A MONTH IN THE HIILLS

Vermont’s political leaders have embarked on a plan to dramatically reshape the state’s education system over the next few years by sharply reducing the number of school districts while giving the state more control over districts’ spending.

The state Senate and House each gave final approval to the controversial education reform plan on June 16, and Gov. Phil Scott signed the legislation later in the month.

The Rutland Herald reported that the Republican governor, speaking at a news conference where he signed the bill, stressed the need for major change.

“For over 30 years, the state has tried to fix a broken system by tinkering around the edges,” Scott said.

With passage of the new law, he said, “we were able to come together and chart a path towards a system that better serves our kids and one that taxpayers can afford.”

The new law calls for reducing the number of school districts in Vermont from nearly 120 today to about a dozen – each with a minimum of 4,000 students. In a first step toward this goal, a new task force created by the law is expected to craft three alternative maps of consolidated districts for the Legislature to consider next year.

The law also would shift to a funding system in which the state would set a baseline of “foundation aid” to individual districts based on student enrollment, beginning in fiscal year 2029. Although most other states including New York already use a foundation-aid system, Vermont until now has left spending authority mainly in the hands of local districts and voters.
Under the current system, set up in the late 1990s, school districts bill the state, which collects education property taxes from individual towns and then redistributes them under a complex formula that’s intended to account for disparities between ‘property-rich’ and ‘property-poor’ communities.

Many of the details of the new funding formula – and its effects on individual towns’ property tax bills – remain unknown and will depend on the results of a series of studies and reports the state has yet to produce.

Opponents, including groups representing teachers, superintendents and school board members, said the new law would largely end the state’s tradition of local control over education – and that class-size minimums set by the law would force small, rural schools to close, resulting in long bus rides for students.

Don Tinney, president of the statewide teachers union Vermont NEA, told the online news site VTDigger that the new law would go too far toward consolidating power in Montpelier.
“I think we know that the best decisions for students are made by people who know their students,” Tinney said.

The governor and many lawmakers claimed a mandate for a major overhaul of the education system after voters, facing average projected property tax hikes of 18.5 percent, rejected nearly one-third of local school budgets on town meeting day last year. Scott and his allies campaigned on the need for major changes, and in November, Republican candidates picked up nearly two dozen seats in the Legislature, erasing what had been veto-proof Democratic margins in both houses, although Democrats retained their majorities.

The new law, known as H.454, passed with bipartisan support, although its passage in the state Senate rested on the votes of a beefed-up Republican minority. The Senate approved the bill in a 17-12 vote, with seven Democrats and 10 Republicans voting in favor while nine Democrats, two Republicans and the chamber’s lone Progressive voted no.

All five senators from Bennington and Rutland counties – Democrats Seth Bongartz and Rob Plunkett of the Bennington District and Republicans Brian Collamore, David Weeks and Terry Williams of the Rutland District – voted yes.

The House passed the final version of the legislation on a voice vote, so individual lawmakers’ votes weren’t recorded. But in procedural vote on whether to send the bill to the governor for his signature, which passed 96-45, only two of the local delegation’s 22 representatives – Democrats Will Greer of Bennington and Mary Howard of Rutland City – voted no.

Although the bill’s passage puts Vermont on a road toward school consolidation, state leaders still will have to navigate a series of politically difficult decisions over the next several years. Vermont Public described the 155-page bill as being “stuffed with off-ramps.” The first of these, it said, will come next year, when lawmakers will have to approve a map of consolidated school districts before other changes like a new funding formula can begin to take effect.

In other news from around the region in June and July:

 

College puts federal grants on pause
Williams College has temporarily stopped accepting funds from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, citing legal risks stemming from the Trump administration’s targeting of diversity initiatives.

The college notified faculty of the decision in a May 30 email from Provost Eiko Siniawer and Lara Shore-Sheppard, the dean of faculty.

“The college is unfortunately not comfortable accepting any new NSF or NIH grants, at least at this time,” Siniawer and Shore-Sheppard wrote.

The decision was first widely reported in early June by the journal Science, which said Williams “appears to be the first college or university to have taken such a dramatic stance.”
But some college officials cast the decision as a matter of legal caution rather than as an act of political resistance to the Trump administration.

A key concern is that the government recently added new clauses to the certifications the college must make before drawing grant funds. Under the new language, the college must certify that it does not “and will not, during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”

The certification documents don’t define what might constitute “discriminatory equity ideology.”
Meike Kaan, the college’s chief communications officer, told The Berkshire Eagle that another concern is the Trump administration’s use of a Civil War-era law called the False Claims Act. That law has long been used by federal prosecutors to target businesses and organizations suspected of fraud. But lately Trump Justice Department officials have used it to target universities whose diversity programs they contend are violating civil rights laws.

So if the college were accused of operating a “discriminatory equity ideology” program after certifying that it would not, it might be at risk of criminal prosecution.

In a statement to the Eagle, the college said it was in the midst of “a thorough review amid the rapidly evolving federal enforcement environment.”
Although Williams receives only a handful of federal research grants each year from the NSF and NIH, those grants are critical to the scholarly work of some professors. After being notified that the college had paused these grants, dozens of faculty signed a petition expressing “deep concern” and asking the administration for more information.

The administration met with faculty members on June 10 and 11, after which several professors told the student newspaper The Williams Record that they felt reassured the college would resume accepting grant funds after a legal review.

“The timeline is murky,” Leo Goldmakher, an associate professor of mathematics, told the Record. “But it sounds like it should be a question of months, not years.”

Since President Trump returned to office in January, his administration has threatened a series of major universities with a loss of research funding, increased taxes on their endowments and a loss of visas for international students, among other moves. The administration also has proposed slashing the budgets of both the NIH and the National Science Foundation.
“The actual story here is that the Trump administration is attacking institutions of higher education and the ability of people to do scientific research,” Sarah Jacobson, an economics professor at Williams, told the Record. “The college’s policy in reaction to the changes at the federal level is a much smaller deal to me.”

-- Compiled by Fred Daley