BRATTLEBORO-Last week, the Vermont Legislature adjourned after passing a controversial education reform bill that many observers both inside and outside the Vermont State House called "drastic," and which Vermont Public called "the single most transformational piece of education legislation passed in Vermont in modern times" if all its provisions are enacted.
Republican Gov. Phil Scott, who made the effect of school spending on property taxes a cause célèbre during the last election cycle, approves of the bill and has pledged to sign it.
What it actually means, how it will come about, and how it will affect Vermonters is a long way from certain. The promise that it will lower property taxes is unproven. The main provisions of the bill, if they occur, will not start to happen until 2028.
One thing is certain about the bill: Brattleboro's Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, D-Windham-7, the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, has been at the center of the discussion all the way through.
The new bill calls for four main changes, Kornheiser said.
"There are big changes to education governance," Kornheiser told The Commons after the session adjourned. "There are big changes to education quality. There are big changes to school finance, and there are big changes to taxes."
The reasons for the dramatic changes are varied, she said.
"What we've seen in Vermont over the last 30 years is a really slow move away from equity in our school system," she said. "We have some districts spending quite a lot and being able to offer quite a lot for their students, and other districts really not being able to do that because of choices that voters in those communities are making."
In addition, the state has almost half the number of students that it had 30 years ago, she said, while property taxes have jumped exponentially.
"So in addition to the fact that some schools don't have the resources to offer their kids an equitable education, we have also had tax rates [and] tax bills that went out of control these last few years," Kornheiser said.
One controversy stirred by the new bill has been about the loss of local control. Up to now, Vermont has offered residents a significant amount of control over its public schools.
The state is divided into over 50 supervisory unions. Windham County has four: Windham Southeast, Windham Southwest, Windham Northeast, and Windham Central.
Up to now, each supervisory union has had a board that spends the better part of its year devising a budget. It takes that budget to Town Meeting for discussion and a vote. When passed by the town, the school budget and the town budget form the basis of the property tax.
Last year, due to circumstances unrelated to the work of the Legislature, but including rising health insurance costs, school budgets increased. Some were outright rejected by voters. Property taxes shot up by double digits.
And, as a result, during election season Scott took on the Legislature, blaming it for the property tax rises and managing to knock five long-serving senators and 14 representatives off their seats, all Democrats.
Enough new Republicans joined the Legislature to end the Democratic/Progressive supermajority that previously could override Scott's vetoes on a party-line vote.
"So we knew we had to take action," Kornheiser said. "The issue felt more urgent. More people were interested. But the issues around the need for equity and consistency have been issues that we've been working on for quite a few years."
To put it another way, in urging the Senate to vote for this bill, Senate President Pro Tem Philip Baruth said, "Voting for this bill is a way of saving public schools from what is coming at them. And that is an animosity based on people's property taxes getting to the point where they can't bear it, and they will vote all of us out to get that to stop."
A 'really slow move from equity'
The legislation was passed in both the Senate and the House on June 16 despite a majority of Senate Democrats voting against it and an unusual procedural move by House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, which immediately called the vote by voice.
The 155-page bill does two major things. It transitions Vermont to a foundation formula, through which the state - not the local electorate - controls school per-pupil spending, and it paves the way for wide-scale consolidation of Vermont's current supervisory unions down to perhaps 13.
Other provisions in the bill:
• the potential for getting new money by raising the property taxes on second homes
• a new emphasis on education quality standards
• the setting of class size minimums, which may lead to closing rural schools with fewer students
• a discount on the value of their homes for people who make less than $110,000 a year, thus lowering their property taxes
• and regional assessment districts to give more consistency in how properties are reappraised around the state.
"One of the foundations of a good tax system is this constant balancing between simplicity and equity," Kornheiser said.
"And usually there's a lot of tension between those two ideas," she continued. "Then, when you throw in the local control that we have with our education system, it gets even harder. And what we've seen in Vermont over the last 30 years is a really slow move away from equity in our school system."
It goes back to Brigham
The current education funding system dates back to 1997. It was a time when some school districts, the wealthier ones, could pass larger school budgets and give its students more educational resources; every child, for example, could receive their own computer. Poorer districts could afford fewer resources; each classroom might have to share one or two computers.
"Towns with ski resorts, lakes, lots of stores, or high-value homes enjoyed well-funded schools with low tax rates," according to an analysis by the Public Assets Institute in 2017. "Property-poor towns had to tax themselves at high rates to afford barely adequate schools. For Vermont's children, geography was destiny."
