[L]awmakers say they’re worried about stretched capacity at the Vermont Agency of Education, especially given the large number of major education reforms enacted by the Legislature in recent years.
The agency has lost nearly a fourth of its staff since the Great Recession.
At a joint meeting of the House Education and Government Operations Committees on Wednesday morning, legislators quizzed agency staff, statewide education officials, and current employees about vacancies, turnover, and staffing levels at the agency.
Dan French, the Secretary of Education, said he’d been working on a reorganization of the agency since his arrival in August and that he still couldn’t say whether more positions are needed. But he did highlight the high number of vacancies – 27 positions – and said he was trying to recruit more aggressively.
“In many of the policy conversations, there’s conversations around ‘Oh you need more capacity, more positions.’ It’s not quite as simple as that. We already have a large number of positions, and we’re having difficulty filling them,” he said.
In its budget request, the agency is asking for $163.5 million for the next fiscal year. A vast majority of those dollars, however, are federal grants, which get doled out into the field. Only $29.7 million directly supports operating costs and personnel at the agency, which has a little over 160 full-time employees.
French has asked lawmakers for some additional support. He’s seeking $1.7 million, out of the education fund, to pay for more help with implementing two new statewide data management systems. The proposal will require a change in law — by statute, the education fund cannot support state-level activities. Most of the $1.7 billion fund pays directly for K-12 schooling.
While French did not ask lawmakers to authorize additional positions, he did emphasize that a slew of new education initiatives at the state and federal level had maxed out available bandwidth for employees. He pointed to Act 46, which consolidated school districts across the state, Act 77, which created personalized learning opportunities for students, and Act 173, which will completely overhaul special education funding over the next few years.
All of the new policy initiatives have overwhelmed people at the state and local level, French said. He was struck, he added, when teachers recently gave him a standing ovation for acknowledging “initiative fatigue.”
“As much as I would encourage you to think about capacity, I also want you to think about your role in decreasing the complexity of the work that we do,” he told lawmakers.
Statewide education officials, meanwhile, testified to legislators that they were already worried the agency couldn’t carry out its existing duties. Organizations representing school boards, principals, special education administrators, and superintendents, particularly raised concerns about Act 173.
The law, passed in 2018, shifts Vermont schools to a block-grant system for special education funding. Vermont School Boards Association Executive Director Nicole Mace said Act 173 is widely considered in the education world to be a much more ambitious reform than Act 46, the school district consolidation law that has dominated the conversation for the past few years.
But, last fall, the agency lost two veteran members of its special education team, Mace said, and apparently hadn’t yet filled the three positions allocated to it by the General Assembly specifically to support the law. State officials were expected to play a big role in giving local districts guidance about how to shift practices to align with the new funding mechanism, she said, but most felt like the agency has been largely absent from the conversation.
“Many special education directors are feeling like the responsibility for implementation of this law is falling squarely on their shoulders,” she said.
Legislators also heard from three rank-and-file agency employees, who told them that while compensation and overwork were problems, so was bad management. Sigrid Olson, a union steward and 14-year veteran of the agency, said supervisors could be bullies. The agency also appeared to have a blanket ban on telecommuting, she said, even on days with extremely inclement weather.
“Employee turnover and morale has been a constant issue during my time at the AOE, and over the years employees – and the agency itself – have tried to address it in many ways, without success,” she told lawmakers.
Rep. Sarah Copeland-Hanzas, D-Bradford, chair of House Government Operations, said lawmakers might ask the Department of Human Resources to re-classify employees to boost wages and help with recruitment.
But she also said she was also worried about morale and management.
“I’d like to know from our secretary of education why there’s bullying in our agency. If that’s to be believed, that’s really sad and disturbing,” she said.
House Education Chair Kate Webb, D-Shelburne, said she was surprised French wasn’t advocating for additional staffing in general. But she said that could be because the he was still working on reorganization of the agency.
“We do know that in terms of (Act) 173, that there needs to be significant support that’s happening in the districts. And it needs to be happening now,” she said.
But on the subject of initiative fatigue, Webb said she heard the agency “loud and clear.”
“I’m not seeing that we want to do any big initiatives at this point. We want to empower the agency to do the work that we’ve asked them to do,” she said.
Concerns about the Agency’s capacity to carry out its growing workload having been brewing for some time. In 2017, French’s predecessor, Rebecca Holcombe, openly defied lawmakers, refusing to conduct a new study the Legislature had ordered until the Agency was granted additional staffing.
