This legislative session, the House Committee on Education put forth a pair of bills that would make a substantial impact on Vermont schools.
H.483 would have made dramatic changes to Vermont’s tuitioning system, through which students receive public money to attend private schools. Another bill, H.486, would have halted an ambitious state initiative to test scores of schools for polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.
Both bills passed the House earlier this year. And once they reached the Senate Committee on Education, both stalled.
The disagreement, in the waning days of the legislative session, has led to unusually heated exchanges between education-focused lawmakers over what’s best for Vermont’s schools and students.
The “sort of fight that has erupted, particularly in (the Senate education) committee around public education, is really unfortunate,” said Rep. Erin Brady, D-Williston, the vice chair of the House Education committee. She pointed to what she called “the tone, the kind of accusations that, you know, who’s for kids and who’s not.”
House lawmakers drafted H.483 in the wake of a June 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Carson v. Makin. That decision affirmed that religious schools could not be excluded from tuition systems that allow private schools to receive public money.
The decision stoked fears that Vermonters’ taxpayer money could subsidize private religious schools that discriminate against LGBTQ+ students. This winter, lawmakers in the House education committee set about drafting a bill that would place stronger restrictions on the state’s public tuition money.
‘Core values’
Reporting the committee bill on the House floor in March, Rep. Peter Conlon, D-Cornwall, the chair of the House education committee, told lawmakers that the Supreme Court decision was “not an explanation for this bill.”
The bill was based more generally on “core values that should be attached to every taxpayer dollar that supports our Vermont students’ education,” Conlon said. “Core values such as inclusion and freedom from bias and discrimination in admissions.”
As written, the legislation would require greater oversight of private schools that accept publicly tuitioned students and limit private schools’ ability to turn those students away during their admissions process.
Private schools taking public dollars would be required to affirm their compliance with state anti-discrimination laws, and the legislation would place a moratorium on new private school applications for public money.
The House passed that bill on March 30. On the same day, the House approved another initiative from the House education committee: a pause on the state’s school testing program for PCBs.
The state is currently engaged in an ambitious effort — one that state officials describe as the nation’s first — to test hundreds of school buildings for the toxic chemicals, which have been linked to a number of health problems.
But critics — among them many school administrators — say the rollout of the initiative has been poorly executed. And when PCBs are detected in schools, administrators can be on the hook for thousands of dollars of mitigation and repair work, which is not always effective.
Both of those initiatives are backed by the Vermont Superintendents Association, the Vermont Principals Association and the Vermont School Boards Association.
The Vermont National Education Association, the teachers union, has also lobbied for H.483 and believes that the PCB testing process needs to be better “paced and aligned,” spokesperson Darren Allen said in an email.
“We are firm in our belief that the actions taken by the House are responsible and supportive of students,” Sue Ceglowski, the executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association, said in an interview. “The state needs more accountability in the payment of taxpayer funds to private schools. And the PCB testing requirements that were imposed on schools came with an array of unresolved issues, not least of which is how they’re going to be paid for.”
The House bills, she said, are an attempt “to rectify that.”
Stalled momentum
But when the bills reached the Senate and were referred to the Senate Committee on Education, they appeared to run aground.
Senate legislative leaders, including Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, and the education committee’s chair, Sen. Brian Campion, D-Bennington, have expressed opposition to halting the PCB testing.
In recent weeks, state officials, medical professionals and some advocacy organizations have urged lawmakers to continue the program.
So far, one piece of H.483 — the moratorium on new private schools applying for public tuition — has been folded into the session’s budget bill. But otherwise, Campion said, “I don’t think 483 does anything to improve education.”
He noted that private schools already must follow anti-discrimination law and rules — some of whose requirements are identical to those put forth in H.483 — in order to receive public tuition money. And the bill does nothing to address a fundamental concern of the Carson v. Makin decision: that public money is subsidizing religious education.
As for the PCB testing pause, Campion said, the bill could result in some schools remaining indefinitely unaware of potentially dangerous levels of the chemical. Both issues, he argued, have taken valuable legislative time away from addressing the day-to-day struggles that schools face.
“I would much rather — I think everybody would — be talking about Covid, mental health, teacher salaries, all these kinds of things,” he said at a May 2 committee discussion.
Proponents of the legislation — including Campion’s vice chair, Sen. Martine Gulick, D-Chittenden Central, a Burlington school board member — argued that the bills are in fact connected to those other issues: By putting limitations on public money in private schools and removing the testing mandate, the legislation is ultimately focused on bolstering the time and funding available to public schools.
“We need to put some guardrails, I would say, and some definitions around how we do use those public dollars and be real, kind of, deliberate about how we do it,” Gulick said. “And I think that’s some of the work that we’ve been trying to do this year.”
‘Really disappointed’
The disagreement came to a head at a May 2 committee discussion in the Senate education committee. In that meeting, Campion clashed with Gulick over the PCB testing pause and leveled unusually frank criticism at the state’s organizations of principals, superintendents and school boards, as well as the teachers union.
“Honestly, I think if this is what the public education advocates — (if H. 483) is the biggest, most important bill for them — this? Given all the issues we have in the state?” he said. “Yeah, I’m disappointed, frankly. Really disappointed.”
Asked about his remarks in an interview later that week, Campion said, “I stand by it.”
“And I hope we can return to a session next year where we really are working on addressing the issues that kids are struggling with,” he said.
Ceglowski, of the school boards association, said she was “disappointed” that the legislation had stalled.
“Those are certainly high-priority issues,” she said, referring to the issues raised by Campion. “We don’t necessarily have control over the bills that the legislature decides to take up, though.”
As of last week, other than the moratorium on private school applications for public tuition, the bills appeared to be stalled for good. It’s not clear when or if Senate education will vote on H.483. As for the PCB testing pause, the chair said, “I think that conversation is over, frankly.”
Conlon, the chair of the House education committee, said that was unfortunate.
“Both bills were strong priorities of not just the House education committee, but they both received strong support in the House itself,” Conlon said. “And, yes, we will be disappointed to see if they die in the Senate without getting their due chance to come up for a vote.”
But Brady, the House committee’s vice chair, said in an interview last week that legislators discussing the budget were considering some of the language in the education bills — raising the possibility that some of their provisions could still become law.
“I’ll remain hopeful until the lights go off here,” she said.