The issue was brought to the Vermont Supreme Court. In its Brigham v. State of Vermont decision, the court said this inequity violated the Common Benefits Clause of the Vermont Constitution. The court mandated a more equitable system of education finance, so that where a child lived did not determine the quality of their education.
Act 60, the Equal Educational Opportunity Act, enacted in 1997, was the result of that decision. It aimed to equalize educational opportunities across the state by shifting the funding formula.
"Under the law, any two towns that vote to spend the same amount per pupil have the same tax rate," the Public Assets Institute explained. "The system delivers resources to locally controlled schools in a way that's fair to both students and taxpayers."
But, by 2024, the old inequalities had slipped back into the system and, along with a sharply declining school population, big property tax increases, and a potential voter revolt, there was a call for dramatic changes.
"We have a need for much wider, bigger school districts, because we have fewer students, and fewer folks who are able to serve on school boards and a changing population," Kornheiser said. "Also, we have the need to make sure that we have resources for kids all over the state, and to stabilize tax rates. And because of the way our education fund was set up in Act 60, we can't just change the taxes."
School populations have changed as the population of the state has changed, but the changes are subtle if you are not looking for them, Kornheiser said.
"I think it's really hard for all of us who have been living here for a while to realize just how much the state has changed in the last 20 or 30, years," she said. "When I look around, I see all the same people that were here when I moved here 30 years ago. And they look the same to me because I've aged too. But when I leave the state, I realize that I have changed. I am now middle-aged.
"Or I realize it when I'm visiting a classroom, and the classroom always has fewer than 10 kids in it. Or when I am at some event that feels like it should be filled with children, but it's not. It's really hard for us to realize just how much the demographics of our state have changed, and how much what that means for how we need to be governing, when there are half the amount of children we had 30 years ago."
Consolidating districts
Presuming the governor signs the new bill, the first act will be changing the number of supervisory unions. The Legislature is setting up a task force to work over the summer to decide how to divide the state into new districts.
"The governor proposed moving to five districts," Kornheiser said. "The Legislature said that's too much consolidation. So this bill just sets up a task force for the summer that will draw new lines for new districts."
She mentioned "a whole long list of the criteria that this task force is supposed to look at. And then when we come back in January, we're going to vote on the new districts."
Kornheiser said she will probably not serve on the task force.
Windham County has four supervisory unions. Does that mean that some are redundant?
"Not necessarily, but it might not be the most effective and efficient way to deliver education services," Kornheiser said.
"Windham Southeast is sort of the closest to scale of all of them," she continued. "But if you look at how many students graduated, how many students were sort of present in the high school for their senior year at say, Windham Southwest, you might see just one or two students that were on campus: Either they were going to Brattleboro for the tech school, or enrolled at [Community College of Vermont] for dual enrollment or the early college program."
Kornheiser said the "vision" in the bill is that "schools will be able to deliver better quality and more consistent educational opportunities with slightly larger districts."
From secretaries to superintendents, this will definitely mean a reduction in staff.
"I've had a lot of conversations with superintendents about this," Kornheiser said. "And in the lead up to the final vote, they were all collaborating really closely with us.
"They felt like it was worth it for them to deliver the kind of quality that they knew we needed, which means losing their jobs," she continued. "Some of them would say, 'I know this might mean losing my job but....' But I will say that we've had something of a superintendent hiring problem lately, because there is something of a shortage."
The new districts should also be "able to deliver special education services in a much more comprehensive way," Kornheiser said.
"Over the last year there have been a bunch of articles about districts not able to deliver special education services that they're federally required to deliver because they just don't have the capacity to do it," she said.
The new districts will also put serious limits on the amount of public dollars going to independent schools, Kornheiser said.
With the current voucher system, some students have been going to private schools on state money. Some of these schools are out of state. A few are out of the country.
This will change, Kornheiser said.
"The bill seriously limits the amount of public dollars going to independent schools or private schools," she said. "We aren't sending money to out-of-state or out-of-country private schools anymore. Essentially, an independent school needs to be standing in as the public school in that region in order to receive funds. And 25% of the students in that school need to be publicly funded, or the school can't receive public funds, and so that really just makes a few schools around the state eligible."
In the past, some private schools getting state money have been religious schools that discriminate against trans and LGBTQIA+ students.
"This is because of a court decision about Maine, which is described as 'the Carson decision,'" Kornheiser said.
