The Shumlin administration has reversed its position on H.361, the education reform bill.
The legislation, which passed the House last month, was originally supported by the Vermont Agency of Education.
On Friday, Bill Talbott, the deputy secretary, told lawmakers that the agency wanted to back away from mandatory components of H.361. The agency wants to pursue voluntary steps toward school district consolidation.
Talbott said the agency is hearing from so many schools “who just don’t want to do it, it makes us ask is there another way to approach this?”
“It’s really hard to make people do things they don’t want to do,” Talbott said.
The agency is making a series of recommendations based on feedback Secretary Rebecca Holcombe has received in response to H.361.
Holcombe has heard from school boards that oppose H.361 because it would eliminate supervisory unions, some of which have as few as 500 students. The legislation creates new integrated education systems with at least 1,100 students.
The Senate is now reviewing the bill.
Rather than imposing a penalty on districts that are unable to reach merger agreements with their neighbors by a certain date, the agency proposes a more generous tax incentive for districts that choose to join forces.
“It’s a good bill in many ways, but we have some concerns about it,” Talbott told lawmakers. “It has a lot of work we don’t think will lead anywhere in the end. If you let people opt out, they will.”
The bill mandates that all school districts study merger options with neighboring districts, and contains a provision that they could seek a waiver from the state if those studies find that forging partnerships was not in a district or districts’ best interest.
The agency now makes only one recommendation toward mandated consolidation. Talbott said the state wants the 32 nonoperating school districts in the state, i.e. the districts that tuition out all of their children, to join larger regional nonoperating districts. This mandated consolidation approach, he said, would even out enrollment fluctuations across a larger pool and help to control budget spikes.
The agency is also recommending that the Legislature remove or reduce some of the so-called “crutches” that allow some smaller districts to operate with state-funded supports. The two supports now in place include small school grants and a “phantom student” hold harmless provision.
“The House did really good work putting together a plan in response to the political interpretation that everybody wants change,” said Sen. David Zuckerman, P/D-Chittenden, but said he believes H.361 needs to be changed.
Zuckerman said the “political winds” blew fiercely after three dozen school budgets were defeated on Town Meeting Day 2014. “And now quite a bit of the public is asking if they really wanted what we were interpreting they were saying,” he said.
The Senate Education Committee was receptive to the administration’s new stance.
Increasing incentives to help bring more districts into larger systems, as proposed by the Agency on Friday, as well as “adjusting some of the supports that have allowed systems that really need to change for the kids’ sake and the taxpayers’,” are now on the Senate Education Committee’s table, Zuckerman said.
Pilot districts proposed
One of the key pieces of the proposal the agency presented Friday calls for stepped-up tax breaks for districts that agree to merge into larger school systems.
Those districts would be pilot programs and the tax breaks they would receive — a 10 cent reduction in statewide property tax rate for five years — would hinge on their participation in the pilot study.
“The idea is to make it a substantial reduction (in the tax rate) and give them time to realize efficiencies,” Talbott said.
Districts that opt for the five-year, 10-cent tax incentive would need to move to a larger school district by a date certain, and within a window of no more than a year from the date of passage, the memo details.
Sen. Philip Baruth, D-Chittenden, asked whether the secretary had made clear she was opposed to mandates when the bill was navigating through the House Education Committee, and the chair of that committee, Rep. David Sharpe, D-Bristol, shook his head no.
“We have floated a balloon. Now we know how many arrows have been shot at it,” said Sen. Ann Cummings, D-Washington, chair of the Senate Education Committee. “It doesn’t mean at some point out here we aren’t going to say, ‘This is what’s going to happen.’”
Cummings said she believes the Legislature should “tread lightly” on the state’s long-held traditions in public education. “If we get too much pushback, and they just say no, there’s more of them than there are of us.”
Stephen Dale, executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association, said the association has a mixed reaction to the agency’s proposal. While school boards have concerns, he said, the proposal “removes the mandate and offers districts some clear choices.”
The Windham Southeast Supervisory Union last week adopted a resolution about concerns with H.361. The resolution was sent to the governor, the Agency of Education, and the State Board of Education.
In a letter to state officials, Windham Southeast Supervisory Union board members said they “are deeply concerned about the proposed content and implications of H.361 which empowers the State Board of Education to determine the existence of our local school boards, and sets arbitrary spending caps without consideration of the true effects on the districts.”
