Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Representative Jill Krowinski (Speaker of the House)]: Will members kindly take their seats? Good morning. Good morning. Welcome to our caucus of the whole to discuss and hear an update on House Bill nine fifty five which is this year's Education Transformation Bill. Representative Peter Conlon, Chair of House Education will give a presentation and then we will open it up for questions. So with that, Representative Conlon, go ahead.

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: Good morning everyone. The House Education Committee passed out nine fifty five less than twenty four hours ago. So please forgive me if I am not as well prepared as I could be. It was a long it's been a long journey, but I'm going to do my best to sort of give you a broad strokes overview, walk you through some of the sections, and then happy to take questions afterward. And I also just want to say that the you know, the bill has still has a long way to go. It has to go through ways and means, appropriations, and then of course our friends in the senate. So some of I would call the bill not fully formed because there is going to be more additions as it makes its way through that journey. Alright. So we've been working on how to move forward with the goals of Act 73 since early January, beginning with the results of the off session work of the Commission on the Future of Public Education of the Redistricting Task Force and of the many entities who have been doing a lot of deep thinking and analysis about how to best help Vermont and its education system adjust to declining enrollment, enormous school building needs, future changes in how we fund education, and how to ensure equity of opportunity for all of our students. H nine fifty five represents the result of that input plus the hours of testimony since the session started, the results of a survey that thousands of Vermonters responded to before the session started. The countless emails that have rolled in. And the valued comments from House members and particularly members of the House Education Committee. With that, let me put in broad strokes what H nine fifty five does. One, it creates mandatory shared service regions called cooperative education service areas or CISAs. You will hear me refer to CISAs occasionally this morning. The bill requires the state be divided into seven CISA regions. The role of each CISA is to provide services more economically and efficiently at a larger scale. Examples would include providing highly specialized services for students with specific needs, back office administration, coordinated transportation, professional development, etcetera. CESAs were a strong recommendation of the redistricting task force as a proven way to provide services more economically, and to get to savings quicker. Most other states have them, and Vermont also has one, about a year old that is already proving to save its member school districts money even with its limited offerings. Two, the bill brings together Vermont school boards in all regions of the state to study whether to seek a formal merger into a pre k to 12 union school district. Similar to act 46 and using mainly existing statute, h nine fifty five would fund seven facilitators in all parts of the state to create those merger study committees. I want to emphasize that the bill requires that merger study committees form and discuss the advisability of becoming a merged union school district, but it does not require them to merge. Just to investigate whether merging is advisable. Should those school districts choose to pursue a voluntary merger, the bill provides financial support for that work, and state statute in chapter 11 of title 16, which this body updated five years ago, lays out that process in full detail. We are not trying to reinvent the wheel here. Before we get into the meat of the bill, I want to emphasize a few things. One, CESAs again are the shared service agencies and they are mandatory, and the bill envisions seven of them in the state. Two, merger study committees are also mandatory in this bill, and this bill envisions about 20, each supported by a facilitator, but merging itself is not mandatory. Also, and this is where things get confusing, the bill provides guidance as to where these 20 merger studies could take place, but it allows flexibility to adjust based on what the facilitators learn on the ground. We are finalizing a visual organizer in the form of a map that will show the CISA regions, the boundaries of which would be set in state statute, as well as suggested merger study groups, which are guidance only and are designed to help facilitators focus their work faster. Alright. Let's go to the bill. Section one is the intent language. It's relatively short, I'd like to read it. Section one legislative intent. To ensure each student is provided substantially equal educational opportunities that will prepare the student to thrive in a twenty first century world, is the intent of it is the intent of the general assembly to work strategically, intentionally, and thoughtfully to ensure that each incremental change made to Vermont's public education system provides strength and support to its only constitutionally required government service. That's directly from act 73. The general assembly recognizes that Vermont's schools anchor local economies and community identity, connecting young people to their homes while supporting workforce development and long term stability, and that different regions of Vermont have different needs, challenges,

[Unidentified Representative (first name Mike)]: and opportunities. Further, it is the intent of the general assembly to ensure that local voice and community input retain an important role in Vermont's evolving landscape. That is in addition to the legislative intent, that we added to h nine fifty five.

