Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: We're back here at House Education on January 15, just having a quick committee chat following the testimony received, to sort of ask based on that, if anything specific you all would like further before the committee, couple of Tony asked that question first. And if there's nothing specific, that's fine as well. This isn't specific, but it's reflective of the testimony we just had,

[Emily Long (Member)]: and I think it was your question. God's gift for data modeling to back up some of those things. I've heard a lot of, well, we could be

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: happy to come back to him in the

[Emily Long (Member)]: chair, discuss the things that you want, and come back with you about it. And I'm fine with that, but there was a lot of unknowns that this was based on. I'm not asking for a specific, that is And my

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I guess one thing we'll have to consider is what comes first. Do we want specifics on this proposal, or do we want to

[Emily Long (Member)]: Yeah, can answer that, but I don't even need to answer that right now. What I guess I'm saying is, as we're moving forward, I'm admit this is not

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah, definitely. Some the data, I can't remember specifically what representative Brady asked for, but I do remember it's one of those things you could think, oh, how many mergers would it take to create this district? So you could go on the mapping tool, overlay the hybrid, for example, and then see how many existing districts existed counting up.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Maybe just on the

[Unidentified Member]: the heels of that, you know, because Erin asked about costs, you know, and so obviously there are no answers

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: to that, but maybe

[Unidentified Member]: there's an answer to this one.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Maybe there's

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: the cost.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: How does it get

[Emily Long (Member)]: to pay So the

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: implementation costs they're part of Act 73. I don't know if it speaks to it specifically with the dollar amount. But that remains, and what are those costs that need to be borne locally or statewide? Combining financial, getting out of common financial software, that seems to be a state expense. So that's just a small But

[Emily Long (Member)]: to be clear, it's the taxpayers that pay whether it's state So or I I think it's just really important that we state that clearly. It's on the back of tax reform. To say, let's remember. Right. Let's remember. I mean, to be fair, there there's grant left for some stuff and all of that, and I appreciate that, but the bulk of what we're doing is on the

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: It's all whether you have kind of like it's part of your You gotta make it work within your foundation formula or state's gonna pay for it on a bigger pot. Yeah. Jana?

[Jana Brown (Clerk)]: Yeah, I was going say, I think we need to dig deeper into that list of criteria that's in Act 73, because I have a memory of how we created that list. And I don't think at the time we really assigned priority, and I don't think we knew at that point which of those criteria were in tension with each other. So I think as the conversation has advanced, it certainly has, we need to really go back and take a comprehensive look at that. What doesn't work together? What do we miss? I think there's, in terms of educational opportunities for kids, we missed a lot.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So, yeah, I think that when we created that list, we sort of said, what are all the things we want to be considered? And by considered, we didn't mean it actually has to be in there, just that have it as part of the process of creating. Yeah, I think it's a good point that we find out which ones are we can think about which ones are intentional and what other.

[Emily Long (Member)]: That will also help with our real struggle time to understand what we're doing. I appreciate that.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I'm just going to go back to the conversation I sort of started and that we'll dive deeper into, but just for you all to think about is sort of what are those sort of core principles that we want to have. As I think about the ones I believe in, I would like to see the concept of a non operating district be gone. But that was part of the original four fifty four. I think that there's probably a lot of consensus here that somewhere construction aid has to fall into this to be part of it. So I just think about what some of those others are. I have others myself, but we'll save it for a bigger discussion. I think, like I said, I think we'll start off just making a list of everybody's and then sort of hone in on a few. Maybe representative Harple's is that she wants everybody to eat the same thing on the same day.

[Emily Long (Member)]: Always. Sure sounded like it, I think.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Well, Tuesdays needs to be split up by the

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: It would be kind of amazing if

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: that was the only thing that It's

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: kind of

[Kate McCann (Member)]: like the one thing we

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: could- It was a horrible, yeah, think it was something more serious to add.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: It was more of a question, like as we think about the principles that we want embedded within Act 73, like is the discussion, I want Act 73 to cover this, or is it like, I want Act 70 I want somehow in our planning for us to find a way to acknowledge this that can't really be codified.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So I'm gonna say it's not about, or part of Act 73 as much as it is core beliefs in redistricting, if that's even a root bearer.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: Right, so can I give you an example of what's driving my question? For one of the things I'm thinking about, two of the things I'm thinking about are like, I want generations of our children to remain feeling connected to their communities. And I want to know that our communities are going to have the opportunity to grow related to what we do. I don't know how to get that into how we redistrict.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: For me, and again, when I'm sitting here, I'm sitting in this chair, it makes me be that big authority. I just want to, when I'm talking about stuff, just me.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: Like, would that be an example of something you would want to hear? Or is that like, that's just

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I guess for me it needs to be more specific than that.

