Two competing education reform proposals in the House and Senate, representing opposing philosophies on how Vermont’s education system should govern itself, appear bound for a collision course, with lawmakers already halfway through the legislative session.
Everyone appears to be in agreement that some version of reform is needed. House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, on Wednesday reiterated her commitment to moving forward with Act 73, which last year laid the groundwork for consolidating schools and moving to a new education finance formula.
That is contingent on first consolidating school districts, and Gov. Phil Scott, who signed Act 73 into law last July, has threatened to veto the state budget if lawmakers don’t settle on a plan.
But lawmakers have found themselves up against familiar disagreements and roadblocks — be it around school governance, school choice or private school tuition — issues that have clouded public education for years, if not decades.
Those issues are captured in the two diverging proposals floated by Sen. Seth Bongartz, D-Bennington, the Senate Education Committee chair, and Rep. Peter Conlon, D-Cornwall, the House Education Committee chair.
Bongartz’s proposal would preserve supervisory unions, a governance structure that offers individual school districts some independence while coordinating some services like special education under the supervisory union’s umbrella.
Conlon’s proposal would expand supervisory districts, which, in contrast, offer a more uniform structure for participating school districts, and offer more regional advantages around facilities planning and other shared services.
But the two committee chairs are in a stalemate. For Conlon, supervisory unions are “not a big departure from what we do already” and preserve inequities in the education system.
For Bongartz, supervisory districts would require total uniformity and would thus strip away local voice and local decision making.
“That’s a problem,” he said.
For political observers and those working in the public education system, it marks yet another go around in Vermont’s seemingly perpetual effort to reform its education system, including, most recently, efforts to voluntarily consolidate some school districts during 2015’s Act 46.
“If we’re not able to address the underlying issue (of supervisory unions versus supervisory districts) head on, then we’re unlikely to really move forward with any meaningful work on consolidation,” Neil Odell, a board member of Friends of Vermont Public Education, said during a House Education Committee meeting last month.
With crossover looming, and extensions likely for the two proposals, lawmakers will need to find consensus on a singular, declarative vision for a state education system — lest lawmakers spend another June and July in the Statehouse to adhere to Scott’s demand for reform this session.
“I think where there’s a will, there’s a way. I do see a path forward,” Scott said during a press conference Wednesday. “But it’s going to be uncomfortable.”
Progress will mean mending the fundamental tension between two competing plans for reform. Can lawmakers land on some agreement?
“We got right here, in Act 46. We did, we got right here and this is where we hit the wall and stopped,” Rep. Emily Long, D-Newfane, said during a House Education Committee meeting last month. “I actually think we can move beyond the wall. I really do.”
“I appreciate your optimism,” Conlon replied. “But it definitely is a wall.”
‘Spinning in the mud’
Conlon’s House proposal would feature a pronounced shift by discarding supervisory unions altogether and instead creating 27 supervisory districts, each with student populations between 2,000 and 4,000.
The proposal is being actively debated in committee and still has a long way to go before a final version. But he said it’s an attempt to create a single, shared governance model for the state’s education system.
“It’s very challenging, in many ways, to have districts where you have different ways of delivering education coexisting side by side. It creates legal challenges. It creates legal quagmires,” he said. “I was looking for something that would work across the board and across the state.”
Conlon’s proposal also notably tries to set parameters around school choice, and to find a “middle ground” between the state’s reliance on certain private schools (called independent schools under state law) and the need to have “the same rules apply to everybody in terms of how students are assigned to schools.”
Under the changes, school districts would assign designated public or private schools for each grade if there is no “reasonably accessible public school” operated by the district.
The proposal leaves room for school choice in areas that rely on it, Conlon said. But school districts would have to enter into a contract with receiving schools, be they public or private schools.
Under his proposal, public funds for private schools following students in high school grades would be limited to the state’s four historical academies: St. Johnsbury Academy, Lyndon Institute, Burr & Burton Academy and Thetford Academy, Conlon said.
Bongartz in an interview said he “fundamentally disagrees” with Conlon’s proposal, and called it a “top-down, one-size-fits-all” approach.
“That’s just not the way Vermont works,” he said.
He also called the new parameters around independent schools a nonstarter, and said parameters around independent schools were settled when lawmakers finalized limiting public dollars to 18 schools under Act 73.
Bongartz’s Senate proposal takes the opposite approach by preserving much of how Vermont’s public education system already functions.
His 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.
Under his proposal, school districts would be given two years to merge voluntarily 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.
Supervisory districts would also be encouraged to merge in areas where they currently exist — mostly in Chittenden, Franklin, Addison and Lamoille counties.
His proposal keeps intact the state’s school choice system, which allows families in districts without a public school for certain grades to use public dollars to send their children to other public schools or private schools.
“The testimony that we have taken from rural Vermont — from the islands to the Kingdom down through parts of Orange County — make it really clear that tuitioning, for the 90 towns that have tuitioning, is fundamental to them, and of fundamental importance,” Bongartz said in an interview.
Eric Montbriand, the Wells Spring Unified Union School District chair, told the Senate Education Committee last month that supervisory unions were of the utmost importance for his region.
Supervisory unions, he said, “allow small, locally governed districts to collaborate and control costs without surrendering community voice.”
Conlon’s proposal, Montbriand said, “threatens both our long-standing school choice model and the supervisory union structure that allows small districts like ours to function effectively.”
Conlon, in an interview, acknowledged the divide between supervisory unions and supervisory districts, and said it was “the toughest nut to crack” on education reform.
But he is firm on supervisory districts, which he said are better positioned to adapt to declining enrollment, and better equipped to coordinate resources around renovating or building regional school buildings.
“There’s lots of folks who want (supervisory unions) just because they want to maintain as much local control as possible over their schools,” Colon said. “And there are those who want (supervisory unions) because it does allow for certain areas of Vermont to maintain parental choice.”
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.
“You can’t solve those problems very well with a (supervisory union) where everybody’s got their own board,” Conlon said.
Wendy Baker, Addison Central School District superintendent, has worked under both systems, and said that supervisory districts allow member districts to better allocate their resources.
“There are things we can do now as a district that help us to maximize everyone’s efforts into an outcome that is greater than the sum of our parts,” she said. “When functioning as a supervisory union, that becomes more difficult.”
But she stopped short of endorsing one or the other, noting that not all supervisory unions and supervisory districts operate the same. She said a larger issue is that neither proposal comes with financial modeling “that would give us a sense as to what the actual impact of either change would be on our kids.”
Nonetheless, the disagreements between the two systems “represents the essential tension that exists in the state.”
“As we approach mud season, we are absolutely spinning in the mud,” she said. “I think that’s something that, really, everybody who’s deeply involved in this feels right now.”
