Vermont’s private schools have long bristled at the notion that they cherry pick their students.
Those claims come from public education advocates, who say independent schools that benefit from taxpayer funds nevertheless turn away students with higher needs, burdening a financially stressed public system.
"When schools that receive public dollars are allowed to create policies and systems that prevent some students from accessing these opportunities, all students in the state suffer,” Chris Young, the president of the Vermont Principals’ Association, said in a recent press release.
That accusation is at the heart of a long and bitter dispute over Vermont’s voucher system, known as town tuitioning, which allows students in communities without schools to attend the public or private school of their choice.
It has typically been lodged absent any hard data, so Vermont Public requested enrollment figures from the Vermont Agency of Education. An analysis of data for the 2023-24 school year, the most recent available, suggests that the state’s private schools, in general, did enroll students on individualized education programs at lower rates than public schools in Vermont.
But there were important exceptions to that pattern — and some private schools even took students on IEPs at slightly higher rates than the statewide average of 17% for public schools.
Most tuition students in Vermont who choose a private option go to one of four schools: Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester, Lyndon Institute, Thetford Academy or St. Johnsbury Academy. Often referred to as the “historic academies,” they have generally been viewed as the de-facto public high schools in their regions.
Three of the historic academies — Burr and Burton, Lyndon, and Thetford — enrolled publicly-tuitioned students on IEPs at similar rates to public schools.
However, the fourth — St. Johnsbury Academy — did not. Under 9% of its publicly-funded students were on IEPs that year, according to state data.
That puts it more in line with the rest of Vermont’s private schools, excluding therapeutic schools, where under 7% of those students were on IEPs.
Terms of admission
At St. Johnsbury Academy, leaders insisted that the school was basically open to all publicly-funded students. And they argued that perhaps the school’s lower rate of students on IEPs was a sign of success.
Mat Forest, St. Johnsbury Academy’s director of student services, said that services offered to anyone, including literacy specialists, could be allowing many students to be successful without requiring a formal IEP.
“The goal was to provide intervention so that they wouldn't necessarily need a plan,” he said.
Asked to discuss the school’s admission procedures, St. Johnsbury Academy headmaster Sharon Howell referred a reporter to the school’s website.
The site, while generally silent on standards for admission, did inform applicants they would need to submit their entire school record — including any intelligence scores, grades, and diagnostic or psychological evaluations — before being considered.
Howell, when asked about this, said, “If it is not clear on our website that we take all comers who are publicly tuitioned, it should be.” The only thing required of publicly-funded students to enroll, she said, was “that they show up and not be violent.”
“The SJA of the past might have excluded students, but the SJA of the present welcomes every publicly funded student who comes to us,” she added.
The academy’s website was subsequently scrubbed of the paragraph telling prospective students to submit their complete school record.
A grand bargain
Public education advocates and independent schools have been fighting for years about what guardrails private schools should accept as a condition for receiving public tuition money. In 2022, the two sides arrived at a grand bargain on the subject of special education.
Private schools that receive vouchers were required to accept students with disabilities. Cammie Naylor is a staff attorney with Vermont Legal Aid’s disability law project, which helped draft the rules. She said she isn’t surprised an uneven distribution of special education students persists.
“I wish I was surprised to see this data. Unfortunately, I'm not. I think we still have a lot of work to do in Vermont,” she said.
Under the new rules, Naylor noted, private schools retained the right to set enrollment criteria. Schools can still reject a student with poor grades or discipline problems, which could preclude certain students with disabilities from getting admitted, even if schools don’t explicitly reject students because they are on special education plans.
“I wish I was surprised to see this data. Unfortunately, I'm not. I think we still have a lot of work to do in Vermont."Cammie Naylor, Vermont Legal Aid
But she also emphasized that special education law gives a student’s home district a key role in deciding where a student on an IEP is placed. A student’s district could also be the one deciding that a private school isn’t right for a child, she said. Further complicating the picture, families sometimes seek out private schools specifically because they no longer want their child on an IEP, she said.
And Naylor and other advocates say the 2022 rules appear to have made a real difference. Karen Price, co-director of family support and education at the Vermont Family Network, said the number of calls from families of students with disabilities struggling to enroll their children at independent schools had “greatly diminished.”
“We used to hear from parents frequently a couple of years ago about the barriers independent schools put up — that services their child needed weren't available, or waiting lists that their child never moved up on,” she said.
Independent school leaders also say it could be a while before we see the full impact of the new rules, which also reduced regulatory barriers for independent schools to enroll special education students.
And they also argue, as St. Johnsbury did, that more informal supports available in independent schools could be making IEPs less important.
Tim Newbold, the president of the Vermont Independent Schools Association, noted, for example, that a lot of private schools in Vermont are quite small.
“Students don't necessarily end up needing [an IEP] because of the small environment — because, again, a lot of the interventions are a small environment,” he said.
Level playing field?
The state’s education agency is much smaller than it once was, and positions that have remained have been beset with vacancies and turnover. For years, lawmakers, advocates and education officials alike have complained that the state is struggling to track what is happening in Vermont’s schools.
People on all sides of the tuition debate stressed the need for more data and expressed frustrations with the state’s limited ability to provide it.
The state also supplied information about where low-income students were enrolling, but Vermont Public decided not to use that data after discovering major discrepancies between them and different reports published by the agency.
“These data concerns are real, and we need to do better, because we can't evaluate our public policy decisions if we don't have accurate data to work on,” said state Rep. Rebecca Holcombe, a Democrat from Norwich.
But the former Vermont education secretary said she had confidence in the special education figures reported by the agency. And she was also skeptical that less formal support services, or an effective use of early intervention, could explain the “very big discrepancies” between schools.
A much more likely culprit, she argued, are the subtle ways admission and enrollment practices can weed out students, or deter them from applying in the first place. Private schools, she noted, can still require things like teacher recommendations, site visits, application fees, and test scores before admitting a student.
“These are all things that put an extra burden on the child and extra burden on the parent, but also create a black box in which decisions are made about appropriateness,” she said.
And private schools can — and sometimes do — charge families tuition above the publicly-funded voucher amount.
“It's not a level playing field, right? Then we're choosing kids based on ability to pay,” she said.
Holcombe’s district is home to Thetford Academy, the only independent school in Vermont that has accepted designation from a town. The Thetford school district has promised to send all of its high-school-aged students to the academy, and in exchange the private school has promised to accept all publicly-funded students from Thetford. The school’s admission policies explicitly state that it will not ask whether a student has a disability until after the child has been enrolled.
Until four years ago, Thetford also accepted designation from the town of Strafford. It stopped, according to local media, because Strafford kept giving parents who wanted them waivers to go elsewhere instead.
Thetford found itself serving a disproportionate number of students with special needs, according to Holcombe. For her, there’s a lesson there in what happens when more privileged families are given the option to self-select into more exclusive environments.
“What we're seeing is that some tuition towns seem to be very dependent on a subset of schools to serve their kids with more significant learning needs,” Holcombe said. “And some other schools aren't sharing in that same commitment to the community.”
