It’s hard to find a subject more frustrating to Vermonters in recent years than education. Specifically, how to fund it, how to make it affordable, and how to ensure that all Vermont students have access to a high quality learning environment.
Today on Vermont Edition, we're joined by Vermont's education secretary, Zoie Saunders. We'll hear why the Scott administration is aiming to fundamentally change the way how schools are run in the state, including a massive consolidation of school districts, statewide standards for curriculum, changing how schools are funded, and more.
Full transcript of interview with Zoie Saunders
This interview was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Mitch Wertlieb: Secretary Saunders, first, let me start by asking what is the core essence of this new plan for education in Vermont, both in terms of funding and how schools would function, that is fundamentally different from what Vermonters know right now.
Zoie Saunders: Governor's proposal is an exciting opportunity for us to strengthen our public education system. As you noted in the introduction, our current education system is facing many challenges, and we've heard a call for bold leadership to think about how to redesign and strengthen our public education system. This proposal proposes three main policy levers, because we know that we need to look at this work holistically, because the challenges are so complex. So first and foremost, this proposal is about promoting educational quality, and in order to do that, we're going to be clear around establishing a core set of expectations for what we want all of our children to be able to benefit from. This plan is about ensuring that a child that lives in a rural community benefits from the same opportunities as a child that lives in a bigger town. And so to achieve that, we need to think about how we fund education and make sure that children that have similar needs receive similar resources in our current system. That's not the case, yet. The third part of this proposal is to think about governance, so we can also operate at scale and ensure that we can deliver a high quality education that is equitable across all communities of Vermont.
Mitch Wertlieb: Well, let's get to some specifics. I understand that there's about 119 districts right now in the state of Vermont, and this plan would have them come down to five. If I have this right, it's a consolidation effort here, and it would put more control in the hands of a state government with five large regional school boards. Is that part of the plan?
Zoie Saunders: The plan is really looking at getting to the optimum scale so that we can deliver educational quality in a way that is equitable. Our current system has a very complex governance structure. We have 52 supervisory unions under which there are 119 school districts. And this proposal moves us to a total of five districts. The idea for that is actually to be able to ensure that we are able to deliver the appropriate resources to all of our schools in our current construct, our districts often struggle to hire key roles, and they often struggle to have their specialized resources. So what this plan does is it enables us to get the right level of expertise in a region who can provide support to schools in ways that some school districts don't have those opportunities to access those really important resources.
More from Vermont Public: How does Vermont pay for schools? A video explainer and glossary of terms
Mitch Wertlieb: Well up till now, in terms of spending, let's talk about that different districts have had quite a lot of wiggle room to spend as they want. That has resulted in the property tax hikes that have upset so many Vermonters and led to a lot of no votes on school budgets last year. Under this new plan, how would districts receive the cash they need to meet student needs?
Zoie Saunders: This new plan proposes a foundation formula, and that formula establishes a base amount of funding to ensure that students are getting a very robust and well rounded education. And on top of that, there are weights, and that is making adjustments for need for students. Our current system is designed to promote taxpayer capacity, but that doesn't necessarily equate to students who have similar needs receive receiving the similar resources. And so we see that as an equity challenge currently, where we have different levels of spending in our districts, even though students might have the same needs. So this foundation formula is based on research and evidence and provides a very funding for robust educational delivery and accounts for additional need of students. So through this plan, it would be really ensuring that children benefit from those same resources across the state, no matter where they live or the wealth of their community.
Mitch Wertlieb: Can you tell us anything about how much money we can expect to see each district get, assuming the idea here is, as you said at the top, to distribute the cash supply equally?
Zoie Saunders: Absolutely. So this week, we'll be providing further details around what went into the calculation and get concrete on the actual funding. So all of those details will be shared later in the week, I can share more around the methodology for how we came to that amount.
