If the devil really is in the details of legislation, Satan may have arrived this week. The trouble is finding him.
Democratic lawmakers have so far welcomed Republican Gov. Phil Scott’s grand “education transformation” proposal with cautious optimism. Yet while broad support for a new funding formula and fewer school districts exists in theory, the specifics of both are what will determine what changes are going to be politically palatable.
Thursday and Friday, Zoie Saunders, Vermont’s secretary of education, unveiled the numbers behind the administration’s proposed foundation formula. The proposal — which assumes a fully transformed school district configuration by fiscal year 2028 — would cost almost $184 million less than the more than $2.3 billion the state is spending this fiscal year, she explained.
The committees of jurisdiction — House and Senate education, finance, ways and means — took it all in on Thursday and Friday afternoon. The base amount per student: $13,200 (one of the highest in the country, assured the state’s consultants). The weights: 1.5 for EL, -.54 for EEE, a sliding scale for school size. CTE is baked in and added on top. (English learners, at risk pre-k students and tech centers for those not up on their acronyms.)
“We have a lot of excel files,” Saunders told senators, meaning the presentations themselves were condensed from incomprehensible rows and columns that all but the most spreadsheet savvy lawmakers will likely never see.
Lawmakers met the details with somber consideration, digging in where possible and getting at key questions. But there’s something absurd about throwing logarithms at a citizen Legislature and expecting them to have opinions. And with less than three months of session left, will elected officials have enough time to completely understand what’s being proposed, or will change require a leap of faith?
In government time, Vermont is attempting to move at warp speed, hurtling toward a complete reimagining of its public education system. And the Democrat-controlled Legislature has largely ceded the driver’s seat. The body it created to shepherd policy change, the Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont, drew a blank when it came to drafting actual legislation.
Instead, the governor and his team — Saunders and her deputy, Jill Briggs Campbell — are in control. Democrats have argued that makes a certain sense. After all, the Agency of Education should contain far more education expertise than a handful of committees. But it means lawmakers are, for now, reacting to the details, not crafting them.
— Ethan Weinstein
In the know
Key members of the House are seeking to keep this spring from being a repeat of the fall, when a mass wave of evictions from the state’s hotel and motel program for Vermonters experiencing homelessness left many of them in precarious situations, some sleeping in tents — including families with young children — and prompted public outcry from service providers, municipal officials, and even some legislators who helped craft the law.
Without intervention, the situation is primed for a replay. That’s because the motel program’s rules are currently loosened for the winter months, allowing hundreds of people who had left the motels to reenter them. On April 1, however, the 80-night limit on motel stays and 1,100-room cap that prompted the recent evictions will kick in again.
Through a mid-year budget adjustment bill, the House Human Services Committee has moved to waive those limits through the end of June. It has pegged the cost at about $1.9 million.
Rep. Theresa Wood, D-Waterbury, who chairs the committee, said the idea is to buy more time for lawmakers to advance a bill to reform the state’s emergency shelter program.
“We wanted to be able to focus on that, and not on, you know, an emerging crisis of people leaving the hotels on April 1,” Wood said in a Thursday interview.
— Carly Berlin
Vermont needs to add around 13,500 people to its workforce each year over the next decade to keep up with labor demand and sustainably grow its economy, according to the Vermont Futures Project, an organization affiliated with the Vermont Chamber of Commerce.
The aim of the organization’s first Economic Action Plan released earlier this week is to provide Vermont with a roadmap for “crafting a robust economy” by dramatically increasing its population and housing stock. Read about their proposal here.
— Habib Sabet
ICE tip
An organization that offers legal assistance to asylum-seekers in Vermont has created an online form for people to report immigration enforcement activity they see, or suspect they’ve seen, in and around the state — an effort, advocates said this week, to create a more comprehensive picture of how federal officials are operating across the area.
The Vermont Asylum Assistance Project’s “ICE tracker” form, so-called using the acronym for U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement, has been up on the nonprofit’s website for the past two weeks, aligned with the start of President Donald Trump’s second term. Read more about it here.
— Shaun Robinson
Read the story on VTDigger here: Lawmakers confront the numbers behind Gov. Phil Scott’s education funding plan.