[Emily Long (Member)]: Yeah, that's a core principle.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Because you have to define what you mean by community. What does a community look like if you're that sort of thing? What does it mean to be connected?

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: Right, and how can also redistricting relate to any of that as we do that, You know, maybe it's something about like internships or our work based learning models.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: That's right, we

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: have to choose specific.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: Okay. I'm not saying like every kid needs an internship and each time. No, that's not any. I just don't know how to address that.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I think we'll just kind of work it out as we go. Yeah.

[Emily Long (Member)]: But to be fair, I actually think that core values or core principles are important to guide our work and the details. And so I appreciate you saying, we'll keep that, but I just want There's more than that one. I actually, frankly, really liked what you just said about communities and having our kids not only there, but engaged and want to be there. And I want the learners to know that we support that and education plays a big role in that.

[Kate McCann (Member)]: It's one of the biggest fears I hear about from my community.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: I'm the ones that stand to potentially, even though it's not written into Act 73, get shut down. And one of the biggest fears that I hear is, we will lose our community centers. I also hear the argument that schools don't have to be the community centers. But you know, I hear other people chewing back on that, but like that is what people are afraid of is that we will lose our sense of community. And so how can we do this without that?

[Leland Morgan (Member)]: And that's the way it is in Grand Isle County. But in Grand Isle County, we had a number of schools. We're down to three, one in Alberg, which goes through eighth grade, and then there's one in Grand Isle and one in South Hero. One of the schools, and I can't remember which one, when they get done sixth grade, they actually leave the island to go to And another everybody in Olive Grande Isle, there is no high school. And as early as the 1950s, back when I can remember older people than myself, they went from the islands to one of the schools. They would either go to St. Albans or across the bridge to New York. There was no Masiskoye, so they didn't. But some went to the Swanton High School, some went to Milton, and a few even that could afford or take the time went to the Burlington school system. So that's always been that way. There's never but they still have a sense of community in the little schools, and that's what they're really afraid of losing. Although this never says that you have to, but they have on their own closed to schools

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: already. Which means the hurt is because of declining enrollment. That sounds like a broken record. That's what's driving this. That's a hard thing to sort of control. I had a much more positive point than that. I'll give you one. But out of my head. Because

[Emily Long (Member)]: I've been like you. I I live in an area where schools have closed, not only in my district, but all around me. And and I there are you know, everybody has the same fear. I've had the same fear about the loss of the the school in a in a town. But sometimes you go through that loss. And when the community is engaged in the decision making around it, they come up with other things. And I use Brookline so often as an example. They closed about fifteen years ago, could be close to 20 now, and merged with the neighboring school and became Newbrook. And there were some intentional decisions that were made at the time to ease that pain that everyone was feeling about the loss of the community. And it's been incredibly successful because of the engagement in the community. It sounds like yours is probably something. Before I forget, I just wanted to

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: add my I do want to recall what's actually in Act 73, and there is a sort of sparsity, small by necessity, work that's been learned more about, and that there are small school grants for those schools that are small by necessity. Sorry.

[Unidentified Member]: So just so, you know, hypothetical, everything's hypothetical at this point, right? So hypothetically, we go to 13 districts because that was the number that was. So, I mean, because what I'm seeing now is my home district closing two schools. Now in these larger districts, will they have the power to just really kind of look at their inventory of schools and then say, okay, this is how we see the future.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Think that there is the work of the recommendation of the Commission on the Future of Public Education was that the power of school boards by and large does not change. And then there are some specific things about if a school board decides it wants to close the school, if it lays out some recommendations to follow, but it you know it just it is the same system that we have today except on the larger scale.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Okay and with foundation formula, that district is going to get a, if the foundation formula goes out in place, district will get a certain amount of money and they can decide what they want to do with it. If it's still supporting a smaller school in

[Unidentified Member]: a certain area for a certain reason, something that

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: I would assume that they would continue doing it.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: You'll find this presentation on equitable budgeting and how they sort of handle it, and

