‘Act 46 all over again’: Gov. Phil Scott signs education reform bill, kick-starting a familiar process for voluntary school mergers

The year’s landmark education reform proposal is now law.

Gov. Phil Scott on Thursday signed into law H.955, the legislative session’s signature bill that launches a new but familiar round of voluntary school district mergers.

The bill’s signing brings some closure to what has been a long year for educators, administrators and legislators. Or looked at another way, it marks yet another beginning to Vermont’s seemingly perpetual effort to reform its education system.

Last year, Scott and the Vermont Agency of Education were adamant on the need to force top-down consolidation of the state’s 119 school districts and 52 governing units. But legislators tasked with crafting the legislation said there was little political will to force mergers.

The resulting bill, H.955, outlines a process to facilitate voluntary school district mergers beginning this fall. Scott, during a press conference this month, said he understood the political roadblocks to forced mergers and said he “wanted to respect the process.”

“(School districts have) been saying all along, ‘We can do this on our own. We don’t need a top-down approach, we can do it from the bottom up,’” Scott said. “Well, now it’s their chance to prove that, and without giving up quality and making sure that we’re taking care of our kids.”

Now, Vermont’s decades-long effort to consolidate school districts moves ever forward. School boards and administrators beginning this fall will have a year to explore new voluntary district configurations before a vote is teed up for participating school districts on Town Meeting Day 2028.

For longtime school officials, the process outlined in H.955 looks like a second go-around for Act 46, the 2015 law that merged 45 districts in 39 towns into 11 new union school districts. That law encouraged, and eventually required, school districts to merge into larger governance units.

“I feel like we’re doing Act 46 all over again,” said Bill Kimball, the Maple Run School District superintendent who led the Washington Central Supervisory Union during their Act 46 merger.

And whether this effort will be successful, he said, is “going to really depend on the communities, and what they want to do.”

‘Arranged marriage’

Under H.955, the state’s 119 districts are organized into 20 groupings. Each school district will send a current board member to participate in their assigned merger committee group by Sept. 15.

The study committees will be led by an outside facilitator, who will be tasked with creating contiguous school districts with at least 2,000 students. Each committee is expected to begin its work by Oct. 15.

A final report is due by September 2027 from each merger committee, with recommendations as to whether it is “advisable or inadvisable” to form a new school district.

H.955 directs the facilitators to consider new districts that emphasize local elementary schools and regional middle and high schools, and that provide each student with universal access to career technical education.

Each committee would also have to show how it would fare under the foundation formula, a new education finance model used by most states nationwide that gives the state far more authority over school district spending. Currently, school districts control how much to spend or not spend in their budgets, subject to voter approval.

Residents in each school district in the study committee would then vote whether to join the merged district on Town Meeting Day of 2028.

All in all, observers say the process mirrors Act 46 in that it provides school districts the opportunity to decide their own fate.

That process led to the very different school district layouts that the state has today, with consolidated school districts concentrated around the broader northwest Vermont area, and supervisory unions scattered across the rest of the state. School districts in supervisory unions share a superintendent but have separate local school boards and budgets, whereas the unified school districts that emerged after Act 46 are more uniform in their structure.

Michael Clark, the Orange Southwest Supervisory Union superintendent, was the last superintendent of the former Essex Caledonia Supervisory Union during Act 46, before helping essentially close it down. 

He likened that process to a marriage by choice, whereas H.955 seems “more like an arranged marriage.”

“And if we’re operating under an arranged marriage situation, we have to figure out, are we really going to be able to work together, versus finding that group that you knew that you would work together with,” he said.

Still, H.955 offers districts some leeway by allowing them to request membership on different merger committees.

Districts may opt to join a different merger committee than the one they are assigned to “if a majority of the school board members vote to leave the assigned merger committee and join a new merger committee,” according to the legislation.

Some districts have spent the last year identifying potential partners in neighboring districts to discuss a merger. Clark, for instance, said his district has had conversations with the Central Vermont and White River Valley supervisory unions about possible mergers.

“Let’s see how it unfolds,” he said.

‘Master of your own destiny’

By the time the school districts met in 2015 to form what would become the Champlain Valley School District, the concept of merging was hardly new, according to Elaine Pinckney, the former superintendent of the then Chittenden South Supervisory Union.

School districts in that region had for years considered the possibilities inherent in merging. Pinckney said the supervisory union hired a consultant in 2006 to help study the possibility, but it wasn’t until Act 46 that the ball got rolling.

“When you do the work ahead of time, you can build that sense of, ‘We are one, we’re not different from our neighbors,’” Pinckney said. “It seemed, back then, that the writing was on the wall, that things are going to get merged one way or the other. This is a way for us to define our own boundaries.”

Pinckney said that the votes to finally merge Hinesburg, Williston, Shelburne, Charlotte and St. George were hardly unanimous, and there were still people who didn’t want to merge.

“But there wasn’t a big hue and cry about it,” she said.

She and others noted that Act 46, over time, gave the State Board of Education the authority to mandate consolidation for certain school districts, a facet of the law notably absent in H.955.

“By voluntarily merging, you would be master of your own destiny, and if you didn’t, you could be merged, and they could decide,” she said. “Knowing that that hung in the balance, certainly people were aware of that, and it made a difference.”

No school in the Champlain Valley region had fewer than 400 students. For regions with smaller schools, there was far more anxiety over what merging might mean for their community schools.

“This is what people were really grappling with, is ‘I’m going to lose my community because I lose my school,’” Kimball said. “That fear has existed for many years.”

Sherry Sousa, the Mountain Views Supervisory Union superintendent, was the special education director for Windsor Central during Act 46. She called the merger process “an incredibly heavy lift over two years” for districts already sending their students to the same middle and high school.

“Even with that kind of perfect situation, one would think it would have taken little time, but there were lots of fears, lots of concerns,” she said. “We had a lot of details to work out, and took multiple votes to get to the seven towns that we currently have.”

Fast-forward 10 years, and districts are being asked to merge voluntarily, without the threat of forced consolidation. It’s a win for most Democratic lawmakers in the Statehouse, but it has nonetheless left some doubt among policymakers and educators over how much H.955 can accomplish.

Lawmakers hope future school districts will have at least 2,000 students, but the bill describes a special process to facilitate mergers for “orphaned” districts with fewer than 750 students.

While the threat of forced consolidation may not be as present this time around, district officials say the looming foundation formula will impact smaller districts.

Before a new funding formula comes to pass in 2029, lawmakers plan to constrain spending by penalizing districts whose spending exceeds a threshold above the state per-student average.

This year’s yield bill, which Scott signed into law on Thursday, will lower the state’s excess spending threshold year after year, starting at 18% above average spending per student and phasing down to 12.5% above average in fiscal year 2032 and beyond, to disincentivize school district spending by double-taxing any spending increases over a certain amount.

That will force school districts to consider ways to scale up and partner with neighboring districts to regionalize their services, absorbing the impact of the tightening spending threshold and, eventually, the foundation formula.

Sousa said the incentive for her districts to merge during Act 46 then was more about creating equity in programming and quality of education for all of the area’s districts. But this time around, “We really are trying to save our region because of the impact of the funding formula.”

“There are districts whose budget going through this (election) was incredibly challenging, and now that the threshold is even lower, positions will be cut,” Sousa said. “People’s belief of what should be provided in a public school in Vermont, it will really be put in question.”

This story was first published by VfDigger and is republished with permission as part of the Vermont Journalism Trust’s Community News Sharing Project.