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Gov. Peter Shumlin high- fives a student at the Smilie School in Bolton on June 2, as he signs the education reform bill into law.
School districts across Vermont are beginning to consider mergers as they work to comply with
the education governance reform bill, H.361, which was signed into law last week by Gov. Peter Shumlin,
A number of school boards and supervisory union superintendents across Vermont have queried Vermont School Boards Association (VSBA), the Vermont Superintendents Association, the Vermont Principals Association, and the Vermont Agency of Education (AOE) in the weeks since the bill was passed out of the General Assembly.
The organizations have scheduled meetings with individual school board members and superintendents the week of June 15.
Stephen Dale, executive director of the VSBA, described the private meetings as “a very preliminary service to our members.”
“It will be an informal conversation — most of them don’t really know what to do or where to turn,” Dale said. “It’s designed for us to help understand their needs and to get some preliminary information to them. … We don’t think it’s appropriate to have a public meeting at this point.”
The meetings will help school officials interpret the new law and figure out strategies for district mergers.
H.361 calls on the state’s 277 districts to find ways to merge into larger “education systems” of at least 900 pupils, and the bill extends tax incentives to districts as well as grants. The law gives districts a few years to voluntarily move into larger systems, and empowers the State Board of Education in 2019 to restructure districts it believes need to make changes and have not. Tax incentives are most generous for districts that move quickly.
It also phases out the small schools grant program and the hold harmless formula that were put in place to protect tax rate spikes in communities seeing rapid student decline when the dropoff of students in Vermont first started to become a problem.
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Stephen Dale, executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association. Photo by Amy Ash Nixon/VTDigger
Vermont has shed some 24,000 pupils since 1997, according to the latest statistics from the Vermont Agency of Education. That trend is projected to continue through at least 2030, state officials have said.
The number of school staff has remained relatively constant, reducing by less than 1,000, and education spending and property taxes to support school budgets have continued to increase, leading to outcry from taxpayers across Vermont.
Dale said about half the supervisory unions in Vermont have signed up for meetings, and that number is growing.
“There will be some districts that would have an easier task logistically to come together in a single district and those districts would be places where a supervisory union is already fully aligned with a union high school,” said Dale.
The fact that some districts can easily join logistically, however, Dale said, “does not make it easier, necessarily, politically. … There are regions of the state who are not thrilled about this idea.”
Dale says the more complicated districts have a mix of choice and non-choice.
“So this is not an easy task, and districts are all trying to figure out, ‘What does it mean for me?’ and ‘How do I approach it?’’’ Dale said.
He expects there will be public forums on the school merger law later in the summer.
At the State Board of Education’s two-day retreat June 25-26, William Mathis, a board member, said, one of the major themes is certain to be the implementation of H.361 and the state board’s role in that major transformation.
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William Mathis, a member of the Vermont State Board of Education, testifies before the House Education Committee. Photo by Amy Ash Nixon/VTDigger
“At this point, we really need to come up with a plan,” Mathis said.
The Agency of Education is helping districts with the rollout of H.361 at the same time it is implementing Education Quality Standards. Agency officials will visit and evaluate every public school in the state as part of a new state outreach plan.
“These things have to move together,” Mathis explained of the new EQS standards.
Mathis said the “latter part” of the new law’s orders, when districts who don’t meet state education standards and have not moved into larger systems can be reassigned by the state board, is “where you’ll see your most troublesome times.”
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