Updated at 10:03 p.m.
Vermont lawmakers on Monday evening sent a sweeping education reform bill that will change the way the state’s schools are governed and funded to Gov. Phil Scott for his certain signature.
House members followed the lead of their Senate colleagues and voted to support H.454, though opponents blasted the bill during lengthy floor speeches.
After a voice vote in support of the bill, the legislation was held up briefly as House members held an unusual procedural fight over whether to send it to the governor. Lawmakers ultimately voted 96-45 to do so.
“It’s clear the status quo is not working for Vermonters,” said Rep. Casey Toof (R-St. Albans Town), who like most of his Republican colleagues voted in favor of the bill. Toof called the bill a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to turn around an unsustainable education financing system that has been propped up with hundreds of millions of tax dollars in recent years and sent property tax rates soaring. “With H.454, we begin a process of getting our spending under control and start to focus on improving the education of our students,” Toof said.
But dozens of lawmakers strongly denounced the bill. Some said they had received numerous messages from constituents in recent days urging them to vote no. Others said they were worried about the impact that school district consolidation will have on rural communities.
Rep. Leanne Harple (D-Glover) said she opposed the bill because it would open the door for rural school closures.
“There is nothing equitable about putting a child on a bus for two hours a day so they can attend a school 30 miles from home,” Harple said. “ I don’t care how nice the gym is. I don’t care if the science lab sparkles with every modern jewel. If a child can’t be rooted in their community, if they spend more time on a bus than with their family, if they have no connection to their town, then that is not equity. That is exile.”
“I fear we are about to make a grave mistake,” Rep. David Yacovone (D-Morrisville) said from the House floor. Voters didn’t ask legislators to “reshuffle the deck” and completely reconfigure the state’s school districts, he said.
‘They asked us to lower their taxes,” Yacovone said. “They will feel that we are tone-deaf if we come up with a proposal that takes several years before any tax relief is in sight.”
The bill calls for a school district redistricting task force made up of six legislators and five retired school administrators to convene in the coming months to begin working on up to three proposals for larger school districts. But those districts won’t be formed until July 2028, which is also when the new funding formula will go into effect.
Passing the bill was one of the final acts of the session. The House on Monday night also approved a bill that charges the Vermont Agency of Education with creating a model policy that prohibits students from using cellphones and other personal electronic devices at school and prohibits school districts from using social media platforms such as Instagram or Facebook to communicate directly with students.
Scott gave a brief farewell address to lawmakers before they adjourned for the summer. He praised them for making real progress on tax relief and housing construction through a $2 billion infrastructure bill. But he saved his deepest gratitude for lawmakers who worked on the education bill.
“I realize this hasn’t been easy,” he told lawmakers. “I know there are many who have and will continue to criticize our work.”
The governor acknowledged that there is much more work ahead for lawmakers.
“But this work takes time, it takes courage, and I appreciate the work each one of you has done to contribute to this effort,” he said.
The Senate, which took up the bill on Monday afternoon, was equally torn over it. There, seven Democrats and 10 Republicans voted for the bill on Monday; 10 Democrats and two Republicans voted against it. Sen. Robert Norris (R-Franklin) was not in the chamber for the vote.
Educators dressed in red — members of an advocacy group called Vermont School Workers United — lined the balcony of the Senate chamber during the floor session. Earlier in the day, they’d rallied at the Statehouse, listening to speeches from education leaders — including Caitlin MacLeod-Bluver, the Vermont Teacher of the Year; Winooski superintendent Wilmer Chavarria; and several legislators, all of whom expressed their dissatisfaction with the bill.
Before the vote, Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (P/D-Chittenden-Central), who opposed the bill, raised a procedural objection — asserting that the report of the conference committee — the group of three Senators and three representatives who hammered out an agreement on the bill — was objectionable because it contained provisions that were in neither the House nor Senate versions the bill.
The Senate briefly recessed; when it reconvened, Lt. Gov. John Rodgers ruled that Vyhovsky was correct and deemed the conference committee report “objectionable.”
But Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth (D/P-Chittenden-Central) told his chamber that conference committees are known to “color outside the lines” and asked senators to suspend the rules so they could vote on the conference committee report. They did so on a 26-3 vote.
Before the vote, both Baruth and Sen. Ruth Hardy (D-Addison) gave lengthy speeches explaining their votes. Baruth said he was voting “enthusiastically” in favor of the conference committee report because it represented six months of hard work and compromise. People who characterized the legislation as a last-minute effort were ignoring all of the joint meetings between the House and Senate, expert testimony, and negotiations that went into it, he said.
Baruth also disputed the criticism that the committee was too focused on independent schools. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said. He noted that the number of independent schools that would qualify for public funding would be cut in half under the bill.
Meanwhile, Hardy — who voted no — said that while she engaged in the process of crafting a bill “with good intentions and in good faith,” she “fell off the wagon” while watching the Senate conference committee members negotiate with the House last week.
“What I saw was a conference committee that … as the lieutenant governor just confirmed, went out of the bounds of what was in either the Senate version or the House version of the bill,” Hardy said. “Almost everything that the conference committee talked about … was about independent schools.”
Sen. Alison Clarkson (D-Windsor) told Seven Days it was a “bad look” for the conference committee to be stacked with two of three members closely aligned with independent schools. In her remarks on the floor, Clarkson said she was disappointed that people’s trust in the Senate appears to have been eroded by the impression that independent schools were the committee’s top priority.
“Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you,” Clarkson said, quoting the late U. S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “What we failed in large measure to do was bring people along,” she said.
Correction, June 16, 2025: An earlier version of this story misreported which senator was not present for the vote and also gave erroneous figures for the no votes. The story has been updated.
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This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2025.
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