Debate on the education reform that Vermont legislators passed earlier this month continues as plans won’t be finalized until the second half of the biennium. Some education groups aren’t happy with the changes.
Vermont’s education reform bill was not completed when the legislature planned to adjourn in May. House and Senate leaders decided that the rank-and-file would return in mid-June to vote on the package. In the meantime, a conference committee worked on compromises to place a final bill on the floor.
Senate Education committee chair Seth Bongartz, a Democrat from Bennington, told that chamber systemic reform is necessary.
“We need to seize the moment to stop the bleeding and create a framework for us to get to the goal of excellent educational opportunity for every Vermont child and substantially and permanently bend the cost curve so Vermonters can afford to continue to fund the system. We need to do it in a way that actually improves opportunity for kids,” Bongartz reported. “With the conference committee's report, money to fund the system will be raised across the state on a uniform basis and distributed on a per pupil weighted basis to each district.”
The Senate passed the conference committee bill 17 to 12.
In the House chamber, a procedural move to kill the bill failed. A voice vote later approved the measure. Representative Leanne Harple, a Democrat from Glover and a high school English teacher, said she is strongly and unapologetically opposed to H.454.
“This bill lays the foundation for the slow death of rural education. It chips away at local democratic control. It opens the door to forced school closures, to forced consolidations, to forced sacrifices that will bleed our small towns dry. And for what? For marginal savings on a broken unsustainable system,” Harple said. “When our fellow Vermonters sent us here, they asked us to fix the property tax crisis, not to dismantle their schools. This bill does far too little to address the actual cost drivers in education. Instead, we are asking rural Vermont to bear the brunt of a broken system.”
The National Education Association Vermont Chapter has criticized the reform package. President Don Tinney says a number of issues should have been addressed before, as he puts it, rushing the bill through the process.
“We’re quite concerned that citizens don’t quite understand that they’re going to be losing their local control over their local school budgets and those decisions will be made in Montpelier. We’re not convinced that the foundation formula will be adequate funding for our schools,” explained Tinney. “So we have to continue to monitor that situation and make sure that we have adequate funding.”
Legislators and Republican Governor Phil Scott have said the bill is the start of education reform efforts and more needs to be done when legislators return in January. But Tinney contends there are options to change the reform plan.
“We still haven’t seen any proof that the current system is somehow broken and needs to be reformed. The only reformation that people were looking for was a reformation of the property tax system,” Tinney asserted. “So how does this play out in real time for our students? Because if we come to a system that consolidates different schools together, does that mean the shuttering of some schools? Does that mean longer bus rides for our students? Does that mean the loss or the expansion of opportunities?”
Responding to a request for comment this week, the communications director for the Burlington School District wrote that its superintendent is not doing interviews on the bill right now because the district had yet to receive modeling on the impacts of the measure. The district opposed the bill and moving forward plans to be involved in discussions regarding consolidation.
Governor Scott plans to sign the education transformation bill Tuesday at noon at the Statehouse.
