Vermont's Legislature passed a law last year that set into motion major changes to the state's education system, from class size minimums to a statewide education funding formula. But the legislature is still debating whether and how to consolidate Vermont's school districts.
Department of Education Secretary Zoie Saunders joined Vermont Edition to discuss her priorities for this legislative session.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Mikaela Lefrak: Vermont has been debating school district consolidation for decades. Legislative leaders have not clearly stated that they are still committed to redistricting, despite passing Act 73 last year. We are three weeks into the legislative session. How confident are you feeling that this is the year that it's going to happen, that we are going to see a new school district map for the state of Vermont?
Zoie Saunders: I'll start by emphasizing that many legislators and educators and community members do agree with education transformation and Act 73. That's how the bill was passed last legislative session. Act 73 is the result of bipartisan compromise and shared objectives to achieve two twin purposes. One is to improve educational quality for our students, and the second is to bend the cost curve. [During the] governor's State of the State, [he] highlighted some of the cost implications, but the rest of his speech focused entirely on the opportunity ahead of us to improve educational quality and to ensure that we can deliver an educational system that is equitable for all students across our state. We know that currently, that is not the case. Depending on where students live in Vermont, they have different access to opportunities and educational resources. I think Vermonters really believe strongly in fairness, and the principles put forward in Act 73 allow us to move forward, to build a public education system and to strengthen our offerings in a way that is equitable for all students across Vermont. That's the opportunity we have ahead to strengthen our system to be the best education system in the country. It's exciting that we have this forward momentum. I would say to your question about this legislative session and the level of interest in moving forward, I feel that we are moving in that direction. I'm confident that the General Assembly has what they need to move forward with redistricting decisions which are put into place to ensure that dollars are going further to impact students. It's all about quality and equity of the way that we spend our significant investment in education to make sure it's getting to all corners of our state in every classroom, and that students are benefiting from an excellent education. The first three weeks of the session, many of the committees have spent time inviting testimony, inviting experts from across the Vermont and educators to weigh in. I think they've been responsible with the approach they've taken the first three weeks. I'm confident that they'll move forward with focusing on the maps, because it is an important element to delivering on the goals and the quality expectations that have been outlined within Act 73.
Mikaela Lefrak: You say you're confident that they're going to move forward with focusing on the maps. That's not really the sense that I got when I was speaking to legislators on the first day of the legislative session at the beginning of this month. We spoke to Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth, as well as Senate Minority Leader Scott Beck, and both of them seemed hesitant to throw their whole weight behind the concept of getting a new school district map this legislative session. Scott Beck said "maps were always a heavy lift for the legislature to do." I want to play you a quick clip of Phil Baruth and then get your thoughts.
Sen. Phil Baruth: For me, the important piece in Act 73 was the foundation formula. The foundation formula, the governor's team argued, needed uniform districts, fewer of them. We have 119 now. They were arguing that we needed, let's say 15 or less. With those bigger sort of equitable districts, the foundation formula would work better. We agreed with that and we passed that. But I guess what I would say is any major piece of legislation, you usually revisit it for the next couple of years. We will revisit Act 73, partly to prepare for the eventuality that maybe we can't get mandatory redistricting through both chambers. I'm now focused on trying to have a parallel track where we're controlling spending, in the short term while we figure that out.
Mikaela Lefrak: The redistricting and the foundation formula — they were part of the same bill that passed. Can they be decoupled?
Sen. Phil Baruth: Theoretically we always say we can't be bound by a previous legislature, so you know, every year is a new opportunity to legislate properly and well.
Mikaela Lefrak: "Every year is a new opportunity to legislate properly and well." Does what the Senate president was saying there still give you confidence that we're going to see new school district maps this session?