It was really important to us that we focus this plan around educational quality and building a base funding amount that is generous and is ensuring that we can deliver a well rounded education. So what is built into that are some assumptions around what constitutes high-quality education and what districts and schools will need in terms of resources to deliver on that within the plan, there is flexibility for the districts to make adjustments based on needs of their students, but the methodology is designed to make sure that this is research based, that we can, as a state, guarantee appropriate resources to provide a range of educational services.
We did this work in consultation with the feedback we heard from our Listen and Learn tour. So as an agency, we traveled all across the state, and we asked Vermonters to help us define student success and also to prioritize those educational services that are most important to them. So we've accounted for that within the base funding to make sure that districts can offer a wide range of elective opportunities, that they can offer expanded early childhood education, further college and career exploration, and all of these things are prioritized in the plan, along with promoting teacher pay equity.
So this proposal is not just about funding. The proposal is about how we can ensure that our funding system delivers on our values Vermont and ensures a really high quality educational experience for every child. Because of that, there's it is complex, and there's multiple leverage to this proposal. So it's looking at funding, educational quality and governance. They're interconnected in this work, and what we've heard really clearly is that we can't just make small tweaks, that we really need to look at redesigning our system in a way to strengthen public education in Vermont so that we have world-class schools in every single community and are able to deliver an excellent education for every student.
Mitch Wertlieb: We've got quite a few calls to get to. Let's take one now from Paul, who's on the line in Bristol. Hi, Paul, what's your question for Secretary Saunders?
Paul: Well I don't necessarily have a question so much as I have some comments. I'm the executive chef of Mount Abraham Unified School District in Bristol, and one of the things I was concerned about was the disbanding of universal school meals. I expressed that in a letter in November back to Gov. Phil Scott's office, and I got a wonderful response that I felt was very nicely written. However, in the response, they said that they were not planning on changing the school meals at all, and here we are a month later, and that's the case now, and it removes a lot of opportunity for students too if you want to talk about, I hear a lot of equity and equality. Universal school meals is the most fundamental human right, not just a need that students benefit from. Every single student hands down, it increases participation by 90% in breakfasts and the kids have access to healthy meals in Vermont.
Mitch Wertlieb: I'm sorry to cut you off there, but I do I understand your point there, and I actually want to ask this question of Secretary Saunders here, because, as I understand it, Paul is correct, the universal meals program would be something dropped under this new plan. Is that a cost saving measure? Why is that program being dropped, as Paul said, it helps so many students in the state of Vermont?
Zoie Saunders: The governor's proposal is about ensuring, continuing to ensure that students receive public school meals if they are not able to afford it. So it's transitioning from universal school meals to a means-tested approach and making sure that those children that are in poverty can still receive free meals. Part of this proposal is looking at the overall approach, and certainly there are really tough decisions that will be made. Look at the General Assembly around how to prioritize funding.
More from Vermont Public: Gov. Phil Scott preaches fiscal restraint in his state budget proposal
As the governor indicated in his address, we know that taxpayers need relief, and so he has signaled a really strong intent to buy down the property taxes. And looking at where there are opportunities to reduce funding in certain programs to achieve that outcome, I expect that they'll continue to be further conversation as we look at the overall plan, and knowing that this is a very comprehensive approach, and we're facing a really challenging financial crisis now, and we'll need to be, you know, thoughtful and intentional around what choices are made to ensure that we can deliver a high quality education for every student.
Mitch Wertlieb: There are many other factors not directly related to education that nevertheless will likely influence the affordability factor. And I know that's a big part of this plan. We got this question from Siobhan in Granville, who writes, “The state took control of teacher health insurance, promising cost savings, and instead, those rates have been increasing by double digits each year, a cost which has been absorbed by the school budgets that the governor criticizes and paid for by property taxes. How does this plan offer any different option?”
