The special panel tasked with proposing new school district maps as part of a mammoth effort to overhaul Vermont’s K-12 system has officially begun its work.
The 11-member body created under Act 73 met for the first time Friday morning at the state office complex in Waterbury. It must produce up to three new statewide maps for state lawmakers to consider when they reconvene in January.
“This is a two-year work job being consolidated into four months,” Rep. Edye Graning, a Jericho Democrat who was elected the panel’s co-chair, said Friday. “And so we will do the best we can with the time that we have.”
Vermont currently has 118 school districts organized into 51 supervisory unions. (Supervisory unions are umbrella school districts with a single central office.) The smallest district has fewer than 200 students, and the largest just over 4,000.
Act 73 envisions radical change: districts with between 4,000 to 8,000 students, although the law allows some flexibility.
Redistricting will not be politically easy. Communities in Vermont have long guarded their local control, and people, particularly in rural areas, are deeply anxious that larger districts will shutter their smaller schools. District lines have also historically dictated where vouchers are used, and school choice is a perennially divisive topic in Vermont politics.
Politics aside, there are also practical difficulties. The task force will have to consider the state’s hilly geography, rural roads, and the deteriorating condition of many of its existing schools.
Friday’s meeting was mostly dedicated to housekeeping. Members unanimously chose Graning and Sen. Martine Larocque Gulick, a Chittenden County Democrat, to co-chair the body. The panel received a walkthrough of an interactive, online school district building tool created by the state’s Center for Geographic Information. And staff gave the group an overview of the law.
But task force members also talked about their hopes and dreams for the reform effort at hand — as well as their skepticism.
If the consolidation envisioned in Act 73 actually comes to fruition, the result would be “the biggest governance reform in 100-and-something years,” Rep. Rebecca Holcombe, a Norwich Democrat, told her colleagues on the task force. But Holcombe, who steered Vermont through its last school district consolidation effort a decade ago as its then-secretary of education, also cast doubts on the state’s capacity to handle the task ahead, and ticked through other reform initiatives that had run aground for lack of follow-through.
“It's pretty clear we are not capable of doing what we already have on our plate,” she said.
While lawmakers must adopt new district lines in order for most of the law’s reforms to come into effect, they do not necessarily have to adopt one of the task force’s recommended configurations. The Legislature is free to accept what the redistricting panel sends their way, tweak it — or ignore it altogether.
Sen. Scott Beck told his colleagues on the task force Friday that he did not expect the Legislature to adopt one of their proposals without “a lot of modification.”
“We're making a recommendation here. We're not imposing anything on the state of Vermont,” the Senate minority leader and Caledonia County Republican said.
After the meeting wrapped up, Larocque Gulick said her expectations are “probably realistic and low” that lawmakers would accept what the task force sends their way, or that they’ll even agree on any new maps at all.
“It's going to take courage and it's going to take grit and resolve with all of our legislator colleagues, and that is going to be hard in an election year with so much at stake,” she said.
The task force’s membership, minutes, and meeting materials are accessible online on the Vermont Agency of Administration’s website. Its next meeting date has not yet been set.
