“It was actually not that complicated in the end.”
That’s how Senate Education Committee Chair Seth Bongartz, D-Bennington, described the final steps toward the Legislature passing the year’s landmark education reform bill Friday.
While the final steps for H.955 may have felt simple, the months leading up to this week were anything but.
This legislative session was defined by a stalemate between Gov. Phil Scott and legislative leaders about how to contain costs and find efficiencies of scale in Vermont’s public education system.
After negotiators reached a compromise last week, the final version of the bill does not force school districts to merge. Instead, the bill outlines a complex but fast-moving process for facilitating voluntary district consolidation. As outlined in the bill, committees tasked with figuring out potential mergers will begin meeting this fall. Districts are to vote on mergers on Town Meeting Day in 2028.
All year, Scott said he would veto any bill that didn’t include forced mergers, threatening to keep lawmakers in session into the summer unless they backed a bill he’d sign. Some Democratic legislative leaders had themselves raised the possibility of mandated mergers before declaring the idea politically impossible. The Republican governor agreed to drop the demand in exchange for speeding up the state’s path to a new education funding formula and adding new measures to try to limit school district spending in the meantime.
Friday, H.955 passed the Senate without a roll-call vote, but the legislation had broad support from Democrats and Republicans. In the House, lawmakers voted 125-10 to pass the bill.
The many supporters of the legislation argue it takes a tempered approach to reform, heeding Vermonters’ call to let them decide how — or if — to consolidate their school districts and schools.
“H.955 delivers a transformation plan focused on a strong public education system that expands opportunities for our kids, keeps decisions local and will save money,” House Majority Leader Rep. Lori Houghton, D-Essex Junction, said on the House floor.
Critics, meanwhile, have said the bill will unfairly target small rural schools regardless of whether they operate efficiently. Still others say the bill doesn’t do enough to reduce taxes immediately.
“The property tax burden of my community was their No. 1 concern,” Rep. Jed Lipsky, I-Stowe, said on the House floor, explaining his opposition. “This bill’s timeline does not move fast enough to reduce the costs to Stowe’s homesteaders and other taxpayers.”
Lawmakers and the governor hope that voluntarily consolidated school districts and the new funding formula — which will provide money based on districts’ student population and how expensive those students are to educate — will prevent property tax spikes in the future. Currently, districts and their voters, rather than the state, have the primary authority to decide how much they spend.
Driven by increased school spending, property tax bills in Vermont have risen more than 40% in five years.
Before a new funding formula comes to pass, lawmakers want to constrain spending by financially penalizing more districts whose spending exceeds a certain threshold above the state per-student average. That threshold will lower year after year, starting at 18% above average spending per student and phasing down to 12.5% above average in fiscal year 2032 and beyond.
Lawmakers hope future school districts will have at least 2,000 students, and the bill describes a special process to facilitate mergers for “orphaned” districts with fewer than 750 students. Currently, Vermont’s largest district has about 3,600 students, according to Vermont Agency of Education data, with many districts well under 1,000. The legislation will encourage districts to merge with state oversight and school construction aid incentives.
In addition, the bill creates cooperative education service areas. These regional bodies will allow multiple school districts to share resources such as special education services, information technology and administrative services.
The compromise deal led the Senate to overwhelmingly pass a version of the reform bill earlier this week. The House opted to finish work on the legislation in a joint House and Senate conference committee, which wrapped up its work near midnight Thursday.
Lawmakers and the governor have their work cut out for them in the years ahead if they want the path envisioned by H.955 to come to fruition. Not least, legislators will need to finalize the details of the new education funding formula, which is scheduled to go into effect in July 2029.