The 2022 U.S. Supreme Court case Carson v. Makin ruled that Maine could not exclude religious schools from tuition assistance programs for students in school districts without their own secondary schools.
"Because of that, there's a precedent that we actually essentially can't refuse those religious schools public dollars if we allow other schools to have public dollars," Kornheiser said.
"But likely what will happen as a result of this other way of limiting independent schools is that they really need to stand as the public school in the region," Kornheiser continued. "Probably none of those schools that discriminate will be able to receive public funds anymore. But that is something of a very convenient accident."
What is a foundation formula?
The new bill will move the state to a foundation formula, which will provide a base amount per student. This takes the cost-per-pupil decision out of local hands and gives it to the state.
"The so-called foundation formula is a commonly used system that would give more power to the state - and less to local taxpayers - to determine how much money school districts receive," according to an article in Seven Days. "Some experts say the switch won't save money, but it could be a more equitable and straightforward way to pay for education."
Kornheiser supports this system and says it offers protection to students needing extra financial attention.
"Every school gets a certain amount of money per student," Kornheiser said. "That's what a foundation formula is. However, for many students in that school whose families are economically disadvantaged, or if the student is an English learner, or they have disabilities, that school receives more money to pay for the cost of educating that student. A foundation formula guarantees that schools have the resources that they need to educate the students that they have."
The foundation formula is not decided by the Legislature, Kornheiser said.
"The funding formula, very importantly, is determined by education finance experts, academics hired by the state," Kornheiser said. "It involves a whole lot of statistical analysis. They look at how much we're spending now and what is the most effective way to get quality results for kids. They correlate school success and school spending all across the state, and they then determine what the per pupil cost is. And these people re-evaluate the number every few years."
Developing a foundation formula will not happen until the new consolidated districts are finalized.
It will all take time
"I think the biggest part of this bill is that there is still a lot more work to do," Kornheiser said. "We still need to work on most of the provisions of the bill. We still have a lot to do. We need to figure out career, technical education, pre-kindergarten and a bunch of other stuff."
Passing the bill was "a huge deal" that brought with it "an enormous amount of work and an enormous amount of deliberation" by an "enormous number of people participating fully in the project" this year, she noted.
"These are huge decisions," Kornheiser said. "But they are definitely not being rammed through at the end of the legislative session. It was a full and comprehensive session of work in the House. The session went longer in order for both the House and the Senate to have more time with the bill."
The House, she said, "took unbelievably comprehensive testimony. We had the Commission on the Future of Public Education that was also having conversations about this work."
As described by VTDigger reporter Ethan Weinstein, "Though the legislation proposes generational change, the bill is replete with caveats and contingencies, requiring years of further work until the biggest transitions begin in 2028. Among the most significant moves, H.454 would start to create a new education funding formula, impose class-size minimums and reimagine income-sensitive property tax relief.
"Major work still needs to be done. A task force will craft up to three maps of consolidated school districts over the summer for the Legislature to consider next year. Lawmakers also need to figure out how to allocate money for pre-Kindergarten, career and technical education and special education."
The bill "essentially sets up a four- to five-year transition timeline," said Kornheiser, who recognizes that the challenge to do big, bold things can be uncomfortable and scary.
"But we're really at a turning point in the state, and I think we need to focus together on what comes next," she said.
'Not the best we could do'
State Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun, D-Windham-3, has been a vocal critic of the reform legislation as it wended its way through the House, but holding out hope that the Senate version and the final text, once hammered out in a conference committee, would return in a form she could support.
In the end, Bos-Lun voted against the bill "because of concern about the impact on rural communities where more than half of Vermont children attend school," she said in a statement posted to her legislative Facebook page on June 17.
"Consolidated, bigger schools do not build stronger communities, they do not necessarily make better experiences for students, [and] they are not a proven way to decrease costs," she wrote. "The premise that bigger is better [and] will save costs is not certain."
Bos-Lun charged that the bill "was not the best we can do."
"It did not address the key cost drivers: medical insurance for teachers and mental health costs for kids in schools," she wrote.
"We will revisit this one next year and hopefully improvements can be made," Bos-Lun said. "Rotten way to end the 2025 session."
For her part, Kornheiser said she is "really proud of the work that we did this year" and that change has to come.
"What we're doing now isn't working in our schools," she said. "I think we have great teachers who are doing a great job, and they don't have the resources they need in a lot of places all over the state, and I think we have a lot of Vermonters who are really concerned about their property taxes.
"And I think between those two things, we can't continue on the way we've been," Kornheiser said.
This News item by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.