Zoie Saunders: As we've traveled all across the state, we have heard that there's a lot of statewide pressures on our school budgets, and part of what this plan is designed to do is ensure that we can have more stabilization than our funding mechanism to really future proof our education system. So you've noted the high cost of health care, we also know that there are other influences that are impacting school budgets, and we need to make sure that we're developing a system that is really investing our dollars in ways that are going to have the best outcomes for students and can sustain some of the economic downturns and also shifts in funding that are beyond a local school district's control. Additionally, this plan is positioned within a broader context of our affordability challenges in the state of Vermont, and we're working really closely the agency of education with our other sister agency partners, and thinking about how to position the education plan within the context of some broader strategies that are being implemented to address the larger affordability challenges facing the state of Vermont.
Mitch Wertlieb: Let’s take another call from David, who's on the line in Duxbury, Hi, David, hi, and you've got a question for Secretary Saunders.
David: Yes, I heard on a VPR interview a couple months ago that the student to staff ratio in Vermont is the lowest in the nation, at three point at 3.6 students per staff. The next lowest was Maine at 4.8 obviously, that's the elephant in the room. The student to staff ratio has to be increased to make education affordable in Vermont. Your comments?
Zoie Saunders: When we compare Vermont to other states, we do have some of the lowest staff to student ratios in the country, and it's important, as we think about staffing, to put that in the broader context of our current workforce, the state of our current workforce. We have a lot of challenges in filling many of those positions across the state. Many of our schools are struggling to hire and retain teachers. Many of our districts are struggling to hire and retain principals and central office staff. So we know that we have some considerable challenges and being able to staff for these positions. We also know that we have a number of our teachers on provisional licenses.
So as we go into this broader conversation around you know how to staff our schools, it's important that we're intentional about and ensuring we have the right level of expertise at the right level of our system. And so that means ensuring that we can have high quality teachers in every classroom, ensuring that we have specialized educators who can provide support to multiple schools, and ensuring that there is that support also at the agency of education. So when we talk about this work, it's really critical that we're thinking about the best way to align our resources and ensure that we have the right educational support and staff at every level of our system, and that will be part of our of our ongoing work, and thinking about this plan being about achieving that opportunity for for students, and making sure that we get the right resources in the right places in our system, because we know we have a lot of vacancies. We know we have a lot of turnover, and this is an opportunity for us to through this plan ensure every child has access to high quality teacher in their classroom, along with specialized support within the region.
Mitch Wertlieb: Related to David's question, I think, has been, is consolidation of school districts, and you know that's long been a goal of Gov. Scott's well before this new plan was announced. But when it comes to a decision to close a small school or consolidate one district with another, how would that decision be made under this new plan?
Zoie Saunders: There's a distinction here between talking about governance at the school board level and talking about consolidation at the school level, when we're thinking about the larger districts, this is designed to promote more shared responsibility of a larger group of students, to enable us to promote equitable decision making and equitable policies. So a larger region creates that shared ownership, and it also allows us to create central office teams that are more robust and being able to deliver services to schools that currently may not be able to access those specialized supports. And then, when we think about consolidation at the school level, that's about building strong schools that are operating at a scale to deliver a range of educational opportunities.
Right now in the state of Vermont, we have some schools that can offer art and foreign language, and other schools that aren't able to do that. And the intent of this plan is to ensure that we have really strong schools that are able to deliver an array of high quality educational services and meet the whole needs of every child. And to achieve that, we need to be clear around defining our education quality and measures and also financial solvency and ensuring that a school is equipped to do that.
Considerations around consolidation are always really challenging, and we need to approach this work with students in mind. It's in shifting the focus around loss to what are the opportunities that students could gain through two schools combining in a way that gives them more resources to offer more for students. We also need to be really practical when we approach this work. We know that some of our schools are in communities that are very remote, and so we're going to be intentional around defining those schools that are small by necessity versus schools that are small by choice. And that will be a process that will establish very clear criteria and guardrails, and ultimately, will be involved community input in making those decisions to ensure that we can deliver on opportunities for students.
