As lawmakers negotiate over education reform, the year-old Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont faces an uncertain future

A virtual public meeting hosted Wednesday evening by the Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont was sparsely attended. But the dozen or so people who logged on had plenty to say.

Small schools matter and bring value to their communities, one Twinfield Union School staff member said. Another attendee said school choice should not be expanded. And most said the proposed transformation of public education in Vermont — the outlines of which key lawmakers are debating this week at the Statehouse in Montpelier —  is happening far too quickly, and without much input from the public.

“I just don’t see how, at this time, we should be rushing through a process to make the governor happy, and the (Agency of Education) happy, and the Senate happy, and the House happy, when they haven’t really consulted with the people in the field,” Keri Bristow, the chair of central Vermont’s Mountain Views Supervisory Union board, said during the meeting. 

“I do not think that what’s going through right now is in any way equitable,” Bristow said. “I think it will be a huge detriment to the public school system.”

Wednesday night’s listening session was the final meeting in a series of five that a consultant hired by the commission has held over the last two months. The meeting capped efforts by the commission to gather public opinion about what Vermont’s public education system should look like, at least until it gets more direction from the Legislature.

The creation of the Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont was part of 2024’s Act 183, the law that set the double-digit average property tax increases needed that year to keep pace with ballooning public education costs.

The law gave members of the 13-member body, composed of lawmakers and education officials, a wide-ranging charge. Among other things, they were tasked with studying Vermont’s public education system and making recommendations to reduce costs while ensuring equal educational opportunities are afforded to all students, with a final report due in December 2025.

But since its first meeting in August 2024, the commission has lacked buy-in from all sides of the political spectrum, several of its members said. 

Some commission members haven’t shown up to meetings in months, according to commission members and meeting minutes. And after Gov. Phill Scott introduced his sweeping education reform plan in January, the commission struggled to find a role for itself.

“It is relevant that the commission was created in a law that was vetoed and then ultimately overridden. That is relevant to, I think, where we find ourselves,” Meagan Roy, the chair of the commission, said in an interview.

Now, as education reform proceeds, with only minor input from the body, the future of the commission tasked with studying the future of public education in Vermont is, itself, uncertain.

Jay Nichols, the executive director of the Vermont Principals Association and a member of the commission, said, “I feel a little bit like we’ve been floundering.”

‘Up in the air’

The commission delivered its preliminary findings on how to rein in public education costs in December. But the group shied away from offering specific recommendations on how to contain costs in the short term.

The document offered an assessment of the situation facing public education in Vermont, along with some key education data trends. Roy, a former superintendent, said in an interview that there were commission members who were disappointed that the report did not have cost containment recommendations. But she noted that the report found the issue was “more complicated than short-term cost containment.

“We really aren’t going to make wise decisions by focusing on the short term,” she said.

A month after the commission’s report was shared, Scott released his sweeping reform plan, calling for the consolidation of Vermont’s 119 school districts down to as few as five regional administrative districts.

“That pretty much changed everything, because at that point, the commission and everybody else was responding to the governor’s plan,” Nichols said, adding that he felt the commission was “bypassed” by Scott’s proposed timeline.

Since then, the commission has turned its focus toward a public engagement campaign. The commission began holding meetings for public input around the state, and later hired Afton Partners, a consulting group, to host virtual listening sessions and to gather the input provided for the commission and lawmakers. The group has so far been paid $24,375 for its work, according to Toren Ballard, a spokesperson for the state Agency of Education.

“At every meeting, we have citizens that come up and say things like, ‘Please keep this commission going, because it’s one place we feel like we can really be heard,’” Nichols said. “But until final legislation is settled on between the House and Senate and the governor… I mean, we could end up with not having a commission. And there’s several of us that have said publicly, including myself, that I don’t want to be part of a commission unless it’s doing real work.”

Peter Conlon, the House Education Committee chair who is part of the legislative negotiations and a sitting member of the commission, said his hope moving forward is that “we can better focus” the commission’s public outreach campaign “to provide really good public information to the Legislature come January.”

“The Legislature, which created the commission to begin with, would be best served by the commission really capitalizing on its outreach in terms of, what do Vermonters think of this new vision of Vermont, how it should operate, how it can best serve Vermonters,” he said in an interview.

The committee by law is scheduled to release a final report with recommendations for public education reform by December. But that has been difficult to home in on, Conlon said, because the commission’s future role “has been very much up in the air.”

In the current version of H.454 proposed by the House members, the commission remains, but lawmakers have refined its focus to address “the state of future larger districts, the role of school boards in those future larger districts, and the role of the electorate,” Conlon said while introducing that section to the conference committee on Wednesday.

The bill finalized by the conference committee would go to the full Legislature for a vote and then to Scott for his approval.

Low turnout 

Nichols and others admit that the commission has “not had strong turnout” for the in-person and virtual engagement sessions. A presentation by Afton Partners reported that only 18 people had attended the four listening sessions in May.

“It worries me. I think that a lot of the public doesn’t have any clue of what’s going on in the Legislature,” Nichols said.

Roy, in an interview, said the commission struggled with whether to host the virtual sessions at all. 

“Eventually, what the commission decided is that the optics aren’t good for us to talk for months about how important engagement is and then cancel the input sessions. It just didn’t feel right,” she said.

She added that the commission is still pursuing public engagement. “But we’re trying to be honest with participants,” she said. “‘You are informing us as the commission. You’re not necessarily informing the Legislature right now.’”

Conlon in an interview acknowledged the commission’s public sessions “have not been as well publicized as we would like.”

“But we have a lot of time left on the calendar, and once the commission gets settled as to whether it’s continuing with its current statutory framework, or if it’s moving ahead in a new statutory framework, that will help guide that work,” he said.

Roy said the commission remains an important tool for ensuring education reform is done thoughtfully.

“I think the commission is needed more than ever to do this work,” she said. Other states that have undergone systematic transformation, she said, “created a body to monitor how successful it’s been. That’s what I think our role should be.”