Sen. Seth Bongartz, D-Bennington, the Senate Education Committee chair, introduced a school consolidation proposal Tuesday that would create a two-year on-ramp period for school districts to voluntarily merge.
Bongartz’s map overlays 11 new supervisory unions over the state’s existing supervisory unions, and seeks to halve the state’s 119 school districts and the 52 governing units that oversee them.
To achieve that, the proposal offers a brief period for school districts and supervisory districts to voluntarily merge before the state’s new education funding formula kicks in in 2030. The state could then force mergers after the end of the two-year period, Bongartz said.
Bongartz’s proposal is the second to emerge this session, and offers a very different vision for consolidation than its counterpart in the House.
Earlier this month, Rep. Peter Conlon, D-Cornwall, the House Education Committee chair, introduced a proposal that would consolidate the state’s school districts into 27 supervisory districts, each with student populations between 2,000 and 4,000.
The dueling proposals highlight the differing philosophies the two chairs are taking to advance education reform. The proposals diverge around supervisory unions versus supervisory districts — the two different governing and administrative models overseeing the state’s 119 school districts.
Supervisory unions oversee school districts with different operating structures, including non-operating districts, which don’t offer residents any schools but use their budgets to enroll those children in other public and private schools. Other districts may only operate grades K-8 but send their high school students elsewhere. Supervisory districts, in contrast, offer a more uniform structure for participating school districts.
Bongartz’s map seeks to preserve many of the unique aspects of Vermont’s education system, be it the state’s split supervisory district and supervisory union structures, or its school choice system and use of non-operating districts that send students to other public or private schools.
Bongartz described his proposal as offering a path toward consolidation that was “not draconian, insofar as it’s not trying to force down into 15, 20 districts overall. It’s going to get to 60 or less.”
The proposal would fall short of Act 73’s prescriptions to create 10 to 25 larger districts.
“You heard a lot of testimony from rural Vermont about not wanting to lose their voice,” he told committee members. “You heard a lot about, from districts that are non-operating, how important that non-operating status is.”
Preserving the supervisory union structure, he said, would “accommodate districts that are not exactly alike.”
The proposal is less conclusive on the state’s more populated areas. At least a dozen existing supervisory districts in Chittenden County, and parts of Franklin, Lamoille and Addison counties, are grouped together in a single district under the proposal. Bongartz said the goal is to reduce the number of districts there by half through voluntary mergers.
Conlon’s proposal, meanwhile, would end non-operating districts, discard supervisory unions in favor of supervisory districts and introduce an updated statutory framework around Vermont’s school choice system.
Bongartz on Wednesday said his proposal takes into account “just how different the needs are around the state.”
Still, he said, “there’s a lot of details to this that we need to talk about and think through.”
Plenty of questions arose in committee discussion Tuesday: How many schools would a superintendent be expected to oversee? What happens if districts merge and then the state deems them too small? How many board members would be on the new supervisory union boards overseeing merged districts?
Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden Southeast, aired concerns around supervisory unions’ ability to coordinate resources around renovating or building regional school buildings.
Under the supervisory union structure, school districts operate their own school buildings and school boards are responsible for infrastructure repairs or renovations.
A school district operating grades K-8 could, hypothetically, bond for repairs to its building, but not for a high school operated by another school district under that supervisory union, she said.
“I personally don’t think that’s a great model to move forward with regionality in high schools especially — to allow too big of a range of how they all govern themselves and operate and vote for things,” Hinsdale said.
She also questioned what guardrails would be in place around Bongartz’s proposed voluntary mergers.
“If I think of Chittenden County and who wants to merge versus what’s best for the kids, or what’s best for the equity of the system overall, those tend to be different,” Hinsdale said. “This is a big gray map blob, but if we just said, ‘Run at each other,’ it’s not generally fair to the kids all the time.”
Bongartz on Wednesday noted that his proposal was merely a draft and put it forward, as Conlon did, to get the conversation going.
“I also want to say, off the bat, this map is, by definition, not right,” he said. “It’s one person trying to make an effort to do what may make sense.”
