged she had “received feedback throughout the day regarding the need for clarity.”

The Agency, in consultation with the Attorney General’s office, she wrote, “has decided that Vermont will send a single, statewide letter which will certify Vermont’s compliance with applicable current law – and reject conditions or assurances that are not supported by current law.”

“Given our statewide response, superintendents will not be asked to provide individual certifications,” she added.