This spring, a state-convened council proposed hundreds of edits to Vermont’s education quality standards, a set of rules governing what and how students learn.
The Ethnic and Social Equity Standards Advisory Working Group spent three years drafting updates to make Vermont schools and curriculums more inclusive and equitable.
Now, as state officials consider those proposals, a legal question has arisen: should the new rules apply to private schools?
“We need outside legal counsel to review the entirety of the changes for consistency with statute,” said Tammy Kolbe, the vice chair of Vermont’s State Board of Education. “One of the things that’s being reviewed as part of that is consistency with statute with respect to independent schools.”
Vermont has hundreds of pages of state rules governing its educational system, covering everything from state Board of Education meetings to the depreciation of school buses.
In 2019, lawmakers created the Ethnic and Social Equity Standards Advisory Working Group — called the Act 1 Working Group, for short — to recommend rule changes that “recognize fully the history, contributions, and perspectives of ethnic groups and social groups,” according to statute.
The working group includes representatives from public schools, state administrators, and the statewide advocacy group Education Justice Coalition.
This spring, the group released a set of proposed updates to the education quality standards, which outline the basics of what and how students should learn in school.
“The Working Group calls for age-appropriate and grade-appropriate Ethnic Studies to be integrated into curricular content for grades Pre-K through 12,” group members said in a May memo explaining their edits. “Ethnic Studies require rigorous, sustained, and complex intellectual and social engagement with the historical and contemporary lives, cultures, struggles, and aspirations of historically racialized, marginalized, or oppressed groups.”
School staff and boards should also “integrate an understanding and respect for the diversity of cultural, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and social identities” and “recognize the lived experience of students who are neurodiverse and/or have disabilities,” according to the proposed rule updates.
“It’s saying that kids, regardless of where they come from, should have an education that is culturally responsive to them,” said Amanda Garcés, a Vermont Human Rights Commission official and the chair of the state body that drafted the new rules.
So far, the updates appear to have been met with approval. At a community listening session last month, roughly two dozen members of the public called in to support the changes.
But a handful of people have raised questions about the new rules. Katie Ballard, the chair of the Vermont State Special Education Advisory Panel, urged state officials to incorporate stronger references to students with disabilities and account for the different legal frameworks that apply to those students.
And the rules have also received pushback from Vermont private school administrators.
As written, the updated standards would apply to private schools that are approved to receive public tuition dollars. But Mill Moore, the executive director of the Vermont Independent Schools Association, argued that those schools should be exempt.
“I think the (board of education) will grasp pretty quickly that there’s no need to apply public school rules to independent schools,” Moore said.
For one thing, private schools already have a set of state rules they must follow—rules that just underwent a series of edits, he noted.
And many private schools, such as Montessori or Waldorf schools, have very different curricula than public schools, he said. This would make it difficult, if not impossible, to apply the updated rules to those private schools.
“Requiring that public school rules apply to independent schools would be like requiring someone to wear their left shoe on their right foot and right shoe on their left foot,” Moore wrote to the working group this spring, adding, “Feet are not identical — symmetrical, but not identical.”
But representatives from the state’s public schools disagreed. In joint testimony to state officials, the executive directors of Vermont’s associations of principals, superintendents and school boards noted that the private schools in question receive taxpayer-funded tuition money.
“At this time when the public education system, the State Board of Education, the Working Group and many others are very necessarily and very appropriately focused on promoting, pursuing and achieving equity, inclusion and belonging in our shared society,” the directors said, “our Associations firmly believe it is imperative that all reasonably available measures should be taken to accomplish those ends for all students,” bolding the word “all.”
Kolbe, the Board of Education vice chair, said that board members are working to hire a lawyer to give a legal opinion on the proposed updates — including the question of whether they can apply to both public and private schools.
A board subcommittee is examining the proposals now and could vote to send the rules to the full state board next month.
“We have a lot more work to do,” she said.