Zoie Saunders: I have confidence that the General Assembly has the tools, the data and the research needed to move forward with redistricting. I have heard many express a shared understanding that voluntary mergers are unlikely. Many superintendents and legislators, and even the Vermont Superintendents Association have come out and voiced their lack of confidence in voluntary mergers as a path forward. I think it's really critical that as the legislature entertains any deviation from Act 73, that they commit to doing the modeling around how those decisions will impact the educational funding and overall quality opportunities. As we've continued to emphasize throughout this process of education transformation, we need to ensure that we're connecting the dots across funding, governance and quality. If there are any changes to the governance that's going to impact on the cost of the system, it's also going to impact the ability to deliver on the array of educational programming and opportunities that we're striving for in order to have an equitable system. Any future conversations around redistricting or changing from the criteria that has been approved in law by Act 73 would require that review and evaluation of the opportunity cost and the real cost on programming to students.
Mikaela Lefrak: So you're saying they have the data the tools that they need to move forward with redistricting if they choose to do so. Sounds like one alternate path is to decouple the foundation formula from redistricting, which are currently tied together in Act 73. What do you think of the idea of Vermont solely shifting towards a foundation formula without changing its mapping for school districts and supervisory unions? Could that still help the state, even if it's a different vision than what we first came up with?
Zoie Saunders: The foundation formula was coupled with governance, because it was aligned to evidence and data around how to distribute those funding to provide specific educational opportunities that were equitable to every student across the state. We identified the need to operate at scale, so merging districts for those dollars to go further. The variability of our existing system makes a foundation formula impossible to implement in the way that we've put forward. You have some districts overseeing as few as 200 students, to some overseeing as large as 2,000 students. If we are to operate the same funding formula for each of those systems and expect that they meet the full range of educational quality, it is going it's not going to work. We could be in a situation again, where we're imposing unfunded mandates on some of our smaller districts that often tend to be in our higher needs communities, and so within our fragmented system, the funding simply won't go far enough to ensure that we're providing an equitable education and a high quality education for every student across the state of Vermont.
Mikaela Lefrak: You, the governor, and other members of his administration have been talking about the need for redistricting for more than a year now. Why do you think it's been so hard to get lawmakers to believe in this vision around larger districts? It doesn't seem like it's catching on with the majority of members of the legislature. It certainly didn't with the School Redistricting Task Force. What isn't working about the messaging? Or are the stats not there? Is the data not there?
Zoie Saunders: The focus for education transformation is on education quality. The way that we can improve educational quality and ensure that we are funding our system in an equitable way, we need to move to a foundation formula. The foundation formula is how We clarify the expectations of our system. It's an expression of our priorities for education to make sure we can actually fund those programs and opportunities for students. The foundation formula is also a way to bend the cost curve make our system more predictable, and redistricting is how we get that return on investment. It's how we ensure that those dollars can actually go farther and providing the needed support for students, to increase teacher salaries, to make sure that a student living in a rural community gets the same opportunities as a student that's given and living in a more populated area. So, it's the intentionality on the design of the system that we're focusing on and on quality. We are talking about generational change and a generational investment in order to strengthen Vermont's public education system. Change is really hard, and Vermonters have a lot of questions, and educators have a lot of questions. I think it's really critical that we continue to stay in dialog, and we show and model what the future system could be. What are the possibilities if we're willing to make these changes. In my role as Secretary, I've reviewed a lot of our prior education reform efforts, and many of them have not delivered the expected outcomes, largely because our challenges with scale and our challenges with inequitable funding. Redistricting is helping us to address the root causes and the barriers for us to overcome the inequities in our system and to deliver on the educational goals that have already been codified in law. So, for example, expanding Pre-K access, expanding career and technical education, providing higher quality special education services to all students with disabilities, and to provide wrap around support, universal after school. All of these things we've articulated as part of our vision as a state to building a world class education system from cradle to career. And yet, when we look back at prior reforms, many of the challenges are because our system is overly complex, which creates challenges of really building the conditions that are necessary in every district, every school, every classroom, to improving and elevating our opportunities. We've also resulted in a lot of unfunded mandates on our districts and additional burdens on our educators without providing the level of support that's needed. So as we move forward with Act 73 it is more than redistricting. It is really thinking about how we're going to strengthen our education system and ensure that our sizable investment in education is reaching our students and helps us to build a system that is sustainable, world class, and benefiting teachers by addressing what we see as a tremendous unfairness. Which is that our teachers are not paid fairly across the state. We have great we have unequal pay for our teachers, and that's an explicit goal of this process, is to make sure that our teachers, who are particularly living in rural communities and underserved communities, are getting the wage that is competitive with their peers in other parts of the state.
