By Sen. Ruth Hardy
Editor’s note: Ruth Hardy, of East Middlebury, represents Addison County in the Vermont Senate. She wrote the following reflection (originally posted at ruthforvermont.com) on voting “no” on H.454, the eduction transformation reform bill that passed last week.
On Monday, June 16, the Legislature passed H.454, the education transformation bill that was a main focus of our work this session. Although I appreciate many parts of the bill and dedicated an enormous amount of time and effort to make the bill better, in the end, I could not support it and voted “no.” You can watch my speech on the Senate floor before voting on Monday, explaining my thoughts on the bill and the process.
In short, I voted against the bill because the Senate lost the trust of many Vermonters and failed public education by repeatedly putting aside the broad needs of public schools and their students in favor of the narrow desires of private schools. Since the bill puts off many big decisions until next year and beyond, it’s very likely that without changes to Senate leadership and committee assignments this dynamic will happen again.
The bill commences sweeping, generational change to Vermont’s K-12 education system — consolidating school districts, implementing education quality reforms, creating a foundation formula to fund schools, eliminating local school district budget votes, changing how private schools receive public funds, and initiating significant property tax reform measures.
The Good
I do support many of the provisions in the bill and worked hard to improve or protect them. I especially like the tax policy changes, which is actually what many voters wanted us to focus on so their property taxes could be lower. The bill will replace the current property tax credit with a new incremental property tax exemption of house-site values up to $425,000 for households earning up to $115,000 annually. This should continue tax relief to thousands of Vermonters with low and moderate incomes and reduce the eligibly cliff.
The bill creates a new property tax classification, separating out non-homestead residential properties, which are generally second homes and short-term rentals. Taxes on this new classification will help pay for the property tax exemption for lower-income Vermonters, shifting taxation onto wealthier property owners. The bill establishes property assessment districts that will oversee regularly-scheduled property reappraisals to ensure towns keep their grand lists updated and prevent property tax spikes due to delayed reappraisals. While the tax policy cannot yet be sufficiently modeled to know how much it will bring down taxes, preliminary estimates are encouraging.
The new foundation formula to fund schools would provide an adequate base funding amount per pupil, plus additional funding for students with disabilities, English-language learning needs, and students living in poverty. There will also be grants for schools that are, by necessity, small and/or in sparsely-populated areas. The formula and the amounts for the base, weights, and grants, were empirically-derived, using the actual cost for Vermont schools. A foundation formula is the most common formula for funding schools in other states and is meant to both adequately fund schools and promote greater funding stability and equity statewide.
I support most of the education reform measures as well, including a statewide school calendar and graduation standards, modest class size requirements, changes to the state board of education, and updates to some state rules governing schools.
The bill includes a lot of strong “intent” language about how the Legislature intends to enact change, and also requests many studies and reports from various entities, including the Commission on the Future of Public Education, the state board of education, the Agency of Education, the Tax Department, and the Joint Fiscal Office.
Getting data, information, and ideas is crucial if we are going to implement these measures successfully, but the fact that so much is currently unknown and yet to be decided means that these reports represent a double-edged sword.
The Bad
As such, there are parts of the bill that are really problematic. The foundation formula will be difficult for many school districts that are already working at scale and/or spending more than the average amount per pupil. These districts will likely have to make budget cuts, but may not have much “fat” to cut — possibly cutting programs that are good for kids.
With a new foundation formula controlled by the state, the bill also unceremoniously eliminates most local school budget votes. Combined with the potential for larger school districts, these measures erode the local democracy that’s a big part of Vermont’s core values.
The bill creates an 11-member task force, dominated by legislators, to recommend new larger school districts, and specifically allows those districts to be structured in a way that accommodates the current system of private school vouchers, and maintains inequitable and inefficient governance structures. This politicized and rushed process for recommending new districts also puts the Legislature in a difficult position to approve new school districts quickly next session, likely leading to even more political division and potential inaction—in an election year no less!
While the bill does create a structure for a state-level school construction program and fund, the final version of the bill removed the modest funding source that was available to seed the new school construction fund. New school buildings are already desperately needed and will be even more so under a consolidated system that seeks to combine some schools that might not have sufficient capacity to accommodate more students. Especially if we are going to create more equity in a system that has both the oldest public school buildings in the nation and sends public funding to private schools with high-end facilities, we have to be able to fund public school construction projects.
I was disheartened, to say the least, that while the bill does limit the number of private schools that can receive public funding, it does not limit the number of students who can attend these schools on the public dime, nor does it prevent communities from closing their public schools and sending kids to private schools using public funding. It also creates a couple carve-outs in the funding system that could lead to private schools getting more money than public schools to educate high schoolers and tech center students. See below for the ugly details.
