A Successful Landing
Like bringing a jumbo jet in for a safe landing, Governor Scott, his administration, the House and Senate, and Democrat and Republican leadership all skillfully collaborated to navigate the big H.454 Education bill home to a successful landing on Monday to close out the 2025 legislative session.
There were many contrary voices at work trying to divert the bold mission on which the Governor launched us at the beginning of this year’s session to reform Vermont’s education system. They were saying, “We moved too quickly. We aren’t moving fast enough. We need to reduce taxes faster. We need to spend more. We’re profiting private schools and endangering small public schools. We’re restricting our most effective schools in an effort to ensure equitable education for all.” With such turbulent skies, the solution will not fully satisfy anyone. But it does strike a balance that we can all live with to achieve the Governor’s ultimate goals of improving quality and reducing costs of Vermont’s education system.
There is no question that full system reform is necessary. Vermont’s education system is one of the most expensive in the country on a per pupil basis with costs continuing to rise, student populations continuing to decline, and mediocre performance results continuing to fall. As Barre City Representative Teddy Waszazak said in his floor speech on Monday, “the status quo is killing us.” We can’t do nothing. We can’t wait any longer.
The keys to the education reform solution are 1) larger districts and 2) a foundation formula. First, larger districts do NOT necessarily mean larger schools and closing smaller schools. It means encapsulating more schools within a larger administrative district, thereby enabling resource collaboration between schools and a reduction of administrative overhead. It will foster a larger sense of community and is where a portion of the quality/opportunity improvement, as well as cost savings, are achieved. Resources that provide vital services and new opportunities can be shared and better compensated within larger districts of schools. Reducing administrative overhead will allow more of our education dollars to flow to our students rather than the bureaucracy. Larger districts also provide the proper setting for communities to equitably and compassionately plan for declining student populations.
Second, a foundation formula regains the equitable and controlled funding of education across the state. This mechanism directly ties the funding, and thus school district budgets, to the number and type of students they serve. This fosters equity and accountability and is another source of quality/opportunity improvement and cost savings. The foundation formula base value ensures that every student is provided ample funds to be well educated, even those in currently underserved areas. It also ensures that students with extra educational needs are adequately cared for by the weights applied to those categories. After fierce negotiation, the foundation formula values and weights are set to match our state-wide FY25 spending and are constrained to increase no more than the NIPA inflation index of about 2.4%/yr as compared to our recent trend of more than 6% annual education cost increases. The Vermont Joint Fiscal Office estimates this effect alone will provide $321M tax savings to Vermonters over the first 4 years of the phase-in period.
The official start date 3 years out was a compromise between the Governor’s 2-year proposal and the House’s 4-year plan. It is the right amount of time to define the new school districts, construct voting wards, elect new school boards, and perform all the legal hand-offs from current to future districts. In addition, we added a 5-year phase-in to both the school funding and property tax changes to ease any transition. This lands us on the new school district and funding start date to begin the 2028-29 school year, with full phase-in achieved by 2032-33. While this may sound to some like a long time to wait for tax relief, it is as fast as humanly possible given the seismic changes being made. Two things will likely occur in the meantime to bridge the gap: 1) the Governor will do his best to buy down rates until the new controls are in place, and 2) knowing that these changes are coming, school boards will begin shaping their budgets to smoothly transition to the new rates.
To those who say the plan was rushed, the truth is that the proposals in H.454 were painstakingly debated in the House and the Senate, following extensive testimony from educators, schools boards, superintendents, constituents, national education finance experts, tax professionals and many more points of view. This follows decades of studies about how to best fund, administer, and deliver education in Vermont. We are not short on information, examples, opinions, data, effort, or time spent considering the options. And even with this bill passed, we’re not done. After the Districting Task Force does its work this off-season, we’ll be refueled and ready to take flight again in next year’s session to continue the work on education reform that we boldly began this year.
I’ve only skimmed the surface of this comprehensive reform package. If you have questions on these or other aspects of the bill, please contact me directly.
I remain honored to be your Representative,
Rob North
www.NorthForVTHouse.com
Addison, Ferrisburgh, New Haven, Panton, Vergennes, and Waltham