Mitch Wertlieb: Let me piggyback off that point, because we got this question from Stacy in Tunbridge, who says, “This plan removes local control in the end, how can this be avoided? People move to Vermont for local control and a more involved community for their schools. This removes that. Why can't we work this out? We want people to stay and move To Vermont, but this feels like just another reason for me to sell my property and move. I love Vermont, but this feels lacking in originality and an actual concept that can be laid out before a vote.” How would you respond to Stacy's concerns on local control?
Zoie Saunders: I think what's really wonderful about Vermont is we have such a strong commitment to education and believe in the high level of engagement of community members. This plan is designed to engage community members in very meaningful ways. So currently, we know that a lot of the decision-making when we talk about local control is around the budget, and unfortunately, much of that focus in the last couple of years has been around what do we have to cut? And it's sometimes very difficult at that local level to make those challenging decisions without the clear parameters.
And then what we see playing out in practice is that our higher needs communities tend to struggle the most to pass their budgets, and that often means that they're going to continue to cut more and more services. And the concern is that we continue with that current system, there will be a greater divide between the haves and the have-nots in our state, and this plan is designed to make sure that we're equitable with the way we resource our schools in terms of actual engagement.
There's a lot of opportunities for parents and community partners and caregivers to be engaged in their child's education. It's shifting from thinking about making those really tough budgeting decisions and focusing more around how do we align our resources and support to meet the needs of students? So there's really two key mechanisms within this plan to achieve that. One is at the school board level, there will be larger regions and ensuring that schools benefit from a larger set of resources and support than many districts are able to offer now. And then each school will have a School Advisory Council, which would engage community members and parents and caregivers and students in making decisions around that school. School Improvement Plan, so thinking about the best ways to implement strategies that are going to meet the needs of students.
And we think with this approach, it's really achieving the goal for Vermont of establishing a balance between unity and freedom. With the larger regions, we're able to achieve unity in terms of standard early goals, to ensure educational quality and equity for students that have a diverse set of needs, and then able to also at that very local level at the school to customize choices and programs to meet the needs of those students. So in effect, this plan is really designed to promote greater engagement at that local level on those decisions that I think really impacts students and teachers and parents on a daily basis.
Mitch Wertlieb: One more question for you, Secretary Saunders. The new formula proposes a statewide standard to coordinate what school curriculums would look like. What would those standards be? How would they be decided?
Zoie Saunders: We have a really good framework to start on in Vermont, we focused a lot on how we define educational quality. And through our listen and learn tour, we ask those very specific questions, how are you defining student success? What conditions are needed in order to promote academic excellence for every child? And then, how do we help to support from the Agency of Education, so we heard really clearly that there's a need for us to be more clear around those goals, and also for the agency to be able to provide clearer guidance and support and training as we move to achieving those high standards.
So over the next several months, I expect that we'll have a lot of robust conversations and getting concrete and those high leverage education quality standards and making sure that those are things that we think are most important to student outcomes. And with everything that we do at the agency, this work needs to be based on research and data-driven, and also takes into account some of the implementation considerations on the ground.
So I think this is an exciting opportunity for us to come together and really think concretely around education quality, and ultimately, when we're talking about quality and we're talking about equity, we're talking about the opportunities for students in our state and making sure that we are giving them a world class education, that they're able to really have a well rounded experience in their schools that allows them to achieve at high levels, and that challenges them with academic rigor, and also engages them in exploration around, you Know, the arts and college and career, and that is a really exciting opportunity for us as a state to get clarity on that so that we can focus our efforts and align our initiatives and our resources to make sure that every student can benefit from those experiences.
Note: This is a partial transcript of the conversation. To hear the rest of the show, including reactions to the plan from the head of Vermont’s teachers union, Don Tinney, and the executive director of the state’s Rural Education Collaborative, John Castle, as well as analysis from Vermont Public’s education reporter Lola Duffort, listen to the full audio provided above.
Broadcast live on Wednesday, Jan. 29 at noon; rebroadcast at 7 p.m.
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