Two members of the Vermont school redistricting task force from the Upper Valley said they think the state needs to take a more deliberate approach to education reform than the sweeping proposal forwarded by Gov. Phil Scott.
Where Scott, a Republican, proposed redrawing the map of school districts, the committee, formed under the auspices of Act 73, a school reform law passed this year, said the state would be better off creating shared services across districts and encouraging voluntary mergers with incentives for construction of regional high schools.
State Rep. Rebecca Holcombe, D-Norwich, and former Dresden Interstate School District Superintendent Jay Badams, of Strafford, were members of the committee and backed its recommendations.
“I think what we were committed to doing was listening to Vermonters and gathering all the evidence,” Holcombe said.
“It’s so much more complicated than you’d imagine,” said Badams, who oversaw the consolidation of public schools in Erie, Pa., as superintendent. That was a three-year process, but the Vermont committee had only a few months for a much more difficult task, he said.
“It’s much more challenging in New England, because of the strength of local government,” he said. “It’s not just something you snap your fingers and change.”
The task force began work in August and was supposed to forward to lawmakers up to three plans for redrawing school districts.
Scott initially proposed five districts, which would replace the existing 119 districts and 52 supervisory unions, but the committee’s charge was to draw new districts containing between 4,000 and 8,000 students.
In its deliberations, the task force considered proposals that included reorganizing school governance around comprehensive high schools attached to existing technical and career centers.
Officials in the Woodstock-based Mountain Views Supervisory Union expressed concern that such a proposal would have split up their district, with eastern towns attending high school in Hartford and western ones going to Rutland.
Despite the upheaval such a plan would engender, it remains unclear whether larger districts would save money, Holcombe said.
“Everyone realizes we have challenges around affordability,” she said. “What they didn’t seem to think was that mergers were the way to achieve those things.”
Rising health care costs is one of the main reasons for rising education costs, Holcombe said.
Larger districts wouldn’t help, as the state already negotiates health insurance for public educators. Unlike recent years, the projected increase for next year is in the single digits.
There’s some hope that sharing services across districts could bring costs down and improve outcomes for students, Holcombe said. She pointed to Act 173, a state special education reform law passed in 2018 that was designed to improve services and lower costs.
That law has been unevenly implemented and the number of students receiving special education services has gone up — as have costs, by around $80 million. If a shared services model can implement that law, the state would benefit, Holcombe said.
“We just have to focus on the right problems,” she said.
The shared services model would make available to smaller districts the expertise they used to get from the state education agency, which was known as the Department of Education until 2012, when then-Gov. Peter Shumlin signed a bill making it a cabinet agency controlled by the governor.
Vermont had some of its best test results in the mid-2000s, when the Education Department had 30% more employees than the agency has now, Holcombe said.
The higher staffing level allowed the state to assist with curriculum and professional development and special education, in particular.
That was near the beginning of the No Child Left Behind era in American education, when standardized testing and the data the tests yielded were central to efforts to improve student learning. Some of that focus has been lost, along with the staff reductions.
“If you don’t have anyone focusing on improving teaching, it’s no surprise that we aren’t doing as well as we used to,” said Holcombe, who served as Education secretary from 2014 to 2018 and who ran for the Democratic nomination for governor in 2020, a race won by then-Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman, who lost to Scott.
The committee held meetings and heard from the public around the state, and learned of different complexities at each stop, Badams said.
In a meeting at Leland and Gray, a middle and high school in the small southern-Vermont town of Townshend, “there was a very concerted effort on the part of the Burr and Burton families to be heard,” Badams said, referring to an independent Vermont high school in Manchester.
Some of the parents had moved in from higher tax states during the coronavirus pandemic and were availing themselves of Vermont’s school tuitioning program to send their kids to out-of-state private high schools, he said.
At the meeting, they said, “if you take choice away from us, we’ll have to leave” Vermont, Badams said. According to the nine-town, Manchester-based Taconic and Green School District’s most recent annual report, about $350,000 in state funding went to out-of-state private schools, while another $12.5 million went to private schools in Vermont, including $11.5 million to Burr and Burton.
It seems impossible to address school costs and consolidation without quantifying the costs of school choice, Badams said. Tuitioning is effectively a second system of education that exists alongside the public schools, he said. In the White River Valley, for example, it enables students with choice to bypass public schools for the private Sharon Academy, he said. That raises taxes for the White River Unified District, which comprises Bethel and Royalton.
“That whole notion of choice seems to me one of the greatest barriers to sweeping reform if you’re trying to save money,” Badams said.
The main reason for slowing the reform process, though, was to ease the concerns of families who don’t want to see their schools summarily closed. Education Secretary Zoie Saunders advised the task force “not to worry about implementation,” Badams said, but the task force felt compelled to consider the details.
“You can’t subject all these families to massive change before you have a plan,” he said.
The task force’s report, released in its final form on Monday, met with swift condemnation from Saunders and from Scott, who said last week in comments to the media that the task force “failed” in its mission to furnish a new district map.
“What I hope this does is prove to the Legislature and the governor that change on this scale takes more research,” Badams said. “I feel like we did the governor a favor.”
The task force’s report is part of a longer political process, he said, one that needs more measured and informed debate. If the governor continues to push for a sweeping consolidation, Badams said, “I would expect you’d get your feedback at the ballot box.”
State lawmakers will resume their deliberations about education reform in January, ahead of elections in November.