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: Section two of the bill is the creation of the cooperative educational service areas, the CSAs. Again, these are mandatory and designed to create scale across a greater geographic region than current school districts in order to provide many specialized services at a lower cost to the member school districts. The bill lists the member districts in each CISA. These boundaries respect existing school districts and supervisory union boundaries. Much of the rest of section two plus sections three through 11 is simply changing the name that exists in current law addressing CISAs to reflect the name CISA. We created enabling legislation in 2023 that allowed but did not require the formation of CISAs. But at that time, we called them boards of cooperative education services or BOCES. BOCES as a name is confusing as they mean different things in nearby states. For example, in New York, BOCES is mostly the term for career and technical education. Thus, much of the rest of section two through seven is simply reflecting that name change. These CESAs would be supported by $15,000 startup grants and $50,000 grants upon hiring the first director of the CESA. Beyond that, CESAs would be funded through a combination of membership dues and fees for service fee for service work. Alright. Let's talk about the merger study committees which begin in section 13. H nine fifty five calls for school districts in all parts of the state to form merger study committees based on guidance provided in this bill and or the recommendation of the facilitator on the ground. They would be made up of school board members. Again, the goal is to study merging into unified union school districts offering pre k to 12 education. Many of you may remember merger study committees from act 46. This is similar and governed by state statute that was largely built from the act 46 process. Merger study committees would be brought together by facilitators to investigate whether it would be advisable to merge. Again, should they decide to merge, statute has a clear process for this that includes a vote of the electorate in each school district that has proposed to merge. Should the merger study committee decide it is not advisable to merge, the process ends, and it is status quo for those districts. Again, merging is voluntary. And I wanna repeat that the groupings listed in the bill are guidance only for the facilitator. They are not required groupings and can be changed based on discussions facilitators have with school districts in the regions. For example, a facilitator may learn that two pre k to 12 school districts have already reached out to one another informally, but are not in the same grouping. The facilitator has the flexibility to adjust those groups based on information like this. Another example, a district with a small high school with declining enrollment may want to talk with another district with a high school about merging, but are in different groupings. The facilitator has the flexibility to meet these needs and readjust these groupings. The guidance map is just that. Guidance only to help focus the early work and get moving on voluntary mergers. The bill lays out a series of dates by which the work takes place with a final deadline for merger votes on election day 11/07/2028. Not surprisingly, the bill requires a number of reports back to the general assembly on progress and impediments encountered along the way, and contingencies for implementing a foundation formula. As I said, the bill still has to get through ways and means and appropriations where you'll probably see some tweaking to some of that. I just want to say that getting here was a long journey for our committee. It was filled with robust discussion, plenty of disagreement, and ultimately a fair amount of compromise. We appreciate the body's interest and attention to the challenging future of Vermont's education system. And with that, I'm really happy to take questions.

[Unidentified Representative (first name Mike)]: Lynn. You.

[Representative Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson]: Reading briefly and describing what you're describing here for the CESAs, it sounds like you're just creating a new super supervisory union that has many of the same responsibilities of our current SUs in terms of administration, HR, budgeting, you know, all of the things that our SUs do now, you're creating these seven super CESAs. The question is is why don't we just make I mean, this is what the governor sort of proposed. He wanted to have five of these. Why are we having a CISA on top of an SU when the CISA is really doing all the work that the SUs always traditionally do, plus all the money that it's going to take? You have representation from all of the the school boards. It's it's duplication upon duplicate actually, I think eventually, the supervisor unions will disarm and, you know, disappear because the CISA will do all other work.

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: Well, so the what what we have seen with CISAs sort of across the country where they exist and have existed for a long time is they're they're not there to replace the governance that a supervisory union provides, but is really there to build the scale needed to provide many of these specialized services. So yes, one could look at it as a super SU, but it is there as a service provider, not as a governance unit. And the idea is that they can be tailored to the needs of the regions that they're representing. For some regions, for example, the need might be for English language learner teachers, much more so than for folks providing special education evaluations. Other areas the specialization might be providing transportation. That's one of the big challenges. So they are service providers, they are funded as a fee for service, and, you know, they, in a way, are gonna have to prove themselves as saving money. So I said we have a brand new one that's covering most of the Southeastern part of the state, and they are up and running and growing and are already provide already proving that they're saving money for their member districts.

[Representative Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson]: Kathleen.

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: Representative James.

[Representative Kathleen James]: Thanks, thanks, rep Conlon. I so I I am really, interested in the direction that the education committee is taking and, excited to learn more about it today. And I had a question for you. I was glad to hear you say that with the study groups, if a particular district is interested in maybe also having conversations with a group that they're not in, that the facilitator can help make that happen. And I wondered, could you talk just a little bit more about what that would look like? I'm sort of imagining a facilitator convening, you know, public meetings where the members of the group are invited and I I guess I'm having a hard time imagining what the process actually looks like and how would one community go about participating in two, you know, two study groups to maybe see what where their best path lies.