[Emily Long (Member)]: it's probably quite fascinating. There is representative doubt. And we all know that the fear, because we all do it, and we did it in Act 46, that the fear of a much larger board, smaller number of people representing, if any. Way we did it in Act 46, said every school district needs at least one, every town, I'm sorry, needs at least one representative on the board. But when you're representing 8,000 students, one in a tiny little town doesn't feel very much. And I don't even know if we have that. We haven't gone through that process. So I'm just trying to acknowledge the challenge around feeling like you don't really have a voice anymore and the decisions that are being made about you. That's the fear in our communities today, and it's real. Absolutely.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: To reset myself, but that would be government ops deciding on the actual Right.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Oh yeah, they are deciding that.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Luckily, that's one of the decisions. We don't

[Emily Long (Member)]: have it don't know, because everything we do sends it over to them. Mean, we're

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Well, at some point, somebody will have to make a recommendation as to board size. Right, and we have to Somebody

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: has to make a recommendation about district size.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: And district size,

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: yes. But after that, it's

[Emily Long (Member)]: You understand that the districts Since we all know we can't have 50 members on the school board, and if we're going to go with large

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: I totally understand.

[Emily Long (Member)]: So it's still not us.

[Leland Morgan (Member)]: They just do the details. That's all. I just wanted to say that Chris and I both live in the town of Milton, and we have our own school district superintendent, everything right in the town, K through 12. I haven't talked to anyone. Do you know what our school system, what our superintendent, have they communicated to you as to what they feel about what's going on?

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: To me? Yes. And they have actually publicly said in school board meeting that they are in agreement with the legislators of Milton who agree with Act 73, and they do agree that there can be consolidation.

[Unidentified Member]: I've got five representatives in there. Do

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: you think that when people, not us, but the general public talks about there needs to be consolidation, I guess this is a question for anyone. Do you think that they mean consolidation of districts or do you think they really mean consolidation of schools?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Ben's on the person answering your question. No, I think it really does. I think people

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: say superintendent is talking about consolidation of districts.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So I think I would answer, some people are like, we have 53 superintendents, that's crazy. We need to consolidate. That doesn't mean buildings. Other people say, really, we have schools that have 50 or under kids in them? That's crazy. We need to consolidate buildings. Believe But yeah.

[Unidentified Member]: Especially especially high students. Administrative talks. I hear that a lot. Yeah.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: I just I feel like there's some confusion that comes to this conversation because people are meaning different things.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yes.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: And so when they're telling us this is what we think we should do, it's hard for me sometimes to be like, do you think that we should consolidate districts with trying to keep our schools open? Are you really saying get rid of the small schools?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So I think it is important. I think you bring up a good point as we talk in here. We should talk about consolidated governance or consolidated footprint.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Gonna preface my last, even though it's already come out of my mouth. I can't totally speak for my superintendent.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: The eating has already started coming No. But

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: just to be fair, I can't. And they're,

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: you know, they're not processing things. But that's a general feeling that came

[Emily Long (Member)]: out of two word meeting.

[Jana Brown (Clerk)]: I would say that almost needs to be an outlier. If you read the public statements, a lot of other things have made superintendents and school boards look at it a different way.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah, that was nowhere to get in this conversation. Yes. Kind of

[Emily Long (Member)]: based on the emails we get.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: As we contemplate, I'm not saying that we should take this as a The the big long list of considerations is something we are going to have to look at and think about the way we personally want to put on each and every one of them. But since I was part of the Commission on the Future of Public Education, I would also remind you that there was a recommendation that we not adhere strictly to the 4,000 to 8,000 limits. I'll just put that out there as a recommendation that the commission made to consider.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: I don't know how this would fit into any amendments to Act seven sixty three, but in thinking about who would it be good to hear from, and maybe this isn't right away as we're talking about districting, but prior to the vote, it might be good to hear from communities that have had their schools consolidated, who feel like they still have a sense of community, because you were mentioning that there were some communities that have been able to move on and how did they do that? So don't know who to ask you about that.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Well, I'll tell you just to debate the point a little bit. I spent a lot of time thinking about what's our role and what's sort of the role of the agency or the role of a community or No, all of

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: I understand that that's their role, like in voting for things, it'd be better to I feel like it would be easier to vote knowing what's possible. Does that make sense?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I think, no, and I'm not saying yours is not a good idea, but you will see a bias from me frequently about needing to be specific. So to have somebody come in and say, here's how we kept our sense of community. That's a hard thing to define. But, but, so I'll tell you that, you know, we've got two communities in Addison County that closed their school years and years ago. And I think I'm not sure that that's not a fine idea to have somebody have some time. Somebody come in and just sort of say, here's what happened. Here's how we're how we're battling it.

