State Board of Education Chairman Stephan Morse. Photo by Amy Ash Nixon/VTDigger
The State Board of Education has held sessions through the summer and is forming two new committees, one on educational quality and a second on governance, as it oversees the implementation of Act 46, the new state education reform law.
Establishing the committees and setting priorities for how the board will approach its new responsibilities under Act 46 will be the focus of a special meeting set for July 24 at the Capitol Plaza Hotel and Conference Center, State Board Chairman Stephan Morse said Wednesday.
The state board is holding a special meeting in July because of the board’s pivotal role in the new law and the short timetable that school districts have to form “accelerated mergers” under the new law, Morse said.
Morse said the Vermont Agency of Education expects between a half dozen and 10 districts to be in a position to merge quickly, within the first year in order to take advantage of tax discounts offered to communities that vote to combine smaller districts into a larger one, under the law.
The law both seeks to right-size schools and find cost savings, as well as create more equitable educational opportunities for students in the face of shrinking resources in many regions.
Vermont’s student population has declined more than 24,000 students since 1997 and the decline is projected to continue through at least 2030, but the costs of education continue to increase, along with property tax rates.
Under Act 46, the state’s 277 school districts have until 2018 to figure out ways to join into larger education districts of at least 900 pupils, both to improve educational opportunities for students, and to find economies of scale for taxpayers.
Districts which do not voluntarily merge, and then fail to meet the state’s standards for quality during a review process that will be conducted over the next three years, can be ultimately restructured by the State Board of Education under the law.
At a recent two-day retreat, the state board reviewed possible scenarios for accelerated mergers and conventional mergers, and how the board may look to evaluate proposals.
Morse said the board devoted much of the retreat to the new law. “Usually we deal with several things, but this was of such importance that we spent the two days dealing with Act 46. We went through our responsibilities under the act and started to get prepared for that.”
While the state board’s main role is to approve mergers, Morse said members also want to serve as ambassadors and resources for the districts that might benefit from combining.
“Normally, we would sit back and wait for applications to come in, but what this governance committee will do is get out into the field and talk to supervisory unions and superintendents and study committees and encourage them,” said Morse.
“We’re not going to be there critiquing their plan,” at such an early juncture, said Morse. “We want to be as proactive as we can to encourage school districts to start working on this.”
Morse said the loss of local control and the creation of districts that will cover wide demographic and geographical distances is controversial in some communities.
“But I know that there are huge inequities in the educational quality among our 300 school districts,” Morse said. “I also know the last time we had a major reform of our school governance was back in the 1890s, and in my opinion, it’s high time we did this.”
Providing equitable education for all students is the guiding principle of the law as he sees it, said Morse. “Down the road a ways, there will be some financial savings out of this,” too, he said.
William Mathis, a member of the State Board of Education, will chair the new education quality committee of the board.
“This is going to be interesting legislation to implement,” Mathis said of Act 46. “Just based on the emails that come flying across my desk, there are all kinds of things that people are worried about.”
“There are some people that are staunchly opposed to it in terms of local control. There are others who want to use it as a method of we want to dance with these people but we don’t want to be seen in the company of others.”
He said there will be both “romances and divorces” between districts. “We anticipate it’s going to be incredibly lively,” Mathis said. “Which way it’s going to go, it’s hard to say.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: State Board of Ed toils through summer to prepare for Act 46 school mergers.