By Ben Kinsley, Campaign for Vermont 

The House Education Committee walked through several drafts last week of their education reform bill. The approach: mandatory facilitated discussions about mergers, not mandatory mergers. 

Facilitators would lead local/regional study committees and encourage district mergers, potentially targeting consolidated districts of 2,000–4,000 students (this is still somewhat unresolved). Districts assigned to a study committee must participate, and the committees follow the existing statutory processes — the same framework Act 46 followed. If a study committee determines a merger is inadvisable, it must file a detailed report explaining why.

The draft includes a notable protection for communities with small schools: articles of agreement must prohibit school closures for three years without approval of the electorate in the town where the school sits. After three years, closure requires a union district-wide vote.

Study committee funding would come primarily through legislative appropriations rather than local school budgets, but that does not account for the leveling up of salaries as a result of re-negotiating collective bargaining agreements (this wiped out all the savings from Act 46). 

Education Secretary, Zoie Saunders, called this salary level-up a feature, not a bug. Because compensation varies widely across the state, she viewed this as an opportunity to level up our lowest paid teachers. That’s great, but, um, where are the savings going to come from then?

Personally, I would prefer to level up salaries by adjusting our student/educator ratios. As the Secretary noted, we are 17th in compensation but we have the lowest student/teacher ratio in the country by a mile. The next closes state is nearly 25% higher. Instead of cutting administrators in order to pay teachers more, it seems prudent to give those administrative savings back to taxpayers (either through tax cuts or infrastructure investments) and then subsequently negotiate over staffing ratios versus compensation to create more equity for our educators.

Saunders and her team described a “three-legged stool” of education reform (quality, funding, and governance) and argued both chambers are pulling the legs apart. The Senate’s maps (in their opinion) preserve too many existing structures; the House’s voluntary approach risks producing no meaningful change. 

The Agency wants larger districts built around historic attendance and tuitioning patterns, with school advisory councils and equity-based budgeting in an attempt preserve local voice. Of course, we already know that bigger districts don’t perform better on either a cost or an outcomes basis, but they are still stuck on this…

The thing I do agree with Saunders on? The shared services model that the House is advancing risks adding bureaucracy by layering new shared-service providers (CESAs) on top of the existing shared-service providers (Supervisory Unions). Both House and Senate versions also risk diverting educator time and school leadership energy into merger discussions instead of improving student outcomes. We saw student outcomes begin to decline right around the time that Act 46 demanded this same process from local districts. While a causal relationship has not been proven, it should give us pause to consider whether diverting attentions to merger discussions have significant impact on the support students are receiving.