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: So you know as envisioned these facilitators would be people who are already very well informed about how the Vermont Public Education System works and preferably with some experience of having gone through this before. But I would say that, what you're imagining is correctly, that, we have these suggested guidance groupings, however, I think the idea would be to bring a region together first and say, is this the appropriate way to go about this? Should we be dividing in other ways? I will just reiterate that the goal here is to create pre k to 12 systems, and that is the kind of merging study committee that they'll be working on.

[Unidentified Representative]: Can you just talk a little bit more about any contemplation on representation at these CSIS? Right now, it looks like a one district, one vote sort of model. I'm worried a little bit about that that does not take into consideration different enrollment, different budgets, different enrollment size, different budgets.

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: Yeah. So the CSOs again are not a governing board. They don't govern anything except their own operations. The one that exists in Vermont currently, the members of it are appointed by the school boards that it serves or the supervisory unions that it serves. And that's what is foreseen. Ultimately, these are supported as a fee for service concept. The representation on it is something we gave some thought to, looked at other examples. You could go a lot of different ways. In some areas, the membership or the governing board of the CISA itself might be just superintendents. We felt that school board members were were more appropriate to have, but they are largely there to provide services. And, so what is important is that the governing board has a clear sense of what services would best suit that region to provide. Mollie.

[Representative Mollie S. Burke]: Thank you. Does this impact any existing state standards, or that's outside of the purview of what's happening here?

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: I I'm gonna have to ask you to repeat that because Oh, sorry. Your sound does not come out anywhere other

[Unidentified Representative]: than me.

[Representative Mollie S. Burke]: Did does this, impact any existing state standards? Standards? You know, standards that already exist about, you know, language arts, arts education, etcetera.

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: This this is not at all about, what is taught in schools. This is about, governance and funding.

[Representative Mollie S. Burke]: Okay. That's what I assumed. I just wanted to check. Thank you.

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: Representative Boutin.

[Representative Michael Boutin]: Chair Conlon, thank you. So, the main purpose of education transformation is to,

[Representative Herb Olson]: you know,

[Representative Michael Boutin]: obviously have better education and to also lower the cost. One of the struggling cost issues in in my district is our articles of agreement. Were you able to discuss those? Are we getting rid of those, hopefully?

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: So the process laid out in this is the same process that it that is in state statute. So in order to come together and become a new unified union school district, that merger study group if they decided it is advisable to merge would have to come up with new articles of agreement for the formation of the new larger district. Those articles of agreement would then go to the voters for approval.

[Representative Michael Boutin]: Okay. Thank you.

[Unidentified Representative]: Hi, chair Conlon. I have a question about the study committee groupings. I see there are some that have one district in it. So can you describe what that process might

[Unidentified Representative (first name Mike)]: be?

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: Yeah. So you bring up a good point. So the as we have sort of gone through all of this, we've kind of a target number of about you know, over 2,000, but for full size K-twelve school districts. The ones that are single groupings are what we would probably describe as at scale already. However, so they were not sort of grouped with others. However, that is probably a tweak that will happen along the way to say, well, at least have a conversation about whether that can be they can come together and provide the same level of service without it costing more rather than less.

[Representative Herb Olson]: Please.

[Unidentified Representative]: Simply put, what in this bill incentivizes or drives cost reduction?

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: I think that there are two factors here. One is the CISAs. They are a proven effective method of saving money across the country. And the one that we have in Vermont also is proving to be a cost saving measure that can be taken. Newer larger districts, if that is what Vermonters are comfortable with and can do it, would operate more efficiently because they would be at better scale. One of the things I think about is that you know, eventually we're going to have a foundation formula. And I would hope that as merger study committees come together, they are thinking, okay, we need to prepare for a new future funding system. And what can we do to come together to prepare for that and build our own scale in order to be more efficient and think about how we can operate at a level where the funding system will not mean reduced opportunity for kids.

[Unidentified Representative (Act 46 veteran)]: Forgive me for not standing. It's fine. As a veteran of act forty six, I wondered whether one of our experiences was that we were not able to talk with the, our surrounding supervisory unions, the ones that were, adjacent to ours about merging schools without a conversation about merging those supervisory unions. And I wondered whether and it was extremely frustrating because we had two schools that should have been able to merge, and are now dwindling as a result of not having been able to do that. And I wondered whether you thought about intricacies like that. Like, supervisory unions or other surrounding members have to engage in a full, merger discussion in order to talk about those details, or could they talk about have you relaxed the statute, such that they could talk about those details without fully engaging and merging the whole, body?

