Education Committee

The House Committee on Education considers matters relating to education, libraries, literary and scientific subjects, and other similar policies.

Commission On The Future Of Public Education Update

The legislature created the Commission on the Future of Public Education in the Yield Bill of 2024 to make recommendations for a statewide vision for Vermont’s public education system to ensure that all students are afforded substantially equal educational opportunities in an efficient, sustainable, and stable education system. Different cost drivers created the challenging budget environment of 2024, and there was renewed urgency around establishing a modern vision for public education across our state. 

Commission members represent many different elements of our education system including state government, the State Board of Education, the legislature, school boards, principals, superintendents, teachers, and other education experts. The Commission delivered a preliminary report at the start of the 2025 session. These education leaders are addressing long-standing, systemic issues present in Vermont’s education system including our education finance system, education governance, resources, and administration, as well as the footprint of our education system (school buildings, districts, and supervisory unions).

The preliminary report outlined the complexity of the work ahead as well as our collective responsibility to create thoughtful change that is student-centered and grounded in reliable data. As Vermonters, we have a shared responsibility for the education of our youth in every corner of our state. Delivering on this responsibility will require collaboration and transformational policy changes implemented over several years related to education governance, the education delivery model, and education finance.

Supporting A High-Quality Public Education System

As we tackle complex education policy issues this session, Vermont students and their right to a high quality public education are at the heart of our work. The goal is to support students on their career path with a solid educational foundation and a strong sense of being a connected and contributing member of our communities. Schools are one of our most important democratic institutions, places where all students from all walks of life have an opportunity to come together, learn, and thrive.

Ensuring equal access to high-quality educational opportunities for our students is critical to the success of the next generation of Vermonters. From pre-K through high school, we must nurture and support all students. Additionally, we remain committed to providing teachers and school leaders the necessary educational resources regardless of geography. 

There is broad agreement that we must bend the cost curve of K-12 education and that systemic reforms must happen if we are serious about a long-term solution. We must keep in mind the importance and power of public education, now more than ever. We can make necessary reforms in a realistic, respectful way that can reduce the increasing cost of education and provide Vermont children with more and better opportunities.

Many of our challenges are not unique to Vermont. Public schools are the provider of last resort, tasked with handling multi-generational poverty, pandemic-associated learning loss, and the adverse impact of social media that we are just beginning to understand. The end of federal pandemic funding, increased student mental and behavioral health needs (conservatively estimated to be at least $50 million in VT last year), continued dramatic increases in employee health insurance costs, mounting deferred maintenance, and inflation is putting extraordinary pressures on school budgets. 

In addition to these pressures, we have underlying structural challenges in Vermont. We operate over 250 school buildings, which drives many of our staffing costs and facilities needs. Vermont schools will always be small by most national standards given our rural nature, but we have schools with extremely small class sizes and multiple grades being combined, not because it is an educational choice but because it is a staffing necessity. We have many very small high schools whose students might be better served in schools with more programmatic and extra-curricular opportunities. We also operate parallel systems - public and private schools - using public education dollars. We have a town tuitioning program for areas that do not operate schools and while the four historic academies operate as quasi-public schools, there has been a steady increase in the number of students using vouchers for school choice and an increase in the number of schools to which those vouchers go. This scatters our public education dollars in more directions (including out of state and out of country) when we need to move towards greater efficiencies and often affords some students opportunities that not all can access. 

Thriving and sustainable public schools are an essential element of strong communities in all fourteen counties. Together we can chart a thoughtful and sustainable path forward that will deliver an excellent education to our students.

Where do we go from here? 

We can make incremental, thoughtful changes in order to increase educational equity across our state and bend the cost curve. All students should have access to robust opportunities.

The Education Committee is working on policy areas that are based on the extensive feedback of educational experts in Vermont and research on best practices (many of these are also ideas being considered by the Commission on the Future of Public Education). In order to address our challenges in a way that is realistic for our context, the committee is working on:

• Setting class size minimums 

• Moving towards schools that operate at scale, including restarting our school construction aid program (there has been no state aid for almost 20 years) with highly targeted incentives for regionalization and consolidation so that we move towards research-based optimal school sizes over the next 5-10 years and setting clear limits on how our public dollars are used in areas that do not have a public school 

• Ensuring a map-based plan for reducing the number of districts in the state that accounts for our current buildings (capacity and condition) and demographic trend data 

• Creating statewide cohesion around common sense issues like a uniform school calendar and statewide graduation standards 

• Clarifying the role of the State Board of Education and resourcing it appropriately to do critical work on the rules that govern the quality of our system and be the public-facing part of public education 

• Continuing to push to resource the Agency of Education adequately [There are currently many vacancies and an increased reliance on consultants, many out of state. When schools cannot count on our Agency for technical assistance or professional development on practices that improve learning, they all do the work on their own which leads to higher costs and disparate results.]

School boards around the state are making very difficult decisions to reduce staff, cut programs and deliver responsible budgets in challenging times.

What about the Governor’s proposal?

The Education Committee has spent much of the legislative session thus far taking extensive testimony to understand the Governor's Plan which would consolidate 119 school districts into five, centralize much decision-making at the state level, expand school choice statewide, and change the funding formula, all within the next few years. The Governor  has only now (8 weeks into the legislative session) provided details about his proposal. The committee is taking a close look at how he proposes to implement this scale of change. The details matter. The proposal must have clear and unambiguous guidance in order to be considered workable. There are some broad areas of concern. 

First, the plan would expand school choice statewide. Public education is one of the few institutions left with an express purpose of serving all students. Public schools are certainly not perfect, but when students come together in the same building, in the same classrooms, on the same teams, regardless of their differences, they are learning about our common humanity and engaging in a critical institution of our democracy. Phrases like “the money would follow the student” mean that in reality the money only follows certain students who can access choices. 

Second, the plan remains unclear where the financial savings for a foundation formula is derived. It proposes to remove $183 million from the system, which is roughly 2,000 teachers. Early modeling shows that a disproportionate amount of the hit could be on Vermont schools that operate at the kind of scale we are striving for, but also have higher salaries due to higher costs of living.

Gov. Scott’s proposal is pushing discussions we need to have. Whether his plan has the detail needed to be realistic remains to be seen, but the concepts of greater scale, bending the cost curve and increasing opportunities are ones we can all get behind.