[V]ermont lawmakers passed an ambitious special education reform law last year intended to simplify the system and save taxpayers millions. But a group tasked with advising the state on the law’s rollout now says important details have yet to be worked out and that implementation should be delayed a year.
Meagan Roy, who chairs the 14-member body, said the group doesn’t think the guidance the Agency of Education has been able to provide to the field so far is thorough enough given the magnitude of the changes envisioned by the law.
To fill in the blanks after legislation is passed, state agencies create rules. The Agency put new draft rules before the advisory group – which includes representatives from public and private schools, administrators, the NEA, and disability rights groups – on Monday. For Roy and most others on the panel, the rules left far too many questions unanswered.
“Now we have all the clarity that exists right now – and it doesn’t feel clear enough. And I think that’s really prompted the group to come out more definitively and say ‘I think we need more time’,” said Roy, who is also the president of the Vermont Council of Special Education Administrators.
The panel’s vote to ask the Legislature for delay was unanimous but for Secretary of Education Dan French, who abstained. In a statement, Ted Fisher, a spokesperson for the Agency of Education, said the office “is capable of continuing implementation without a delay.”
“Act 173 is an important change in the way we administer special education services that will benefit Vermont students, and we cannot afford to hold off on these improvements indefinitely,” he wrote.
He added that the agency was “currently considering” the recommendation to delay “in order to determine what the benefits and drawbacks would be.”
Act 173 was passed in 2018 to great fanfare. The law is intended to address both the notoriously complicated bureaucracy surrounding schooling for children with disabilities and the programming’s ever-increasing costs. To do so, it transitions Vermont from a reimbursement model for funding special education to a census-block grant system, where schools will receive a set amount in special education dollars based on its student population. (There are provisions for reimbursing especially expensive cases.)
But while Vermont may want to simplify special education, whatever system it installs must still conform to federal special education law, including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Knitting those pieces together, and creating a clear new regulatory system is complicated work.
“There are a lot of things right now that are not clear about how the financial portion of this will be implemented. And that includes things like, what documentation will the Agency require from districts in a census-block grant construct?” Roy said.
As written, new rules are supposed to be in place by this November, and the funding would begin to shift in fiscal year 2021. The advisory group is now asking rule-making be extended until November 2020, and for funding changes to wait until 2022.
House Education Committee chair Kate Webb, D-Shelburne, said she had anticipated the group would be asking for more time. An architect of Act 173 – and former special educator – Webb said she preferred the law be implemented correctly than according to the original timeline.
“I believe that there will be sympathy, particularly if it’s going to help the rollout of the law be more effective,” she said. But she also added she wanted to see a clear plan for how to use the extra time.
The group’s decision to ask for a delay has also prompted anew questions about staffing capacity at the agency. Roy noted that the three positions created by the General Assembly to support the law had not been filled, and that the state had also lost veteran members of their special education team to retirement.
“Vermont, right now, doesn’t have a state director of special education,” she said.
At a joint hearing of the House Education and Government Operations committees, lawmakers took testimony in February on the agency’s loss of capacity. At that time, representatives from the groups representing school boards, principals, and superintendents all highlighted Act 173 as a key area of concern.
Nicole Mace, the executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association, reiterated those concerns on Thursday before the Senate Education Committee, where Roy had just told lawmakers of the advisory group’s request to delay.
“The Agency of Education has not, to this date, provided the level of leadership that’s really needed to ensure all stakeholders within the system understand the roles they play,” Mace told lawmakers.
Senate Education chair Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden, said he would be asking French to come in to lend his perspective. But he also said he and then-House Education chair Dave Sharpe, D-Bristol, had fought hard to make sure Act 173 included additional positions at the Agency.
French had told him “months ago” he was interviewing people, Baruth said, and the slow pace of hiring had left him wondering “whether his intention is to simply to continue the downsizing of the agency.”
Baruth added his irritation was compounded by concerns that under-capacity at the agency was creating dysfunction elsewhere in the education system, including pre-K, where the agencies of Education and Human Services have yet to work out a deal about how to untangle their dual oversight of the system.
“At a certain point you abdicate your place and leave government trying to figure out how to do it around AoE, which is bad for everybody,” Baruth said. “It is a source of frustration that AoE is understaffed, and then when given permission to staff, they are not staffing.”
Fisher, in a statement, said that the Agency of Education had used the funding set aside in Act 173 to hire a legal staff member to maintain another position whose funding had been cut. As for the other two positions created by the law, he said the state had been actively trying to recruit candidates since the fall of 2018.
“Currently the state of Vermont is experiencing extremely low unemployment rates, some of the lowest in the nation. There is also a shortage in Vermont of qualified professionals with expertise in special education, the kind of expertise these positions demand,” he wrote.
