Action Alert!

Last week the House punted on education reform when they passed H.454, which delays making any structural changes to Vermont's education system until 2029. Even worse, it puts the same folks who designed and run today's failed system in charge of building the new one. You can find our full analysis of the bill here.

The House's grand education transformation initiative offers a mixed bag of deferred governance changes that put the people who designed and run todays failed system in charge of building tomorrow's education delivery system. The bill does, however, make historic changes to the way we raise funds to pay for schools that should introduce better transparency and accountability for taxpayers while also putting downward pressure on spending.

The annual "yield" bill sets the statewide property tax rates for the following year (in this case FY2026).

Action Alert!

A bill that would allow legislators to exempt themselves from ethics oversight is up for a key vote on Tuesday in the Senate Government Operations Committee!

Good Morning House Ways & Means Committee,

Thank you for your work on the new foundation formula, this will be an important step forward for education policy in Vermont by reducing the complexity of the current system and providing transparency and predictability to voters about how the school budgets they vote on will impact their tax bills.

Senate Appropriations Committee, I fully appreciate that you are in the midst of crafting a state budget that meets the needs of Vermonters in an uncertain environment. That is no easy task and I thank you for stepping up to it.

Seth Bongartz, Chair of the Senate Education Committee, drew a new map for education governance reform in response to Governor Scott's plan. The significantly reduces the number of governance bodies in the education system but also preserves inter-state and tuitioning school districts in most instances.

Dear Senate Government Operations Committee,

Having been involved in ethics legislation in Vermont for over a decade, we have significant concerns about H.1 which is on your Committee schedule for this week. We believe this bill represents a step backwards in transparency and accountability for public officials and that the bill was rushed out of the House before national ethics experts could weigh in.

Dear House Commerce Committee,

Thank you for taking on Career and Technical Education (CTE) reform this year. This is such an important topic for the future of our state and our workforce. Campaign for Vermont has long supported efforts to put these resources front and center in our education system.

Montpelier, Vermont – On Tuesday, Campaign for Vermont Prosperity (CFV) issued a statement regarding a bill they say represents a step backwards on ethics reform. “It’s unfortunate,” said CFV Executive Director Ben Kinsley, “we have been making progress on ethics reform for nearly a decade now, but this bill moves us in the wrong direction.”

As legislators returned to Montpelier this week we saw some of the hastiest decision-making this year. To be fair, that is usually the case as the cross-over deadline looms large over committee work.

A counterproposal for 2025 education reform focused on the learnings from Act 46 and recognizing Vermonter’s preference towards local control of schools.

Executive Summary

It is now quite clear to most close observers that Vermont’s education system is unsustainable. School spending has increased 42% since 2014 while our student population has shrunk. This has pushed the state to the second highest cost per student in the country. At the same time student performance has declined.

Governor Scott and Secretary Saunders have proposed a bold plan to change the trajectory of our education system and re-imagine what education in Vermont will look like in the years to come. We appreciate the audacity of the plan they put forward. There are some things that make a lot of sense like the new foundation formula and the increased focus on oversight and accountability. There are also things that miss the mark, like unwieldly regional school districts.

After more than a decade working on education reform in Vermont, we know what is likely to work and what is not. We pointed out many of the pitfalls of Act 46 before the bill even passed the legislature. The current plan repeats some of these mistakes.

Our largest concern with the five-district model is that it eviscerates local control. Vermont’s schools are more than just buildings where we educate students, they serve as de-facto community centers. This is not unique to Vermont, I just read a report last week from MassInc talking about the importance of school-centered neighborhood vitality. If we move the responsibility for a school many miles away, we risk losing the connection to their community.

The tragedy is that we don’t have to. School districts, at their core, really only require a volunteer school board to operate. There are no meaningful cost savings to be had there. The major opportunity is our 52 supervisory unions. Currently they are the impediment to larger economies of scale as most of our overhead has already been moved up to that level. We get into details with our proposal below, but consolidating these structures makes much more sense than taking away local school boards and severing the connection between schools and their communities.

I hope to work with legislators and the administration to Vermont-size our education delivery system and to re-align our current incentive structure to achieve better outcomes for students, more engagement from communities, and stable and predictable costs for taxpayers.

On behalf of Vermonters,

A bill gained traction this week in the House Government Operations Committee that would be a step backwards from a statewide comprehensive ethics framework. The bill, H.1, proposes to exempt the House and Senate Ethics Panels from the requirement to consult with the State Ethics Commission regarding any complaints referred to them by the Commission.

The bill proposes to exempt the House and Senate Ethics Panels from the requirement to consult with the Executive Director of the State Ethics Commission regarding any complaints referred to them by the Commission. It includes a repeal of a prior ethics oversight legislation and amends the procedure for accepting and referring ethics complaints. A new draft of the bill would also exempt the judicial branch and executive branch attorneys from the purview of the Ethics Commission.

The bill aims to regulate the use of synthetic media (specifically deepfakes) in elections by requiring the disclosure of deceptive and fraudulent synthetic media within 90 days of an election.

Governor Scott gave is budget address on January 28th, proposing a $9B budget for FY2026 with heavy investments in housing and other areas while simultaneously cutting taxes for the most financially vulnerable Vermonters.

We are of to the races! The first week of the legislative session was as active as you would expect as a flood of new legislators sought to get up to speed on big issues like education spending, health care costs, and carbon-pricing.

Good evening, I wanted to be sure that the Commission took the recent Education Outcomes & Spending report from Campaign for Vermont into consideration. As well as the original report from 2014 that Tom Pelham and I co-authored.