[Emily Long (Member)]: Where are the nuance lies that Leanne is is I the one I talked about earlier.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Yeah. Yeah.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Think was a case study.

[Emily Long (Member)]: It is because, you know, the two towns are they're close physically. You know, they're next door to each other. Yeah. Not a long travel time, although they have to cross a river. But anyway. But they share a post office. They share a fire department that's called New Brook. And they went through quite a lot of pain during the process of going through it. The fear of the loss of closing their school was that the community was going to fall apart. And it was really hard, but there were things that made it better. And one of them was a daycare center opened up in that school, like within a year afterwards. So the school was still using, there were still children in it. It was a different thing. So I'm giving you that one example and telling you that there are a lot of place that don't have any of those things in place. That's why it passed in our area that number of years ago. But I have other school districts right now who don't want to merge because they don't have those things that aren't helping them through it. And it was still tough for Brooklyn.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: And Right. I'll tell you where I get frustrated is, you know, the term community is a a vague term. So we're really talking about our town lines that were drawn in the sixteen hundreds. And for some reason, we continue to identify these. I think about Newbrook and really you are sharing a school together so that you almost haven't lost that of community. And all of sudden, town lines don't actually matter that much. The community is just a bigger community now.

[Emily Long (Member)]: As much as an important part of it.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah. You know, I think about my town of Cornwall, we don't have a store. We have town hall and a church that nobody attends. And our school needs tens of millions of dollars worth of work. There's going to be just about to start a really hard conversation as to whether it's really worth investing in when Middlebury, just as an example, has capacity to take all of our kids. Many of us, when people ask you where you're from, you live in Carmel, you really often say Middlebury, because it's easier to identify. But also, that's like, it's anyway, this whole idea of what community needs, it's going to differ to various people. I'd like to think that these lines that were drawn back in the 1600s does not define community?

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: I mean, so I have a different perspective being from Butler. I think one of the things is that we all went to this school and we moved back to our town and our kids are going to school and their parents went to school. And so those generational lines in that neighborhood, know, is one thing that exists within a town. And I also can tell you that the town of Flover, and this is just one example, but it really is different than the town of Barton, and it's different than the town of Albany. Traditions are different, and our politics are different, and our It does feel like a real thing. So maybe that's different than your town, but it feels true for my

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Certainly other towns where I believe that's been a big issue. But then we have to come back to who is it we're trying to create a loft? What are we trying to We keep talking about it's about the kids, but we keep slipping into it's about the adults. That's where we have to be careful.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: I was gonna say,

[Jana Brown (Clerk)]: I think one, this is a little bit off time, but one interesting thing from Superintendent Bunting's testimony earlier this week around student engagement. Think one of the hard things for me about these conversations representing a large district in Chittenden County is student engagement in your rural schools looks so different in different parts of the city, like for Emily and for Leanne. So it's really hard to measure. It's not always about the miles that you have to drive to get to school or how big or how small your school is. There's something else, I think, happening in our rural areas about proximity and engagement with your local school that's really hard to measure and plan for. Growing up in Fair Haven, if I'd had to drive twenty minutes to school in Brooklyn, break in engagement would have been really tricky. So it's like, I don't know how we planned for that. I mean, it's very sort of indefinable.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: And it's different engagement.

[Kate McCann (Member)]: Yeah. On the flip side, I will say the CBD parking lot, which draws from a large area. That place is hopping twenty first. That parking lot is full at night. There is in those towns, there's no community connection between the towns. But there is robust adult education. The facilities get used by the community a ton.

[Unidentified Member]: Is And how do you define community?

[Kate McCann (Member)]: It's used by anybody who can drive to it, probably not just people who live in those towns, but the adult ed programs, the woodshots get used, the art pieces get used, the darkroom gets used. That's wonderful. I know, I know, I just

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: I think there's definitely district dependent and I wish every district were like that, but I don't think that that's the case.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: But it's just a different perspective of Yeah, the broader

[Emily Long (Member)]: right.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah, Doug, this is what we're gonna just keep doing and keep doing and keep doing until we get somewhere. Don't wanna lay down the wall and say, oh, we're voting on this, this and

[Emily Long (Member)]: this right now. Did have one.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: Just one more time on the, like whether or not we wanna talk to people about community and your comments, that's up to communities in some ways. I think also though one thing it does for us is like it helps us to talk to our own communities to say that, okay, we recognize that fear, we looked into that fear and here are

[Emily Long (Member)]: some of the things we found out.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Very good point.

