By Shaun Robinson and Ethan Weinstein/VTDigger
After a drawn-out day of disagreements and false starts, the Vermont Legislature bailed on its plan to wrap up business for the year on Friday, May 30, failing to come to a deal, at least for now, on this year’s landmark education reform bill.
So strained were the talks, the House and Senate couldn’t even immediately agree on when negotiations would continue.
The Senate gaveled out for the night shortly after 11 p.m. Senate President pro tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, told his colleagues that coming to an agreement needed more time, and the Senate would instead gavel back in at 2 p.m. Saturday.
“We’re going home now,” Baruth said.
Soon after, around 11:30 p.m., the House adjourned until Monday, June 2, at noon. From there, House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, said the chamber would be holding brief sessions without taking any actions, known as “token sessions,” until mid-June. That’s when legislators had previously penciled in to hold votes to override potential vetoes by Gov. Phil Scott.
“We’ve been putting compromises on the table all day, trying to find a path forward,” Krowinski said in an interview after ending her chamber’s business for the night. “This is a top priority for this legislative session, and we have to get it right. And at the end of the day, everyone was feeling like it needed more time.”
Legislative leaders said they expect the joint House and Senate panel hashing out the education bill, H.454, to continue meeting in the coming weeks, though the schedule was not clear.
The outcome leaves the session’s highest-profile work unfinished. Following an election where property tax rates drove voters, leading to a wave of Republican victories in the House and Senate, Democratic legislative leadership pledged to heed voters’ call for a more affordable education system.
Yet four months in, the path toward that future state remained murky.
The parties began Friday closer than they ended it. Early in the day, the House and Senate conference committee members appeared to reach some tentative agreements on H.454. But as the hours wore on, negotiations — at least in public — faltered. The committee had been unable to lock in key details. Left unsettled was which funding formula to use, what to do about school choice and private schools and how to limit spending before school districts consolidate down the road.
Meetings of the conference committee — three senators and three house members — were continually postponed. Legislators and legislative staff scrambled in and out of rooms. Lobbyists lingered in the halls. As the conference committee drifted further and further from either chamber’s original position, the possibility of explaining the hugely complex and fast-changing piece of legislation to 180 lawmakers looked near-impossible.
The vast majority of lawmakers dawdled as the conference committee worked in fits and starts, with people playing cards and sipping drinks throughout the State House.
The House, Senate and Gov. Scott have made education reform the year’s key issue. All three parties agreed on the need to consolidate school districts and transition the state to a new funding formula. But for months, the parties have reached little consensus on the intricacies and the timeline of that generational transformation.
The three parties have agreed to a few compromises. After initially insisting that lawmakers redraw school district lines this year, the Senate and the governor eventually agreed to give a special redistricting panel the summer redraw potential maps. The House and Senate have also come to agreement on class-size minimums.
Baruth had told his chamber around 10 p.m. Friday that agreement still looked possible.
“It’s frustrating,” he said on the floor, describing the delay, “but the way I think about it is, your constituents and my constituents sent us here for this night because they want us to do our work, they want us to finish it up, pay strict attention and then be done and go home.”
That proved overly optimistic.
