This year’s legislative session was dominated by one issue in particular: school district consolidation aimed at education reform.
But lawmakers in the House and Senate also spent hours of committee work on other consequential education bills. Legislation around chronic absenteeism, immigration protocols in schools and pre-kindergarten school choice for Northeast Kingdom residents have since been signed into law.
Other critical bills still await the governor’s signature. Still more proposed laws, intended to regulate education technology and give students voting powers on school boards, for example, never made it out of committee.
Some education leaders caution that new legislation will add more to school officials’ already full plates.
Chelsea Myers, executive director of the Vermont Superintendents Association, said the “sheer volume and pace” at which legislation is adopted each year has created an enormous workload for school district administrators. This year was no different.
She said her criticism isn’t a reflection of whether any particular bill has merit. “But there once again are a number of added responsibilities to the plates of school districts at a time when there were also large policy initiatives to restrict spending,” she said.
Here’s what bills made it into statute this session.
Immigration protocols
Lawmakers this session took their cue from Winooski, which last year became the first district in the state to enact a “sanctuary school” policy protecting students and their families from federal immigration enforcement actions.
The resulting legislation, Act 125, (or S.227), standardizes policy across Vermont’s 119 school districts and 52 governing units by restricting immigration agents’ access to school grounds and prohibiting school staff from collaborating with immigration authorities.
Gov. Phil Scott signed the bill into law last week. In a press release, he said the bill “sets a standard for how Vermont schools interact with federal immigration authorities and reinforces best practices many schools already have in place.”
“Our kids should be able to go to school without being afraid of what may happen, and this bill takes steps to make sure students have equal access to educational opportunities,” Scott said.
The bill requires that the superintendent of each district, or a designee, be the point person for immigration-related matters. That person would be prohibited from allowing an immigration enforcement officer onto school property without identification and a judicial warrant.
The legislation also prohibits schools from collecting or requesting information regarding the citizenship or immigration status of students or their family members.
Wilmer Chavarria, the Winooski School District superintendent who spearheaded his district’s immigration policies, said he was “relieved to know that Vermont chose to recognize the importance of protecting every student from targeting and fear, regardless of their family background.”
“This law effectively removes a target off our backs because we are no longer the only school district designated as a ‘sanctuary’ for immigrant students,” he said in a statement. “Now, this may mean a target on everyone’s backs, but in this day and age, the state should wear that target as a badge of honor.”
Truancy and absenteeism
Vermont’s laws around chronic absenteeism were dated, to say the least — they hadn’t changed since the 1960s. But lawmakers, in conjunction with the Vermont Agency of Education, set out to modernize the laws this session.
The result is Act 122 (H.930), signed into law by Scott last week, which fine-tunes the state’s truancy and absenteeism policies.
The bill will establish a model framework, based in part on policies in the Maple Run School District in St. Albans. Its leaders have prioritized finding at-risk students and directly engaging with them or their parents. By flagging warning signs, staff would intervene before the student begins missing school days.
Bill Kimball, the district’s superintendent, said he supported the intent of the bill. “We should have as much support for kids before they become chronically absent,” he said.
Toren Ballard, the Agency of Education’s policy and communications director, said the legislation “signals a shift in how Vermont approaches student attendance.”
“This bill provides the needed foundations for schools to track and manage attendance data using consistent definitions and shared expectations across Vermont,” he said.
Rates of truancy and absenteeism remain stubbornly high in the years since the Covid-19 pandemic. School districts recorded their lowest rates last year since the 2021-22 school year, with 25% of the Vermont student body considered chronically absent. But that’s still above the roughly 18% of Vermont students who were considered chronically absent during the 2019-20 school year.
Act 122 standardizes definitions of both absenteeism and truancy across Vermont’s 119 school districts. School districts previously used varying definitions of who would be considered truant or absent.
Schools should prioritize early identification, supportive intervention and meaningful family engagement “in order to produce consistent school attendance and student success,” the legislation reads.
Scott, in a statement accompanying his signature, said he appreciated the “collaborative work across agencies and departments on this bill, which will help us reverse the chronic absenteeism trend we’re seeing in Vermont.”
Essex County pre-K
A new law with limited geographic reach, Act 124 (S.214), offers some relief for parents in the Northeast Kingdom’s Essex County.
There, parents have few options when it comes to finding a pre-K program for their children. But the one-page bill signed into law last week amends the state’s laws to allow school districts in Essex County to pay tuition to send pre-K students to New Hampshire schools and programs.
Local advocates and school leaders during testimony this session said this will offer a lifeline for a handful of parents who will now be able to send their 3- and 4-year old children to programs across the Connecticut River and have their school districts pay the tuition.
PCBs
House lawmakers began this session intent on ending an expensive program to test Vermont schools for airborne polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.
By the end of the session, however, lawmakers instead moved to extend the program’s original 2027 deadline for testing.
PCBs, used in some building materials prior to 1980, are considered a known carcinogen. Vermont, with among the oldest schools, on average, in the country, began to test schools for PCBs in 2021. But the cost of the testing program became far more expensive than initially envisioned.
The legislation, H.542, would delay the deadline for schools to test their buildings for PCBs to 2035. The bill also creates a fund that contemplates the possibility of future settlement money recovered by the state via litigation.
Litigation filed by Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark, filed in 2023 against PCB manufacturer Monsanto, remains in the early phase prior to trial. A number of states have successfully settled cases against Monsanto around similar allegations of PCB exposure, including neighboring New Hampshire.
