The Agency of Education and an advisory panel tasked with overseeing the rollout of Act 173, Vermont’s massive special education reform, have, until recently, been at odds over a foundational issue: how to define special education.
But a meeting Monday of the advisory group – whose members include representatives from public and private school groups as well as disability rights advocates – where agency personnel presented a new set of draft regulations for Act 173, appeared to signal a burgeoning consensus.
“Thank you,” said Nicole Mace, a member of the panel the executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association. “This reflects a huge shift.”
Meagan Roy, the chair of the group, echoed Mace, although she said she wanted to give the panel until its next meeting in December to digest the new rules, which were released late Friday.
“I believe this set of rules shows significant movement toward the discussions that we’ve been having, primarily about the definition of special education matching the federal definition,” she said.
The panel’s members unanimously asked lawmakers earlier this year to delay the rollout of Act 173, and did so largely over concerns about how state officials were leading the process to implement the law. Advisory group members worried about a perceived lack of capacity at the agency, but also expressed sharp disagreements with the state over the draft regulations it released for Act 173.
Several of the education groups represented on the advisory panel ultimately went as far as to hire an outside consultant to review the agency’s existing and draft special education regulations. The resulting report argued that the state too narrowly defines special education, and that reforms contemplated by the agency under Act 173 were missing opportunities for flexibility.
Neither the advisory group nor the agency are actually charged with adopting the final regulations under the new law. That job belongs to the State Board of Education, whose chair, John Carroll, has told the panel he would like to see draft rules by the end of the year. Once the State Board formally opens the rule-making process, likely in January, it will start taking even wider public feedback about what the law ought to look like.
Act 173 was passed in 2018 with the twin goals of addressing special education’s notoriously complex bureaucracy and ever-climbing costs. To do so, it transitions the state from a reimbursement model for funding special education to a census-block grant system, where schools receive a set amount in special education dollars based on its total student population.
This won’t be the last major debate education officials will have about the reform effort. Left undecided at this point is how independent schools – many of which educate those students with the most acute needs – will be treated under the new system. Education Secretary Dan French told the advisory group it expected to release an updated timeline soon about when it would start that work.