[Jana Brown (Clerk)]: Not that gonna hand that a negative note, but I'm feeling a little more uneasy and sort of concerned about how we're going to sort of draw the lines between the information we need now to make the next whatever we think the next set of decisions are and the information that some folks might suggest is going to come to us as part of implementation planning. I understand you can't ask for all of the data in the world, but at the same time, I'm very uncomfortable that we don't have the information we need now to make good decisions in the future. I'm not willing to say, We'll figure that out down the road.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: It's a chicken and egg problem. Yeah.

[Kate McCann (Member)]: Speaking of fears,

[Jana Brown (Clerk)]: back to group four.

[Kate McCann (Member)]: It occurred to me there, and I actually just had an email from our wonderful former committee assistant and now Education Commission of the States, some information I had asked about how states raise their taxes for education. I'm sure that Ways and Means is well versed in this, but it kept coming up in those district creator tools. And then here talking about like grand less, grand less, like having or sort of, that's a very different reason to group a bunch of kids together for school based on property values. If you wanna dig deep and you're doing that because you want to have a really economically diverse set of students coming together, there's a lot of research behind that. Because right now in this country, pretty much demography is destiny, and that's a huge inequitable thing about our society. But I don't think that's why we're talking about grand list equalization across new districts. And so if we're gonna make a major fundamental piece about creating school structures based on property values, that's marrying two very, very different things. And I'm only bringing it up because I'm just reading this brief they sent me, and we actually are the Of all the things we do special, another one is that we are more reliant on property tax than any other state. If you look at how we bring in our and pay for everything, it's extraordinarily property dependent versus almost every other state. I don't know why that is. I know people do, and I'm sure that this would be an annoying question in the money committees and for a lot of people. But suddenly, we're talking about building school districts based on property value and wealth, and not because of some philosophical belief about economic diversity and wanting to bring a lot of different kids together, I might be able to get more on board with that. But I don't think that's I haven't heard that. It's more about property tax value and property taxes. Why do we? Again, I hate to bring us back years in this discussion, but we're going to do everything. Why do we pay for it based on so much based on property taxes and other states don't. And we're going to a foundation for it because that's what other states do. And that seems like it's better. We're going change how we fund and we have to change how we collect.

[Emily Long (Member)]: But there's two parts to that. Well, of course we do use income sensitivity, so we didn't have that piece today. There's also the other factor that we pay for more things in Vermont out of the education fund, which is funded by property taxes, essentially, not everything. And that's different from many other states. I guess I'm very uncomfortable at how much, when we're looking at these factors, we're talking about number of kids.

[Kate McCann (Member)]: I'm on board with educational quality factors, class size minimums, regional, middle and high schools, things that have an educational value. I understand that. Obviously, practical things like drive times matter. Building, redesigning an education system around property values, I need to understand better how that's a defining principle of schools. It's a defining principle, perhaps of our tax system. It does not necessarily need to be a defining principle of our education system. I'm still struggling to make that.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: We can dig in deeper. I think that the consideration was to try to make them. Equal. Yeah, and part of that is so that one district doesn't have the greater ability to raise the the supplemental spending than another. So it sort of balances that. But but

[Kate McCann (Member)]: I I was was just just property tax focused in our

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah. Well, that's a certainly a debate that's been wanting for many, many, many, many, many, But I would just say that's a consideration. It's not that consideration. Seems like a pretty big one.

[Jana Brown (Clerk)]: Yeah, well, I guess that raises the question too. If considerations around supplemental district spending are driving really fundamental decisions, doesn't that sort of imply that we're not adequately accounting for the cost of education with our foundation formula? I mean, think that's a really dumb or a really obvious thing to say. Don't know.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Part of the sort of compromise of what Act 73 is, is that I think when it left the houses didn't have supplemental district spending.

[Emily Long (Member)]: No, like it, but we didn't have any conversation around something like this. Now

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah. So it's in there. We could we could relitigate whether that's even even an appropriate thing to do because some districts will do it, some districts won't. It's a minor at 5%. It's a minor number. I don't think that's an impact.

[Jana Brown (Clerk)]: Maybe some of these issues would be solved for me, as I was suggesting before, look at the criteria and think about priority and sort of what they, think a little more deeply about what we all need. And then this might come into bigger focus.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Very close here. We've got to get to the floor. So take us offline. We're done for the day, everybody.