The Senate Education Committee delayed voting out H.361, the controversial education governance bill, on Tuesday because of concerns expressed by residents in southern Vermont at two weekend meetings.
Sen. Ann Cummings, D-Washington, chair of Senate Education, said the panel would postpone the vote until after a public hearing to be held 5 to 7 p.m. tonight in Room 11 at the Statehouse.
Driving the delay in part is a pushback from the two senators from Bennington County, Sens. Brian Campion, D-Bennington, and Dick Sears, D-Bennington, who on Saturday met with dozens of constituents who expressed deep concerns about losing small schools and local control.
At two meetings, one held at Memorial Hall in Wilmington, and the second held at the elementary school in Readsboro, citizens from across the region were unified in expressing opposition to H.361, and urged their senators to convey their concerns to the Statehouse.
“The political winds are that everybody wants other people to change and don’t want to experience change for their own schools,” said Sen. David Zuckerman, P/D-Chittenden, a member of the Senate Education Committee, after the expected vote was delayed late Tuesday night with little explanation. “I’d say there are large swaths of the state – not just pockets – that don’t like any change.”
The latest version of the bill contains stepped-up incentives to encourage school districts to merge into larger systems, as well as some sticks. The legislation would eliminate the state’s 62 supervisory union districts and form integrated education systems of 900 students or more. If districts don’t become part of larger systems within a five-year period, the state could mandate district participation.
The Legislature is weighing structural reforms because many rural areas of the state face dramatic declines in student enrollment and rising education spending.
Bennington County concerns
Campion said constituents in his district have deep concerns about how H.361 will affect the future of small schools.
“We want them to thrive, we want to do a bill that will help them,” Campion said.
Campion drew an analogy to the clean water bill, saying, “We want to make certain we keep the waters pristine … we want to make sure we keep the good schools good … I just want to make certain that what we’re doing we’re doing in a thoughtful way.”
Sears and Campion went to well-attended forums in Wilmington and Readsboro. Concerns were high, Sears said. The towns send many secondary school students across the border to Massachusetts, he explained late Tuesday.
“They’re really concerned about losing their local elementary schools,” Sears said, “which are kind of the centers of their town.”
“Also, a lot of people in the community work in their schools,” and there is deep concern about the economic impact of people losing jobs in small towns, Sears said.
“Sen. Campion and I, I think it’s fair to say, we heard so much from these folks and their concerns that these towns … that if they decide to merge with another school, it should be their decision, not ours,” Sears said.
Agency of Education position pushed
Campion on Tuesday also continued to raise concerns about the Agency of Education’s position on the legislation.
Less than two weeks ago, the deputy secretary of the agency, Bill Talbott, testified that the agency was receiving feedback from across the state with concerns about the legislation. Talbott said it is difficult to get people to do things they don’t want to do, and cited legislation already on the books that some school districts are not heeding.
The Shumlin administration later characterized his testimony as a “miscommunication.”
Campion brought the issue up with Rebecca Holcombe, the secretary of the agency, on Tuesday afternoon. “A week and a half ago, your agency came out pretty strongly against H.361.”
Holcombe said she did not agree that Talbott’s stance represented the agency’s point of view. “I don’t want to open that can of worms again,” she said.
Campion said later he was still troubled by the administration’s flipflop.
“Bill Talbott is a very respectable person and he had a three-page memo and so what I don’t understand is how we go from here’s a three-page memo from the agency and Bill Talbott is your representative saying ‘We have deep concerns about the direction we are moving in,’ to the following Tuesday, ‘There was a miscommunication and now we’re OK with it,'” Campion said in an interview.
“So when the secretary came in what I was trying to get from her in part was a little bit of an explanation around what happened,” Campion said. “I was trying to get an explanation because we want to make good policy. If the agency doesn’t have the employees to make this happen, we want to know that.”
Holcombe said the declining enrollment in the state’s schools, which is projected to continue through 2030, has led to diminished opportunities for many students, and costs that are not sustainable for taxpayers and change must occur.
She thanked lawmakers for working with the agency to help them partner with school districts across the state to work on the challenging issues they confront.
