This commentary is by Eric Peterson of Bennington. He was a longtime columnist for the Bennington Banner and Berkshire Eagle and has also written columns for the Albany Times Union.
As the landmark education bill struggled mightily to be born in the Legislature, the question became whether it could be Phil Scott’s crowning achievement.
Gov. Scott is serving his fifth two-year term as governor of Vermont. Only in New Hampshire and Vermont do governors serve two-year terms, the other 48 states are all four years. It means a Vermont governor only has one year in which to enact his/her major program before having to run yet again for reelection.
A comprehensive bill can take the full two years. Vermont’s legislators work part-time. A session lasts five or six months. There will continue to be meetings during the summer but the whole legislature won’t return to Montpelier until the new year.
The myriad problems of Vermont’s schools have worried governors, legislators, teachers and parents for many years. This year there was finally a serious attempt to vault the state’s education system into the 21st century.
Scott has been a successful and popular governor. His style is often to respond to the legislature. He softens the Democratic majority’s policy prescriptions to make them semi-palatable to the Legislature’s Republicans and to Vermont’s conservative voters.
Scott has been a “make no waves” kind of chief executive. He rarely leads with proposals with his personal vision of a Vermont of the future. The two-year terms are an encumbrance to serious, thoughtful planning for the future. But so is Scott’s seeming reticence to lead.
This is not entirely the governor’s fault. Democrats have been Vermont’s majority party for years, although they did lose their supermajority in the state senate last year. Scott is also a member of a vanishing breed, a moderate Republican. The national party has moved not so much rightward as Trumpward.
There was a time when Green Mountain State Republicans such as Aiken, Stafford and Snelling (More Dick than Barbara) were not entirely out of step with other Republican officeholders throughout the country. The Vermonters were often more cordial and less dogmatic while remaining small-government conservatives. In today’s political world Governor Scott continues the Vermont Republican traditions and finds himself basically adrift in sensible Vermont.
The work is not complete, and both the legislators and the governor admit that. Work is expected to continue through the next session. Vermont parents and school board members will have their say over the next several months as they read about the plan and talk to your representatives and their neighbors.
Rep. Jonathan Cooper is a bright, impressive young first-term member of the Vermont House representing Pownal, Readsboro, Searsburg, Stamford and Woodford. Cooper, a Democrat, is a regional planner with two master’s degrees. He is the father of a young student.
In an email exchange with Rep. Cooper, I asked him about his first session as a representative and questioned him about issues including the education bill. Representing several small towns, he is alert to the many problems facing rural communities with dwindling numbers of students.
In Rep. Cooper’s district there are two schools with a warm place in my heart: Pownal Elementary School and Woodford Hollow Elementary School.
The theatre arts high school class I co-taught in Bennington created a program at Woodford Hollow in which our students worked with their students. I also directed the school play, an after-school program, at Pownal School for several years.
The faculty at both schools were dedicated and their students were bright and enthusiastic. It made me a strong proponent of bringing high school and elementary school students to work together and an admirer of the close bonds students make in small schools.
Mr. Cooper voted in favor of the education bill saying, “I voted for the fairness and accountability within the bill: fairness in how Vermont’s kids benefit from our education resources, and accountability in how Vermont’s education system meets our students’ needs … We have lost almost 50 percent of our public-school population in the last 40 years, but the administrative presence is even larger than it was back then.”
Rep. Cooper is correct and that, in a nutshell, is the problem. Fewer students, larger expenses.
Cooper referenced the Vermont Supreme Court Brigham ruling that it was unfair and unconstitutional to let each town or school district decide how much it wanted to spend on its own. “At that time, “Cooper wrote, “a student in the highest spending town received 2.5 times the education funding of a student in the lowest spending town.”
But by 2025, Cooper wrote, “A student in Vermont’s highest-spending town received more than three times the education funding of a student in the lowest-spending town.”
Cooper wrote that legislators were “clear-eyed” that more work remained to be done, and that Gov. Scott’s team was involved “every step of the way” and that the number of Republican senators and representatives is proof of that.
Jonathan Cooper is a young man with a bright future. One can hope he continues his legislative career well beyond his first term.
It might also be beneficial if Gov. Scott decides that getting the education bill right and finished will be his goal. That may take sacrifice.
Announcing before or early in the next legislative session that all his attention will be on preparing the Vermont education system for the next 30 years will be his overriding concern. Therefore, he will not seek a sixth term as governor.
That would allow him to go out a winner and to be long remembered as the governor who greatly improved the state’s education model. It will also allow Vermont to acquire new eyes and fresh thinking for other challenges facing the Green Mountain State.
