Upper Valley school officials call state’s efforts at reform premature

In a sign of how heated Vermont’s education reform debate has become, the board of the White River Valley Supervisory Union has cut ties with the organization that advocates for the state’s public school boards.

Members of the 10-town supervisory union said they felt that the Vermont School Boards Association wasn’t behind two key positions, the ongoing need for supervisory unions and a provision for minimum class sizes.

Those two proposals “would close WRVSU and the Newton School,” Sarah Root, a member of the WRVSU board and the Strafford School Board, which oversees Newton, the town’s pre-K to 8 school. “These are huge deals for us. They were lobbying for something that’s going to close our schools.”

The board voted unanimously on May 27 to leave the VSBA.

Vermont lawmakers are waiting for a conference committee to reconcile the House and Senate versions of the reform bill, which originated with Republican Gov. Phil Scott and is now known as H. 454. A vote is planned for next week.

The measure is among the most sweeping school reforms in state history, akin to the 1890 adoption of a statewide property tax and the subsequent consolidation of hundreds of one-room schoolhouses, and to the regionalization of secondary schools from the 1950s to the early 1970s, two revolutions that shaped the current education landscape.

As lawmakers negotiate, the proposal’s immense scope, intended to address the both education quality and rising property taxes, is now drawing fire from education officials who warn that Montpelier lacks a mandate to radically redraw a system that touches every community in the state.

“To completely give up the way we live in Vermont to maybe save some money, I don’t think that’s good enough,” Kathy Galluzzo, chairwoman of the WRVSU board, said in an interview.

“We actually agree with them on 99% of our issues,” Flor Diaz Smith, president of the School Boards Association, said in an interview. The VSBA’s board is diverse, representing school boards from across the state, urban and rural, she said. “Obviously, we don’t like anyone leaving our organization,” she said, adding that the door is always open for a return

A majority of the VSBA board supported H.454 as drafted by the House, Diaz Smith said. The organization needed to get from the governor’s proposal for five massive school districts to something it could support, she said.

“We knew the conversation could not be ‘Let’s not do anything,’ ” she said. Even so, VSBA sent out a letter on May 30 urging lawmakers to defeat H. 454, largely because of funding changes in the Senate version and the 4,000-student district minimum size.

The debate over H.454 “really underscores that you can’t do this complex work in the legislative process,” Diaz Smith said. “It’s not just about education politics, right. It’s about the shared future. … What do we want the state to look like?”

“It’s terrible for education,” Neil Odell, a member of the Norwich and Dresden school boards and former president of the VSBA, said in an interview. “It’s almost so bad that I don’t know where to start.”

Widespread worries

Between them, the House and Senate proposals envision school districts comprising between 4,000 and 8,000 students. The Senate bill preserves supervisory unions and districts, partly as a way to maintain elements of the state’s system of school choice, which enables students who don’t have a school in their district to take state money to any school, public or private.

The largest Vermont school district in the Upper Valley is Hartford’s, which according to state figures enrolled just under 1,500 students in 2023.

WRVSU had 1,360 students that year, about half of them in the White River Unified District (comprising Bethel and Royalton), the only district in the union with a high school. Two of the union’s other districts, Strafford and First Branch (comprising Chelsea and Tunbridge) are pre-K to 8, and offer high school choice. Another two districts, Sharon and Rochester-Stockbridge, are pre-K to 6 and have choice for middle and high school. And Granville and Hancock, which once had their own elementary schools, now have no schools and pay tuition for all grades.

As school enrollments have fallen and small schools have closed, officials in rural districts fear that the consolidation proposed in H. 454 would close down their schools.

But it’s not clear that consolidation would save money, Odell said. Larger districts would have to renegotiate teacher and support staff contracts, which would increase spending, blunting any savings from reducing administrative overhead.

Negotiations in the Senate bolstered the state system that pays tuition to private schools, said Odell, who is also on the steering committee of Friends of Vermont Public Education, a new advocacy organization.

“They were doing everything they could to keep that privilege,” he said. “It was bad governance all the way around.”

Maintaining choice is part of WRVSU’s push to keep the supervisory union structure, which allows districts with different formats to coexist under the same umbrella.

Families who moved to Strafford did so “because of Newton School and high school choice,” Root said.

Recent efforts to end the practice of school choice by requiring districts without schools to designate three public schools, or one of the state’s four traditional academies, have died in the Statehouse. Root said she’s not opposed to designation, and thinks public money should stay in public schools, but that’s not a widely held view in Strafford.

Putting theirmoney elsewhere

WRVSU plans to send some of the nearly $10,000 a year in dues it sent to VSBA to the Rural School Community Alliance, a newly formed group advocating for the state’s rural school districts

Right now, Vermont doesn’t have any districts with more than 3,000 students, said John Castle, a former principal and superintendent in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. The governor’s plan called for districts of 10,000 to 15,000, and a much larger district in Chittenden County, the state’s most populous.

“I think it’s the scale,” Castle said in an interview. “It’s out of context in Vermont.”

Castle is on the Rural School Community Alliance’s steering committee, and the Vermont Rural Education Collaborative, which he founded about a decade ago, amid the consolidations of Act 46, serves as its fiscal agent.

The departure of WRVSU from the VSBA points to a rural divide in Vermont, as more populous parts of the state draw more people and economic power.

Opposition to H. 454 does appear widespread, and growing as the Legislature awaits a proposal for a possible June 16 vote.

Scott’s proposal, and the subsequent legislation, were a response to a substantial property tax increase last year. Opponents of H.454 argue that there’s no guarantee that it will save money, particularly if it will require new, larger schools and longer bus routes.

“He did not have a mandate to transform education, and certainly not in two or three months,” Root said.

Diaz Smith, Castle and others said they’d like to see the Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont, which began meeting last year, continue its work and propose more modest reforms in keeping with the state’s history.

“They never let that commission do its job,” Odell said. The commission was charged with studying Vermont’s public education system and coming up with a recommendation for a statewide vision and policies to enact it.

And Act 127, the recent law that changed how education is funded is only in the second year of being phased in. It already appears to be forcing higher spending districts to reduce costs while providing greater funding to districts that have more students living in poverty, learning English or on a special education plan.

“I think it does deserve more time,” Odell said.

There are other fixes school officials would like to see. The state took over negotiating health care for educators in 2017, and since then costs have skyrocketed, Galluzzo noted.

While legislators are feeling pressure from the Scott administration, they’re also feeling it from school officials and citizens, who are just starting to make their voices heard.

“I’d like the bill killed,”  Root said. “Put it down.”

The Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont is holding online listening sessions, including one at 6 p.m. on June 11.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.