Mikaela Lefrak: We've gotten tons of emails ahead of today's conversation, Secretary Saunders. Unfortunately I'm not going to be able to get to all of them, but a number of them were from people at small rural schools that wanted you to know about the work that their school is doing. I'll just read one here. It's from Kate in West Windsor, who's a librarian at the Albert Bridge School, and she's worried about schools like hers closing in the coming years, and she writes, "these schools, Albert Bridge being one, are able to accomplish extraordinary things with our small classes and unique approaches to education using methods not possible with larger class sizes and fewer members." I know you and other members of the administration have been visiting — you just said you've been visiting these small, rural schools. It feels like, though, that there is a large contingent of people out there who just like are really feel like they're not being heard. Where do you think that disconnect is coming from?
Zoie Saunders: I think that there are a lot of fears. So let's, let's be honest that what we're contemplating is a lot of change, and change is really difficult. You know, the legislators have difficult decisions related to the new district maps. In local communities, there are concerns around what change actually means for them, in their local community for their school. So we can't we cannot undermine how important these conversations are and how personal they are to individuals and in the communities in which these in which schools are located. And so I think what we need to make sure we're talking about here is what are the opportunities ahead for students, and the reality is right now, our districts are grappling with these very decisions. So many of the concerns that we're hearing brought up around potential school closure or potential cuts to budgets or potential cuts to teachers or adjustments to salaries, are things that are happening right now in our current system. Right now, districts are making the decisions to close schools. Right now, districts are making the really difficult decision to cut programming because there are no other options available to them. And so what act 73 is designed to do is to recognize there are current challenges in our system that we want to overcome in order to better resource our full education system and ensure that there is a level of quality at every school where students attend across Vermont and and that's where we're trying to head. And so I think it's really a result of many of the challenges that have already been identified that we're moving in this direction. Because what I have heard from superintendents and school board members and even community members that have grappled with these hard decisions at the local level, they feel alone because they're having to make these really tough calls without clear parameters and guidance from the state, and it's being done in a way that is not as strategic and is not as fair. And so what we're looking to do with act 73 and the opportunity ahead, is to invest, is to really think about how we best leverage the large investment we have in education, so that it gets to improving teaching and learning, and that results in more equitable opportunities for students in terms of access to programming and electives and enrichment offerings, and that it results in teaching. Teacher pay equity across the state, and a system where everybody feels supported, because we're able to ensure that those dollars are also funding academic coaches and curriculum directors and the support team that's needed to run a highly effective system.
Mikaela Lefrak: We've gotten a lot of questions about health care costs. It's another big priority for the legislature this this legislative session. And the president of the Vermont School Board Association, Flor Diaz Smith, wrote an op-ed recently about how health care costs are one of the biggest drivers of school budget increases. The School Redistricting Task Force did their own analysis. They say that changing the district size would not meaningfully reduce health care costs. And we also got an email from a listener named Megan about this, who says that they're a public school educator, They say that the biggest driver of education costs to taxpayers from their perspective is health insurance. Megan wants to know, what are you all doing to recognize that health insurance benefits are a major cost driver? How do we include that in this conversation?
