At first blush, Gov. Phil Scott’s proposal to transform education appears to be a response to an immediate crisis. The confluence of steeply rising education costs and declining student enrollment has driven up property taxes and created inequities among school districts. The Scott administration and state legislature have both described the situation as untenable.
Education Secretary Zoie Saunders has spent the past several weeks briefing lawmakers on the proposal’s specifics: changing how education is funded; consolidating 119 school districts into five regional ones; and expanding student eligibility for school choice — all within an ambitious two-year timeline.
But the challenges facing the state’s education system, as well as proposed solutions, have existed for decades. Six years ago, a draft document called a “Blueprint for Transforming Vermont’s Education System” floated similar changes. So, too, did a committee created in the early 1960s to study Vermont’s education system. It recommended consolidating school districts into regional ones, much like the current plan.
“Whenever there is discussion about reorganizing school districts on a larger political unit, the objection is immediately raised that there will be a loss of local control,” the committee’s 1963 report said. Because education had become such a vital part of the country, the committee concluded, the time had come to “organize it on a much more effective basis.”
“What we’re talking about in this proposal is not new.” Education Secretary Zoie Saunders
Saunders herself has acknowledged that these have been persistent problems. When designing the current plan, she said, Agency of Education staff found a report from 1869 that outlined some of the same challenges that schools in the state are facing today.
“What we’re talking about in this proposal is not new,” Saunders said.
Yet the state’s failure to resolve the problems reveals how difficult it is to obtain widespread support, even while everybody agrees the system is in desperate need of reform. The challenge this time around for Scott, Saunders and state lawmakers will be learning from the lessons of the past and finding common ground that will be palatable to Vermonters from different communities and socioeconomic backgrounds.
“Change is hard, period,” House Education Committee chair Peter Conlon (D-Cornwall) said in an interview on Monday. “And this level of change, in something that Vermonters highly value, is tricky.” He noted that the idea of sweeping education reform can threaten people’s sense of identity, traditions and values.
Past attempts to overhaul education in Vermont have not gained traction. Phil Hoff was governor in 1963 when he convened a five-member task force to study the public education system. Its report, published in full in the Rutland Daily Herald, put forth several recommendations, including reducing the state’s 45 supervisory unions into 12 regional districts, each with a school board and a superintendent. The report pointed to statistics that found smaller high schools cost more per pupil to operate than larger ones. It also suggested that students in more populous areas such as Burlington and Brattleboro had better educational opportunities than those in smaller, agricultural communities.
“We believe that the people of Vermont probably cannot afford to give Vermont children the education to which they are entitled if we try to give them that education in our present town school system,” the report stated.
The report led to proposed legislation that would have created 14 regional school districts, according to a 1966 book, Vermont State Government and Administration. But “loud protests arose from the proponents of the ‘little red schoolhouse'” and lawmakers from small towns. They bristled at the idea of centralized control of schools and argued it “would destroy education in Vermont,” the book states. The bill was defeated, as was a subsequent bill in 1965 that would have created 25 school districts.
More than five decades later, in 2019, then-education secretary Dan French undertook what he described as a “visioning exercise” with other members of the Scott administration. It took the idea of school district consolidation much farther.
The so-called “Blueprint for Transforming Vermont’s Education System” envisioned a single statewide school district administered by four locally elected regional school boards. There’d be one for Chittenden County, the most populous part of Vermont, plus others for the northern, southern and central regions of the state, each with its own superintendent and large central-office team. The model is similar to the five-district governance structure in Scott’s current proposal.
The 2019 document also called for a “simplified” funding formula that would be more “transparent and predictable” to Vermonters. It would create a uniform property tax rate throughout the state — very similar, again, to Scott’s current plan.
Other similar ideas in the “Blueprint” include school choice for all students in the state, abolishing the State Board of Education, universal graduation requirements, equalizing teacher pay and creating parent committees at each school to help inform decisions.
Despite the common themes, the governor’s office says the current education reform plan is not based on the “Blueprint.”
“Many of the challenges we face today … are the same challenges we’ve faced for years and are the product of a system that no longer works for Vermont,” Amanda Wheeler, Gov. Scott’s press secretary, wrote in an email.
At a March 2019 State Board of Education meeting, then-secretary French characterized the “Blueprint” as a brainstorming activity meant to stimulate conversation, not a vetted policy proposal. He told board members that an overly complex educational system was creating inefficiency and a growing divide of opportunity for students in different regions. He also flagged declining student enrollment as a major issue.
“I have … full knowledge of the fragility of the current system, and I’m really concerned about not having a plan in place to address these demographic issues as they emerge,” French said then. “I don’t think we have a lot of time to sit and have a statewide debate for five or six years, so we’ve got to figure that out — how to heat up that urgency about it.”
The document, though, came to light at a fraught time. It was released in the wake of Act 46, a law passed in 2015 that incentivized, and in some cases forced, school districts to merge in the hopes of achieving cost efficiencies and providing more academic opportunities. Opponents of Act 46 argued that it would result in the erosion of local control and create an overly bureaucratic education system that devalued small, rural communities.
The law led to the emotionally charged creation of 50 new unified school districts. The state has yet to fully study whether Act 46 achieved its goals, though it certainly didn’t lead to the cost savings that were envisioned.
After the messy and painful mergers, some felt the ideas laid out in the “Blueprint” were too much, too soon. Krista Huling, then-chair of the State Board of Education, said as much to French at the March 2019 board meeting.
Act 46 created divisions in communities and made people feel as if their voices weren’t being heard, Huling said: “I just feel this could be another example of that.”
A year after the “Blueprint” was released, the pandemic diverted the focus of the Agency of Education. Now, as that public health crisis has ebbed, Vermont again finds itself in a situation that requires immediate action. An average property tax increase of 13.8 percent last year frustrated voters, who signaled they wanted a change in November by ousting dozens of Democratic lawmakers and stripping the party of its supermajority in the legislature.
It remains to be seen where the latest iteration to overhaul the system is headed. Already, lawmakers have criticized the proposal to expand eligibility for school choice. But they seem to understand that time is running out to resolve major funding and governance changes.
“We have probably reached the point in time where we need to decide what is possible to be accomplished in this legislative session,” Rep. Conlon told Seven Days on Monday. He called the governor’s proposal “somewhat overwhelming in its magnitude and underwhelming in its level of detail,” which poses challenges during a short legislative session.
And hashing out a plan in Montpelier is just half the battle.
“If we are willing to make big, hard decisions,” Conlon said, “it may not go down well in our own communities.”
But, he said, the legislature has an obligation to figure out how the state can provide its young people with “a high-quality education at a cost Vermonters can afford.”
As history shows, though, that’s easier said than done.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Reform Redux | Gov. Phil Scott’s proposed education overhaul resembles past plans to address long-standing challenges”
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This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2025.
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