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: Yeah. So, you know, this envisions larger than what was envisioned under act 46 because much of much of those sort of supervisory unions that merged under act 46 were already part of a unified union high school, for example. This extends that further, so hopefully would pull in. But more importantly, the role of the facilitator in these areas is to begin initial talks, and if the on the ground sort of desire to maybe even expand beyond that and pull in other regions is something that would be beneficial, then they have the flexibility to make that happen. I think that the question of does state statute, is it an impediment to, even going further? You know, one of the things we require is a number of report backs, and one of them is to say what impediments exist in order to that it that are, that is hurting the ability to merge further.

[Unidentified Representative (Act 46 veteran)]: Can I ask a follow-up but unrelated question? Of the seven, facilitators, will they have professional qualifications? Because one of the things that we experienced in I forty six is that we had a wholly unqualified facilitator in the beginning. We lost about a year of discussion as a result.

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: Yeah. We have, you know, I suppose as the bill move moves through it, the the listing of sort of qualifications could be made even more vast. The idea is that facilitators would be people who have had experience with the public school system in Vermont and more importantly experience with mergers through act 46.

[Unidentified Representative (Act 46 veteran)]: Thanks.

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: Mike.

[Unidentified Representative (first name Mike)]: Thank you. And and thank you for your work on this and and to the whole committee and and to the study committee. I I appreciate the direction you're taking. I appreciate how the study committee helped, I think, form this. They were listening to Vermonters. I don't think Vermonters wanted us to blow up the system. They support education. They want a system that they can afford though. I I think this is a direction that can be helpful, and I and I hope as we're talking and focusing on governance and funding, we can get past this and start to actually focus on what's happening inside the classrooms because that's changing by the day. And when we look around the world, what's happening in classrooms, we're falling behind. Recently, there was the annual study of the 10 best colleges in the world, now 80 of them are in China. So I I hope we can get past this, find a system that's gonna provide education at the cost we can afford, but then start that get that focus back on what's happening in the classroom. So thank you.

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: Yeah. Thank you. You know, is Vermont faces a a very challenging future with education just based on declining enrollment. And this is really a way to sort of take some some encouragingly voluntary steps forward in order to address that. But we need to pivot and address that in order to have the ability to really improve what goes on in the classroom. John?

[Unidentified Representative (first name John)]: Thank you, chair Conlon. I just wanna kind of follow-up on the facilitation plan here. We're gonna start with a small group of facilitators here as we understand it to date here, and I've read through this as much as I can here since last evening here. What kind of support can you just elaborate what kind of support would each facilitator need to care at the kind of the first part of this? And do we anticipate needing more facilitators just given the scope of what we're trying to achieve here over the timeline that's been defined here to date?

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: Yeah. Thanks. You know, we had to we had to make our best educated idea of how this would work. And so within the system that we've created, the facilitators would have a lead facilitator that would provide them with the support that they would need in the field. They would further be supported by the currently existing CISA as sort of an overall administrative body. And so between their experience, having a lead facilitator they can work with, and working with one another, The hope is that this would be sufficient. I would also say that undoubtedly not every group that comes together is gonna come together for a long time. They may come together and say, we don't wanna do this, it's not gonna happen, And that's where the process ends for that group. Hopefully not, but I think that that's probably a reality. Candice?

[Representative Candice White]: Yeah. Thank you, chair Conlon, for your work and for your committees. I'm hoping you can elaborate a bit more on the CISAs. Maybe speak to the one that currently exists in Southern Vermont. What does the structure of the CISA look like? Does it include does it pull current positions from a a school or a district, pull them up to the CISA level, and what kinds of positions? I'm just trying to visualize what this will look like.

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: So the current one that exists is called the Vermont Learning Collaborative down in Southeastern Vermont. And they are new and it and and it they have been coming together as kind of a cooperative for years, but did not become an official CISA or BOCES until we provided the enabling legislation. Currently, they are providing services mostly within the special ed area and mostly expertise that is otherwise hard to come by at a reduced rate for the school districts that are down there. So assisting with special education evaluations, I think providing some specialized services. But what they're really enmeshed in right now is surveying their members and saying, what else can we do? Where else can we help you save money by providing specialized services at scale? Whether that is back office administration, so that not you don't have seven different SUs providing payroll, maybe that can all be put under one, or coordinating transportation, or coordinating the very specialized transportation that goes on. And professional learning is another area that they are providing. So for example, they have been getting a lot of interest in just federal compliance professional development, not only within their CISA, but they are asking to provide those services to other school districts outside of their service area for which it is a fee for service. What the school districts using them are finding is that they can get that information and get that level of service less expensively through this cooperative arrangement than sort of going out on the free market. Marty?

