A report released by the Agency of Education last month paints a troubling picture of the state of special education in Vermont. The number of pre-K through 12 students on individual education programs, or IEPs — the personalized plan required by law for all students who qualify for special education — has increased since 2018 despite a decline in the total student population. And special-education students are placed in alternative schools at more than twice the national rate.
That’s led special-ed spending to go up, with the highest increase in a category that’s known as “extraordinary costs” — those for students with complex needs who require more than $66,000 a year to educate. The state spent $473.8 million on special education in fiscal year 2024 compared to $397.2 million for about 1,000 fewer students in fiscal year 2018.
State officials believe Vermont’s new education reform law, Act 73, could help improve both the quality and cost of the special-education system. The measure will change the way the state pays for special education by providing school districts a certain amount of money for each student based on their specific disability. It also calls for consolidating school districts into larger ones, which could make it easier to hire specialized staff and provide in-house special-education support.
Larger districts can “pool a lot of different resources, establish new programming [and] have a whole cluster of services in ways that our smaller districts [are] challenged to do,” Vermont Education Secretary Zoie Saunders said last week.
But some Vermont educational leaders say a previous piece of education reform, passed by the legislature in 2018 but not yet fully implemented, could be key to addressing the state’s special-ed woes. The measure, Act 173, aimed to support struggling students while also tamping down special-education costs. Seven years later, though, districts have made varying degrees of progress, and the state has acknowledged shortcomings in carrying out the law’s mandates.
“Let’s look at what has already been passed,” said Mary Lundeen, executive director of the Vermont Council of Special Education Administrators, “and let’s focus on implementing it with fidelity and finish the work that we haven’t been able to finish, that may not even have been started in some places.”
State officials say they are still committed to implementing that law. But whether it goes anywhere amid the broader push to overhaul Vermont’s education system is an open question.
Special-education students in Vermont are placed in alternative schools at more than twice the national rate.
The 2018 law calls for Vermont’s schools to use a “multi-tiered system of supports” in which all students receive high-quality classroom instruction from a well-trained teacher who is able to adapt lessons to meet different needs. If students still struggle, they would be given additional small group or one-on-one support.
The legislation also had a secondary purpose: to bring down special-education costs. If students were well supported by teachers and specialists, the thinking went, academic or behavioral challenges would be identified and addressed early instead of snowballing into costlier problems.
Katie Ballard, a mom of two and chair of the state’s Special Education Advisory Panel, thinks early intervention would have made a difference for her older son, who attended Essex Westford schools. In kindergarten, he was classified as having an emotional disturbance — a disability category used in Vermont three times more frequently than the national average. All through elementary school, he struggled both behaviorally and academically.
When her son was in seventh grade, Ballard pushed to have him evaluated by an outside organization. The results found previously undiagnosed academic struggles, and the school subsequently paid for private tutoring. It worked: His behavioral issues dissipated, and, last year, he graduated from high school as a member of the National Technical Honor Society.
Ballard believes that if educators had been trained to recognize her son’s challenges early on through the multitiered system support that legislators called for in 2018, he wouldn’t have suffered as much academically and emotionally — a result that research supports. And, she said, the costly, intensive services he received in his later years wouldn’t have been necessary.
“When students are identified appropriately and given appropriate interventions early enough, costs don’t escalate,” Ballard said.
Special-education experts and administrators largely agree that’s the right approach. But a lack of leadership from the Agency of Education, the disruptive pandemic and a resulting teacher shortage impeded the reform efforts, they say.
In recent years, the number of teachers on provisional licenses — which means they are not fully qualified to teach in their subject area — has spiked. The highest number have gone to special educators, who need “an additional layer of support and mentorship,” according to Slate Valley Unified School District superintendent Brooke Olsen-Farrell. That means “experienced staff members must dedicate significant time to supervision, coaching and documentation, all of which place added strain on an already stretched system,” she added.
Kris Benway, Slate Valley’s director of special services and board president of the Vermont Council of Special Education Administrators, called the 2018 measure “really good legislation without a good implementation plan.” In the absence of statewide leadership and training to enact it, each school district was left to figure it out on their own, Benway said. She thinks the state should recommit to the approach, even as the broader education overhaul gets under way.
In its September report, the Agency of Education acknowledged that it did not sufficiently help school districts implement the measure. A “field guide” it created “was not presented adequately statewide” in the year before the pandemic hit, the report states, and its support was limited to written guidance rather than more intensive training on the pedagogy behind the law.
“The state still lacks measures of fidelity, quality and effectiveness of high-quality instruction and intervention,” the report states.
In a meeting of the Special Education Advisory Panel last week, Saunders said her agency is developing a strategic plan for special education and has restructured its special-ed division — two measures designed to address shortcomings. She expressed a commitment to following through on the work of the 2018 law. That might mean additional teacher training and better monitoring of schools to make sure they’re following through.
“The best practices that were identified in Act 173 were the right best practices,” Saunders said. “We don’t want to throw those out.”
But with complicated school district mergers and a totally new system for funding education looming on the horizon, coupled with recent mass layoffs in the U.S. Department of Education’s special-ed division, it remains to be seen whether the agency can follow through on Saunders’ commitment.
No matter what happens, reform tends to “create chaos, and it’s difficult to implement in chaos,” said Meagan Roy, a former superintendent who chaired an advisory group for the 2018 measure. “I worry about causing more destabilization in the system, which is just going to make it harder to do things we haven’t been doing well for a while.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Lessons From the Past | A 7-year-old law could improve Vermont’s ailing system for students with special needs”
This article appears in Oct 15-21 2025.
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