This summer, Vermont education officials kicked off an effort to write new equity rules for private schools.
The initiative follows up on a 2019 law, Act 1, which was intended to diversify curricula and combat bias in Vermont schools. After a working group recommended new educational rules, the State Board of Education began incorporating them into the regulations that govern private schools.
But that initiative ran into controversy last week as some lawmakers, public school advocates and officials from the state’s Human Rights Commission and Office of Racial Equity raised concerns about the process.
In a letter, a group of eight state lawmakers accused the board of “effectively replicating an unjust ‘separate but equal’ approach” between public and private schools.
“If you’re receiving public funds, then you should play by the same rules. Full stop,” said Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone, D/P-Burlington, one of the letter’s signatories and the clerk of the Vermont House Committee on Education. “Especially when it comes to rules that impact anti-discrimination.”
The controversy is the latest skirmish in a long-running battle over the role of private schools — often called independent schools — in Vermont’s educational ecosystem.
In many rural parts of the state, students can receive taxpayer money to pay their tuition at independent schools. Private schools that can receive public tuition money are known as approved independent schools. As of the 2021-22 school year, roughly 4% of Vermont’s roughly 80,000 students attended approved independent schools.
Act 1 established a working group to recommend ways to incorporate “the history, contributions, and perspectives of ethnic groups and social groups” into Vermont classrooms. Last year, the working group presented board members with a 26-page draft of updated equity rules, which aimed to strengthen anti-discrimination measures and incorporate ethnic studies content into school instruction.
The group recommended that the new rules apply to both public and approved independent schools. But in May, the State Board of Education decided that the new rules would apply only to public schools.
Vermont has two sets of educational rules, one that applies to public schools and one that applies to private ones, the board said, and the working group drafted changes only to the former, not the latter.
So earlier this year, the board began updating the independent school rules, too.
“We were still sensitive to the fact that you know, you’ve got Act 1, you’ve got these principles, everyone agrees that they’re good principles,” said Jennifer Deck Samuelson, chair of the State Board of Education. “And so we thought the cleaner way to address that was to reopen” the independent school rules.
But that process has since stoked controversy. At the State Board of Education meeting last Friday, some lawmakers and public school advocates accused board members of creating a weaker set of standards for private schools than for their public counterparts.
In an Aug. 16 letter, a coalition of the state’s organizations of superintendents, school boards, principals and the teachers union decried what they said were “weak accountability standards” and pointed to rules that would apply to public schools but not private ones, including provisions dealing with school materials, student assessments, and reporting academic data.
Officials from the state’s Human Rights Commission and Office of Racial Equity also expressed concerns that the drafting of the rules — which took place over the past month — had been too swift, and that scheduling and language barriers may have prevented members of the public from participating.
But a group of private school leaders, as well as three other lawmakers, pushed back on those criticisms and defended the board.
Independent schools supported the equity goals of the law, and by suggesting otherwise, the public school coalition was making a “troubling” and “irresponsible mischaracterization,” the heads of four prominent private schools wrote.
“We absolutely wholeheartedly endorse the intentions and thinking behind all of these rules,” Andrew Lane, director of Sharon Academy’s middle school and a member of the executive committee of the Vermont Independent Schools Association, said in an interview. “And so we wholeheartedly endorse the work that the State Board of Ed is doing to adopt these new rules.”
Rep. Kelly Pajala, I-Londonderry, said in an Aug. 18 email to the board that public school advocates’ criticisms were “inflammatory” and “unacceptable.”
“Keep calm and carry on,” she wrote.
Sen. Brian Campion, D-Bennington, also wrote in support of the board’s work. In an email last week, Campion thanked the board members and expressed faith in its process.
“From what I have observed, the State Board is going above and beyond what the statute requires with your proposed rulemaking,” he wrote.
Campion is the chair of the Senate Committee on Education, which has been at odds with the House Committee on Education and public school administrators over regulation of private schools.
Samuelson, chair of the state Board of Education, said the board’s work in drafting the rules is only the beginning of the official monthslong rulemaking process, which involves multiple opportunities for the public to weigh in.
The goal is to standardize pro-equity language in both sets of rules, she said, adding that differences between the two were likely due to differences in how public and private schools operate and are governed. Both sets of rules would ultimately have the same anti-discrimination protections, she said.
“The rules are not final yet, by a long shot,” she said.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated how many lawmakers commented in defense of the state Board of Education.