Finally, the bill seeks to do all of this work in three years, a compromise with the governor who wanted things done in two years and the Legislature who preferred four.
This shortened timeline creates complications with the timing of electing new school boards, envisioned to be in a stand-alone special election in November 2027 when voter turnout will probably be low.
It also is likely to create rushed decisions and potential chaos in schools when a weak Agency of Education and hostile federal situation are already causing alarm for schools.
The Ugly
Unfortunately, from the beginning, Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth forced us into a narrow framing of reform and the Committee on Committees (Baruth, Lieutenant Governor John Rodgers and Senator Ginny Lyons) appointed senators with little relevant policy experience to positions that allowed them to cater to narrow interests over the common good. As such, the process, and the loss of trust it created, became the ugliest part of this important bill.
Over the past several weeks, a committee of conference, made up of three senators and three representatives, negotiated the final details of the bill. The vast majority of those negotiations focused on private school interests, with repeated proposals by the senators for specific carve-outs in the bill that would advantage or exempt private schools that receive public funding. Two of the senators have direct ties to large private schools which depend on public money — Scott Beck is a teacher at St. Johnsbury Academy and Seth Bongartz was the board chair for Burr and Burton Academy for nearly two decades.
Through these connections and apparent conflicts of interest, the private schools and their high-paid lobbyists appeared to be using the negotiations to gain financial advantage and protections. (You can watch recordings of the negotiation sessions on the Senate Education Committee livestream to see this dynamic in action.)
It’s also notable that these negotiations came after I had already negotiated many of the same topics with Bongartz to finalize the details of the bill that passed out of the Senate, the very version of the bill that Senate conferees were supposed to be defending in their negotiations with the House. Instead, they repeatedly demanded provisions for private schools that were in neither the House nor the Senate’s bills, underscoring that despite my good-faith negotiations and handshake deal with Bongartz, he was absolutely willing to betray our agreement.
According to the rules followed by the Vermont General Assembly in Mason’s Manual of Legislative Procedure, members of a committee of conference are supposed to defend the provisions in their body’s version of the bill and reach an agreement that includes only the provisions of one house or the other, or something reasonably in the middle. They are not allowed to include provisions outside of the scope of the specific sections of the bill, and if they do, any member can object to the report of the conference committee.
With H.454, this is exactly what happened: the Senate conferees demanded and won provisions for private schools that were not included in the House or Senate versions of the bill; Senator Vyhovsky objected and Lieutenant Governor Rodgers ruled in her favor, finding the conference committee report “objectionable.”
In other words, the bill we were asked to vote on had been finalized without following legislative rules. Unfortunately, most senators voted to overrule the lieutenant governor and accept the new version of the bill anyway, leading to a 17-12-1 vote on the bill in the Senate.
Public input
I heard from hundreds of educators, administrators, parents, and community members who support our public school system, asking me to vote against H.454 (and nobody asking me to vote for it). One of the common themes I heard is that they had lost trust in nearly everyone who was trying to enact education reform.
Rather than consistently support schools and implement gradual, positive reform over his nearly decade as governor, Phil Scott put his inexperienced secretary of education in charge of proposing massive, rushed reform during a very tenuous time. Rather than center on public schools that educate more than 95% of Vermont’s students and are the heart of most Vermont towns, Senate leadership ignored their interests and focused on the narrow needs of private schools. Only the House seemed to listen to and appreciate the perspective of public education, but in the end, even they gave into the bullying demands of the Senate negotiators and the political threats of the governor.
Some say that the ends justify the means or that policy is more important than process, but if the process is so bad that it leads to a loss of trust from the very people who are the subject of the reform, then a good product will be difficult to achieve. As I said to Senate Majority Leader Kesha Ram Hinsdale when she was lobbying people to vote for the bill, “Process matters, trust matters. You cannot do meaningful reform without them.”
This transformational bill includes so many decisions yet to be made. As an education policy maker, mother of three kids who graduated from our public schools, and a Vermonter, I care deeply about our educational system. I will continue to do what I can to ensure the success of H.454 even though I voted against it. But to restore the trust of others, there must be transformational change in the Senate before the next legislative session in January, with new leaders of key committees, a clearer focus on the public schools that serve 95% of Vermont kids, and a commitment to a process based in good faith, ethics, and transparency, rather than what we have seen from current Senate leadership. Only then will the type of reform we need be possible.