[Representative Martin LaLonde]: Thanks. I noticed that you've delayed or suggesting delayed the foundation formula by two years. Can you explain that? Why is that considered necessary?

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: Yeah. I think that if you if you think about what it takes to, have, to to form this if we go back to act 46, you know, if we put the, election date for, approving a merger, 11/07/2028, that just sort of says, okay, the voters have said, yes, we wanna do this. After that, there is a lot of work that has to be done in order to have that new merged district up and running. You have to bring together collective bargaining agreements. You have to bring together all the financial record keeping, all of the student record keeping. It's a longer process to make all that happen. Herb, then one more, I guess.

[Representative Herb Olson]: Thanks very much, chair Conlon. I think your committee has done a terrific work, has worked very hard. I have some questions. One is maybe a technical one. In Section 603A, I think it's three or something, it talks about a CSA being formed of member supervisory unions. And then after that, there's listed a bunch of supervisory districts. And so that's I'm not sure whether that's intentional or whatever. You know, the wording kind of hangs me up there.

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: Thanks. Let me answer that first. So the overarching term for whether it is a school district, a unified union school district, anything that provides those services, the overarching term that we use is supervisory union. So a K-twelve unified union school district is also a supervisory union. A a town school district like Burlington that provides k to 12 education is also a supervisory union.

[Representative Herb Olson]: Okay. I appreciate that. The the sort of larger set of policy issue, I think, in terms of how the CISA would be grouped and who would be party part of that CISA, as well as thereafter a study group. I think there's just a general concern from some of the smaller communities that, you know, there's a majority minority kind of issue there and how that would play out in terms of some of the smaller schools that they are concerned about. So it doesn't talk a whole lot about articles of agreement, and I was wondering if you'd share your reasoning on that.

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: I don't were you referring to merger studies or were you referring to the CISAs?

[Representative Herb Olson]: Well, think both in the sense that the CISA is the body that appoints the facilitator, and then they go forth and do their work. I presume at some point the facilitator is answerable to the CISA, but maybe I I got that wrong.

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: No. The the just to to be clear, it does get confusing. So the facilitator's job is to work with merger study committees. They are not answerable to the CESA until a CESA is formed and if it wants to provide further merger work. But really, what we wanted to do is get these merger study groups together as quickly as possible. Okay. So they will be sort of working independently, however, contracted with the existing CISA.

[Representative Herb Olson]: Okay. So they're they're on their own. But in terms of the study committee, I think the the question I have is still is still out there. If you have grouped a lot you know, some larger districts or supervisory unions as they were, just a little concerned about how some of the smaller communities, some of their small schools are going to fare there. And I'm wondering if the committee gave any thought about that.

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: Sure. The creation of a merger study committee and the process it goes through is all laid out in state statute currently. And I would just remind you that it takes all districts to vote in favor of merging in order to merge. So a if that is a concern of the various districts that are that are looking to merge, the electorate ultimately can say no.

[Unidentified Representative]: Thank you. I'm going to be on a tangent I'm a little wondering if there's any thought or anybody working on dealing looking at the entire system. We're dealing with a system, an educational system. We have all the elements of that system. We know we got governance. We know that we've got administration. We've got all the various elements that make a system work. Is there any plan or hasn't or is someone sitting down and looking at each one of those elements and trying to look at how could we scale this better or what would be some things that we should consider when we begin thinking about doing anything? Because right now we're taking action. We're proposing to take action. It makes me a little nervous if there hasn't been a good system analysis conducted before we start taking action because if we're wrong someplace, we're gonna do a lot of backtracking and cost money. Just a thought, any any thoughts or comments

[Representative Peter Conlon (Chair, House Committee on Education)]: on I appreciate that. I mean, Vermont has a very complicated education system when it comes to sort of governance and how we organize ourselves. And I'd say that really what this bill reflects is a lot of analysis and thought about how we operate. I would say we have been looking at our state from the bottom up as an overall system since we passed Act 153 fifteen or so years ago, which then led to Act 156, which were sort of the early voluntary merger ideas that didn't get a lot of purchase. That moved into act 46, then act 49, and now here we are sort of taking the next step and trying to create a more efficient system across the state while respecting local voice and, local input.

[Representative Jill Krowinski (Speaker of the House)]: So I'm sorry. We need to wrap this up because we, need to transition into session. So there will be more opportunities for, question and answer. You can always grab representative Conlon or members of the House Education Committee. Really appreciate the questions. And with that, we will wrap up the caucus of the whole and we will be getting