MONTPELIER — The Vermont Senate voted on Friday evening to approve its version of this year’s landmark education reform bill, H.454. The decision came just before 6:30 p.m., after hours of discussion on the floor and days of debate in committee hearings and a number of other meetings behind the scenes this week in the Statehouse.
The Senate’s bill largely mirrors the version that the House passed last month, though with some changes that senators indicated may need to be worked out in a committee of conference in the coming days. The vote was not unanimous, but it was taken by voice, so individual senators’ votes weren’t on the record.
It wasn’t certain, even at the start of the day on Friday, whether Senate leadership had enough votes to get a bill over the line. At a tense meeting earlier this week of the Senate Democratic caucus, it became clear support had faltered for a now-defunct version of the bill that had passed out of the chamber’s education and tax-writing committees. Meanwhile, school district leaders from across the state had issued missives in recent days panning many of the Senate committees’ proposals.
That led Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, to scrap the chamber’s initial version of the bill on the floor Thursday morning. Plans were to take up an amendment to the House’s bill Thursday afternoon — and then, when that didn’t happen, Thursday night. But it wouldn’t be until late Friday afternoon that the slate of changes, spearheaded by Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, made it onto the floor.
“I will say that we have given Vermonters, and our colleagues in the House, a bit of a show over the last couple of days,” Baruth said on the floor Friday after senators passed the bill. He then suggested people had “underestimated” the chamber, but the fact that senators came to a consensus shows people do so “at your peril.”
Senators were facing intense pressure from Republican Gov. Phil Scott to pass a bill before adjourning for the year. He had all but demanded it, warning that he would use his powers to call them back for a special session until they came to a consensus. This year’s Legislative session is already well into overtime compared to years past.
Both chambers of the Legislature, and the Scott administration, have broadly agreed the state should transition to a new “foundation” education funding formula and move toward consolidating school districts. But they have disagreed over the details and the timeline. A foundation formula, the most common type of education funding system across the country, provides districts a set amount of money per student in each district and how expensive those students are to teach.
The legislation senators approved Friday maintains much of the form of the House’s bill, including the overall timeframe for lawmakers’ proposed education transformation. Like the House bill, it lays out a four-year transition, with both new school districts and a new foundation funding formula taking effect at the same time on July 1, 2029. The Senate-passed language would also, like the House version, empower a task force made up largely of experts and representatives of different public school constituencies to create three school district consolidation maps for legislators to consider next year.
Before the bill’s final approval, senators from two other parties had their say. Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky, P/D-Chittenden Central, proposed two changes to the bill that did not pass. Then, Senate Minority Leader Scott Beck, R-Caledonia, offered up two additional amendments — one he later withdrew, and the other of which was voted down.
Part of Beck’s goal, he said on the floor, was to address concerns of people who live in school districts that currently spend relatively less per student to fund their schools and that, under the bill’s proposed new funding formula, would see their taxes increase significantly — as much as 30% or more for some districts in one estimate.
Those districts would also, under the bill’s proposed formula, receive significantly more money than they currently spend per student. While voters would be able to choose to pay a higher tax rate to spend more on their schools, as the proposal is currently structured, they could not vote to lower their tax rate by spending less than the base amount set statewide.
Sen. Ann Cummings, D-Washington, who chairs the chamber’s finance committee, responded to Beck and other similar comments from other GOP senators. She shared their concerns, but said it was not possible to fully understand the proposal’s tax rate implications until new school district boundaries are drawn up and approved by the Legislature next year, which is the schedule proposed in the bill.
“We’re aware that there are going to be problems we need to solve. But we don’t need to solve them tonight in order for this process to go forward,” Cummings told her colleagues. “To do it now, is premature.”
Both chambers’ proposals set new average class size minimums, though the Senate’s proposal would have lower average numbers of students per class. For example, the House bill suggests minimums of 12 students for kindergarten and 15 students for grades one through four, while the Senate’s bill sets the standards at 10 students for kindergarten and 1st grade and 12 students for 2nd through 5th grade. The Senate bill would also give the state secretary of education greater discretion over the enforcement of the class size standards.
Senators also increased the maximum size allowed for proposed new, consolidated school districts to 8,000 pre-k through 12th-grade students, compared to 4,000 students in the House version of the bill. The Senate bill also nixed a requirement for a uniform school calendar across the state.
Some parts of the bill senators passed Friday appear to be designed to appease Democratic senators who represent towns in school districts that currently pay tuition to send students to independent schools for some, or all, grades. Specifically, the bill added back certain measures first crafted in the Senate Education Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Seth Bongartz, D-Bennington, who served for 19 years on the board of Burr and Burton Academy, a historic independent school in Manchester. He stepped off the board in 2020.
For one, the Senate version now requires the task force that will develop new school district boundaries to include at least one option that maintains the current supervisory union and supervisory district structure, which would support historic tuitioning arrangements with independent schools. It also broadens the group of independent schools that would be eligible to receive tuition under the new system.
In the House version, an eligible independent school would be one with a student body that was at least 51% public school students in 2024, while Hardy lowered the threshold to 40% in her initial proposal. The standard ultimately approved by the Senate allowed schools with 25% or more public school students in the 2023 school year to participate.
After approving the bill, the Senate voted to immediately send its proposal over to the House for that chamber’s consideration. As of Friday night, plans were for the House to take up the bill Tuesday and call for a conference committee that same day, according to Conor Kennedy, chief of staff to House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington.
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