The State Board of Education has adopted a set of criteria to help school districts navigate Act 46, the new state law aimed at forging larger and fewer school systems in Vermont.
At its meeting in late July, the board adopted Act 46 criteria for accelerated mergers, and created a worksheet to help districts get started.
Vaughn Altemus, education finance manager for the Agency of Education, said the criteria “puts accelerated mergers in terms of a number of questions,” and it will help the state’s 277 districts to efficiently determine if they qualify to seek an accelerated merger.
“Basically, it’s a decision framework checklist as to whether you’re qualified for accelerated mergers which will be the first round,” of unified districts to come before the state for approval to merge, Altemus said.
The criteria focus on three goals: equity, quality and transparency, according to the minutes of the July 24 state board meeting.
Rebecca Holcombe, secretary of the Agency of Education, speaks about the new education governance reform bill at a meeting of the State Board of Education on Thursday at the Okemo Mountain Resort. Board Chairman Stephan Morse is to the secretary’s right. Photo by Amy Ash Nixon/VTDigger
The agency has also created a document to help communities with forming study committees if they plan to try to take advantage of the accelerated merger process.
Districts wishing to take advantage of the maximum tax breaks under the new law must have affirmative votes of all districts within a proposed unified school district by July 1, 2016, and be ready to transition to those new school systems by July 1, 2017.
The most generous and long-lasting tax incentives are available for those districts approved for the accelerated mergers.
There are also tax incentives and grant help for districts which cannot move that quickly, but they are less generous, and for four years, where the accelerated mergers will be given five-year tax breaks.
In order to take advantage of the accelerated merger, a new system must have the minimum number of students stipulated in Act 46, 900.
School districts that do not move into the preferred structures for unified school systems by 2019, and which do not meet the AOE’s educational quality standards, can be moved by the state board into restructured districts.
Vermont has lost 24,000 students in its public schools since 1997, but education spending and property taxes have continued to increase, leading to taxpayer outcry.
More staffing needed to support new law’s implementation
The Legislature will be hearing from the AOE and the board next session about the need for additional staffing to implement Act 46, members of the SBE said.
“Stephan Morse and I testified repeatedly to the House and Senate education committees that if this thing was going to work, it had to be properly staffed and supported,” said William Mathis, a member of the SBE. “What ended up happening was that they added one position, but no funding source was added to implement it, and if they want this thing to go as a major piece of legislation that they desire, then they are going to have to get people working within the field who know the law, and know the process, and can assist local schools in the process.”
The state board also recently approved the charges of two new committees at its recent meeting, the education quality review subcommittee, and a governance subcommittee, which will focus on Act 46, said Morse.
Mathis, who is chairing the new education quality review subcommittee for the state board, said, “Every state has the equivalent of educational quality standards and they vary in their philosophical outlook from being pretty liberating documents to counters of test scores to punishing schools and things like that, and what we are trying to do is build a qualitative system for school evaluation that continues with some test-based measurements, but also looks at the quality of what’s happening in a school.”
“How do you have a set of qualitative criteria that applies equally to Elmore School and to Burlington High School? They are very diverse,” Mathis said.
Former legislator believes positive change lies ahead
Peter Peltz, a member of the state board and a former legislator who served eight years on the House Education Committee, said education governance reform has been a long time in coming.
He said his “master plan” in getting out of the House and onto the state board was to be able to play a role in the adoption of change for the state’s public education system.
Peltz was appointed to the new governance subcommittee on the state board.
He said the state board, the Vermont Superintendents Association and the Vermont School Boards Association “are doing a good job of going out and dealing with districts at a local level,” to get the ball rolling around Act 46.
The creation of the expanded unified education districts is an exciting democratic process where decisions will be made over joining with other communities, setting tax rates, approving articles of agreement and more, said Peltz of the citizen participation.
“You’ve got a whole host of issue,” said Peltz. “What does a school mean to people?”
The property tax issue plays big, too, said Peltz.
“It’s been sort of a standoff for many years in regard to coming up with any structural transformation,” in the state’s public education system, said Peltz, and now, with Act 46 signed into law, real change looms.
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