Zoie Saunders: It is true that health care is a large cost in the school budgets, and that there are efforts underway to reform our healthcare system and to really create further cost savings so that that is affordable. When you think about the budgeting for a school district, healthcare costs are also associated with staffing, and we know as we look at the entire state, we're seeing a decline in student enrollment, but also we're seeing kind of consistent or increases in teacher salaries. So there is an effort as we think about ensuring that we're really right sizing our system. And there's an important element to that too, that I think we need to bring up, which is that right now, we don't have the workforce to support all of or to fill all of the jobs that we're recruiting for, and that's resulting in a really big increase in the number of teachers on provisional licenses. That's resulting in a large increase of expensive contracted services because we're not able to hire for that those specialized services and result resulting in a lot of turnover. So it is true that within our current hyper local budgeting context, some of these costs are outside of the control of our local school boards, and that's precisely the reason that the state needs to share and the responsibility we can't continue to expect our local school boards to go at it alone and to recognize that there should be an alignment around negotiating for the overall package for employees. So right now, the benefits package and the health care is negotiated at state level, whereas the salaries are at a local level. So there have been conversations both and recommendations from the Commission on the Future of Public Education to couple those, so that districts actually have the opportunity to do budgeting and create a competitive package for their employees, because right now it's outside of their control. So that is a direct recommendation that came out of the Commission on the Future of Public Education, is to make sure that those are coupled the salary negotiation and the negotiation of health care at the same level, to make sure that districts can actually create manage those costs better.
Mikaela Lefrak: I'm going to toss one of Vermont's larger school districts, Burlington, into the conversation. I want to hear your thoughts on this, because two weeks ago, the superintendent of the Burlington School District, Tom Flanagan, sent a district-wide email about their budget proposal for the year. It was really interesting to me. He proposed an increase to the school board of 4.47%. That was going to lead to a 4.31% increase in property taxes. He said that the Burlington School District has declining enrollment. They're reducing six and a half positions as well as three and a half district office positions. The superintendent does not support Act 73 and wants to remain a separate school district. So if the head of one of Vermont's largest school districts doesn't support this idea, I don't know who will. What do you say to that?
Zoie Saunders: So, you know, I think with all these questions, I would first say that, you know, the Agency of Education would not have advocated for this plan if we hadn't done our homework, and we really have looked at this approach comprehensively to understand what the impacts will be on the educational experience for students, that's first and foremost. And also on how the funding will help us to bend the cost curve. There are a lot of educators and legislators, again, that do support education transformation and act 73 but that's not to say that this work isn't hard. This work is challenging. I would also note that the school board from South Burlington School District recently submitted a press release that was informed by unanimous support of the board advocating for act 73 and the South Burlington district identified that the act 73 would help to improve academic opportunities and also to then the cost curve. And that received unanimous support from their school board. And there's other school boards across the state that have been really grappling with these hard decisions and feeling that there needed to be a more statewide strategic approach to managing with to managing these challenges. I really welcome the opportunity to continue sharing. You know, the research that we have done, and research does show that consolidation saves money, but it has to be done in a way that is really thoughtful. What this is coming with is not just a proposal to redistrict it is first and foremost. Act 73 is about improving educational quality, and we started with identifying what are the inputs that we need in our system. What are the resources that our classroom teachers need? What are the programs that we believe are most important? What are all those unfunded mandates that are currently in our education quality standards? We started there and then built the foundation formula to fund those quality objectives. And in order to fund those quality objectives, we have to operate at scale, and there is wide consensus across the state, if you talk with teachers and principals and superintendents, that scale will allow them to provide better and more expansive opportunities for students. And so I would encourage us to continue staying the course. I would encourage us to continue having the conversations and looking at how all of these pieces fit together to create a better educational system for all of our students across Vermont, and continue to share out, continue to surface up what the questions are, and engage in this dialog, because it is really. Important, and we have an opportunity to make, you know, generational investment into our education system that will make us the best education system in the country, and that will require a lot of collaboration and hard work ahead. The more clarity we can have now, the better our districts will be positioned to start making the decisions that are needed in order to transition and move our state forward to achieving these quality objectives.
Broadcast live on Monday, Jan. 26, 2026, at noon; rebroadcast at 7 p.m.
Have questions, comments, or tips? Send us a message or check us out on Instagram.
