Dem lawmakers and governor defer to each other to take up proposals
By Ethan Weinstein/VTDigger
Vermonters cited affordability as a top priority in the 2024 election, and last week, they voted to send more Republicans to Montpelier than in recent decades.
Driving affordability concerns is the cost of education, which fueled this year’s average education property tax increase of 13.8%.
The election results, which saw a number of Democratic incumbents unseated, signal that state education policy needs to change — and fast, some lawmakers say.
“This is what voters told us last Tuesday: We need to fix the education funding system in Vermont,” said Sen. Thomas Chittenden, D-Chittenden Southeast.
Because Democrats lost their supermajorities in both the House and Senate, the majority party can no longer override Republican Gov. Phil Scott’s vetoes. Bills will likely need bipartisan support, and the governor may have more sway in policymaking.
“It’s fair to say that the elections made it clear that Vermonters want the Legislature and the governor to work more closely,” said Rep. Peter Conlon, D-Cornwall, chair of the House Education Committee. “We will be looking forward to very detailed proposals from the governor right away as the session begins.”
Last year, lawmakers and the administration sparred over collaboration — or lack thereof. The administration said Scott had produced years’ worth of potential cost savings ideas that the Legislature ignored. Democratic lawmakers, in turn, said Scott’s ideas came too late or lacked details.
Asked if, given last week’s election, the governor would engage in policymaking in a new way, Rebecca Kelley, Scott’s director of communications, wrote in part, “The message from voters is that legislative leaders need to start opening their minds to his ideas AND heed the warnings he puts forward.”
In a 2,500-word email, Kelley provided an 8-year timeline of Scott’s education finance suggestions, ranging from a statewide health care contract to increasing staff-to-student ratios through attrition and using some surplus funds as property tax relief. She suggested that those ideas remained relevant, and that the onus was on the Legislature to consider what had already been proposed.
Kelley also said it was a “false narrative” that the administration had not fully cooperated in education finance policymaking last year, writing, in part, “We WERE at the table, going back and forth on ideas.”
“Here’s the bottom line,” she wrote. “If the majority — and they do still hold a majority, which means we cannot make them take up any of our ideas — continues to be allowed (and sometimes enabled) to say ‘we don’t like that proposal, give us another one,’ we will not solve this problem.”
With more Republicans in office, some of the governor’s allies have new positions of power.
After his election to the Vermont Senate this month, Rep. Scott Beck, R-St. Johnsbury, expects to continue working on issues of education finance, a primary focus during his time in the House.
He plans to advocate for a proposal like the one he brought forward last legislative session, and in previous years, which would provide a “foundation” payment to school districts based on their number of students.
“I think we should have made this change a long time ago,” he said in an interview. “You’d get the spending to right-size itself organically.”
As with Vermont’s current formula, Beck’s idea would factor in “pupil weights,” or the relative expense of educating different types of students in different school settings.
The idea has a supporter in Chittenden, who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, which handles education funding.
A foundation formula that provided a base level of equitable funding “increasingly makes sense to me,” he said.
While Chittenden said he initially referred to the idea as the “Scott Beck Plan,” he said he learned that a similar idea was proposed following the Vermont Supreme Court’s 1997 Brigham decision, the landmark case that led to the state’s current funding formula.
“It’s really the ‘Brigham decision alternative No. 2, option not taken,’” Chittenden said.
The current system, according to Chittenden, “doesn’t reward frugality as much as it should.”
In addition to a funding formula change, Chittenden said he’d support shifting costs like universal school meals and mental health support out of the education fund and into the state’s General Fund. He also said lawmakers should consider taxing second homes differently than other properties that aren’t primary residences, like rental units and businesses.
And while Chittenden expressed some concern that a foundation formula would benefit some kids more than others, he said the status quo might not be better.
“I just don’t know if it’s going to guarantee every kid has access to equal educational opportunities in the state,” Chittenden said, “but our current system isn’t doing that either, right?”
A push for a radically new education funding formula is likely to receive pushback. For Vermont’s teachers union, the problem isn’t how much the state spends on education but how it pays for that spending, said Colin Robinson, Vermont- National Education Association political director.
While education funding will no doubt be a “top priority” this legislative session, Robinson said there’s “a clear distinction between education funding and the cost of education.”
Moving from a property tax to an income tax would “make the wealthiest pay their fair share,” he said, rather than putting the burden on the middle class.
Robinson pushed back on the idea of a foundation formula, though he acknowledged that without a specific proposal on the table, it’s hard to know what such a formula would entail.
“What is best for kids is usually best determined by local communities, and that’s why we have local control,” he said.
Regardless of what happens under the Golden Dome, education stakeholders will also be plotting the future elsewhere.
The legislative session coincides with the ongoing Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont. The commission was chartered by lawmakers last session to grapple with the biggest questions facing Vermont’s schools, such as how to improve student performance and address ailing infrastructure.
A finance subcommittee is slated to deliver short-term cost containment ideas next month. Complete recommendations from the commission aren’t expected until 2025.
