A proposal from House leaders has reopened a philosophical divide that threatens to swallow the Vermont Legislature’s push for historic education reforms.
Last summer, Democratic lawmakers and Republican Gov. Phil Scott enacted Act 73, which seeks to streamline school governance and curb education spending. But that compromise succeeded only because it left the most controversial aspects of reform almost entirely unresolved.
The future of Act 73 hinges on lawmakers approving a plan this year that would consolidate school districts into much larger units. They’ll also have to decide what role independent schools play in the new system.
“People don’t want to be forced to merge."Milton Rep. Leland Morgan
Draft language presented by Cornwall Rep. Peter Conlon this week represents the first concrete attempt to answer those questions. The plan from the Democratic chair of the House Education Committee, however, has already found the third rails that killed previous reform efforts.
School governance
Conlon’s plan — he says it’s meant to be a conversation starter — would force Vermont’s 119 school districts to merge into 27 units, most of which would have between 2,000 and 3,000 students. It’s a more modest consolidation proposal than the one envisioned in Act 73, which calls for about a dozen districts of between 4,000 and 8,000 students.
Conlon said his concept is more in line with what superintendents and other education officials say is the sweet spot for maximizing operational efficiencies. And he said it would maintain some local decision-making power while still allowing for economies of scale.
Lawmakers across the political spectrum, however, are reluctant to cede local control to decentralized boards that don’t include representatives from all the towns they govern.
“People don’t want to be forced to merge,” said Milton Rep. Leland Morgan, a Republican who serves on the House Education Committee. “What the people of the state of Vermont want, I think, is more important than most anything else.”
Glover Rep. Leanne Harple, a Democrat who’s also on the education committee, said her constituents are speaking in a unified voice.
“People are really concerned that as we lose local control, people are going to make decisions for their towns that are not right for their towns, like shutting down their schools,” Harple said.
Many rural lawmakers fear that closing small schools will exacerbate the demographic trends that triggered this latest push to “right size” Vermont’s education system. The number of students in Vermont has dropped by 25% over the past 20 years. The staff-to-student ratio in Vermont schools is by far the lowest in the nation.
“If we move our schools out of our rural communities, I wonder if we’re actually ensuring declining enrollment in all those areas for the rest of time,” Harple said.
Resistance to forced mergers isn’t the only obstacle to reform this year, because the proposed governance structures poke the hornet’s nest that is school choice.
School choice
About 90 communities in Vermont are in school districts that don’t actually have schools to serve some or all grade levels. Parents in those “nonoperating” towns currently have a wide range of options of where to send their children, including independent schools.
Conlon’s proposal would effectively end school choice in those communities, and instead empower district boards to designate up to three schools that students could attend.
It’s part of a push by anti-choice lawmakers who say the flow of public tax dollars to private institutions threatens to hollow out public education infrastructure.
“If you have an area where you are depopulating public schools by offering choice,” Conlon said, “that’s not creating a strong, robust education system.”
Lawmakers such as Williamstown Rep. Joshua Dobrovich, a Republican on the House Education Committee, said choice is the hallmark of local education for many parents in his district.
“I have yet to get one email that says, ‘Reduce the amount of choice that we currently have. Go to no choice,’” Dobrovich said.
Tim Newbold, president of the Vermont Independent Schools Association, said Conlon’s proposal would be a death knell for many of his members.
“I don’t think many independent schools would make it through it,” he said.
Proponents of choice have a strong defender in the Senate, where Bennington County Sen. Seth Bongartz, a Democrat, chairs the education committee. Bongartz said pro-choice lawmakers made a major concession last year when they agreed to reduce the number of independent schools eligible for public funding by more than half — from 46 to 18. Conlon’s proposal, he said, “is going to be a major issue.”
“I think that issue in my view is kind of settled,” Bongartz said. “The 18 independent schools get to continue and be successful.”
Conlon told members of his committee that success on education reform will require every lawmaker in Montpelier to make decisions that are unpopular among voters back home.
“I would say there’s probably something in all of this for everyone of us to look at as not just a political pothole but a real political problem,” he said.
In an interview with Vermont Public this week, he said he’s yet to detect any movement toward consensus:
“Maybe there’s a middle ground there that I don’t see yet.”
