Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Welcome back to House Education on February 25. The committee is now going to hear from our colleague in the Senate. They were nice enough to invite me down to present what I had come up with, and I thought we should return the favor and have senator Schlaingart come up and talk to us about his proposal. So we all have sort of a good understanding of where the two committees might be at at this time of what they're discussing. So for the next half hour or so, we've got the opportunity to hear from the author himself and get a better understanding of what's on the table there. Senator Bongarsh, the floor is yours. Thank you for making the time for us and welcome.

[Sen. Brian Campion (Chair, Senate Education Committee)]: Thanks for having me. This is a nice room, I was just a little tight. We, So my committee has heard, as you have, you've heard a lot of testimony a lot of testimony from rural Vermont, both schools that we visited before the session started and then since and the committee's sense is, I believe, that we need to have SUs included in the model. And so what we're really trying to do is make the units larger than they are now in most instances to gain efficiencies. They're almost big enough to be there on both seats in some instances. And but along but as we're doing it, try to reduce the number of SUs, large SUs and SDs by about half, maybe a little bit more than half. And then within each of those, reduce the number of districts by more than half. So in order to move much closer to we're also thinking about a model onto which the foundation formula can be set. And so gaining efficiencies, gaining larger units, and it's really not much more complicated than I just said. Larger units, fewer SUs and fewer SVs, half and half, and then districts within the SUs reduced by more than half. So that's what we're trying to achieve with the map.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: This would it should it create s u's where none exists?

[Sen. Brian Campion (Chair, Senate Education Committee)]: I'm not sure if every one of these these are just basically areas of the state where we heard that the that districts wanted the ability to remain, to have a voice, a combination of that and parts of the state where the tuition program, for instance the islands in Essex County, talked about it as being critical to their ability to function. I'm not sure whether some I know that we one, I forgot where an SD got incorporated little tiny SD got incorporated into one of these SUs. I should start by saying this was also the same as what you said at the beginning, I had said this the day I introduced it, this by definition can't be right because I kind of did it and so it's we're having some testimony on Thursday from people just asking about tweaks to the boundaries if this town should be there, this town not there. So it's the same thing of getting something on table to get the discussions started.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So you're I'm sorry, Rob. Go ahead. What's the the grade the large grade area over over to Ibero?

[Sen. Brian Campion (Chair, Senate Education Committee)]: Those are that's an area of a lot of SDs. Okay. And the goal there is rather than try to set the boundaries for those SDs, give two years for those SDs to merge and reduce the number of SDs in that area from about 23 to 12.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Does that happen?

[Sen. Brian Campion (Chair, Senate Education Committee)]: Voluntary merger for the first couple of years and if not

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: the board do it. If not what? The

[Robert Hunter (Member)]: state board. So

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: could you just tell a little bit more about this two year window? And does that cover all of the new districts?

[Sen. Brian Campion (Chair, Senate Education Committee)]: Well, one bit of Maybe if you take

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: some time to explain sort of the language behind the map, that would be very helpful.

[Sen. Brian Campion (Chair, Senate Education Committee)]: So the the SU boundaries would be set in statute, but within those SUs, glad you said that, the idea would be to reduce not and not SU by SU necessarily, the goal is to reduce the number of districts within those SUs down to less than half of what it is now, the language is 50%. So there will be a little bit of hopefully districts within those SUs, and I'll get to your question about the SDs, districts within those SUs will not want to wait and have somebody do it, they'll look carefully and try to figure out a way to merge in a way that makes sense for instance in the area where we are we've got three little districts that are all non operating, Stratton, Windham and Saint Kate. They should merge.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I don't know about geography all that well. Are they contiguous?

[Sen. Brian Campion (Chair, Senate Education Committee)]: No, not contiguous, but they don't have to be, especially if it's non operating. Hopefully districts within those SUs will look and try to find a dance partner and if not, because they'll know that if they don't do it, the State Board's going to do it. The same thing with the SPs in that big gray area. So it's two years to do it voluntarily, it's sort of a hybrid. As the task force, a lot of people have talked about having it happen voluntarily, so we left that window open but then recognized that in order for the Foundation for Movement work we need to get to somewhat larger districts.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So just to sum up here, Let's just say the blinds were perfect here. These would become all SUs, although the gray area is undefined. Currently, that would remain SDs. That in order to sort of achieve efficiencies of fewer SDs within these SUs, you would look for voluntary SD mergers within them.

[Sen. Brian Campion (Chair, Senate Education Committee)]: District

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: mergers. SDs, yep. Contiguous or not. And then if nobody gets around to any of that, it's the state board in two years forcing it, sort of as we did that, the tail end of Act 46. Is that Yeah,

[Sen. Brian Campion (Chair, Senate Education Committee)]: the idea is to try to get it lined up for Act 46 coming online. That might take a little bit of adjustment too. But this did anticipate some sort of a short term, something short term to hold down the rate of increase. That would then when Act 46 comes online, have this ready, try to wind them up.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So on that, if we were to look at your area, is the tan bottom left, that would be basically one superintendent, one central office, and ultimately overseeing how many school districts and how many towns would that end up being?

[Sen. Brian Campion (Chair, Senate Education Committee)]: How many towns? I don't know. How many districts? I can probably figure out. Now if they didn't merge, a lot of them would merge. Number of town would stay the same but your number of old districts could pass So

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: within, when we're talking about giving the voluntary and the set goal within SUs of about half, reducing about half, is that per SU or is that total? Like some SU could not hit that goal but others could accept Yep,

[Sen. Brian Campion (Chair, Senate Education Committee)]: theoretical. Although I also think we'll find that with the foundational formula there's going to be a lot of pressure on districts to merge on their own. We didn't try to do this SU by SU, we want to get the number of districts down.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I think one of the challenges we hear is the complexity of now it would be even larger SUs and sort of one central office overseeing essentially separate contracts, separate everything for each district, but now over a pretty large geographic area. Obviously, one of my big concerns with SUs, among other things, is increasingly a small pool of highly qualified applicants to be superintendents are veering away from the time commitment and complexity of overseeing SU because they have to spend so much time on board management rather than on educational leadership.

[Sen. Brian Campion (Chair, Senate Education Committee)]: Yeah. Would have thought about that. Mean, some of the board management could out to the next the other people on the team. Superintendent wouldn't have doesn't have to go to every meeting other people can do that and really there's no reason it would take more people to do this than we have now and hopefully there's the efficiencies gained by you know especially within the world special ed for instance and specialized services that you can have with a larger area.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Do you force or does your language include any sort of increases in the sort of powers and duties of an SU board? No, we've been thinking about that because it's their creatures of statue so that's a possibility. I mean, National Board, is you have to be careful because it's, let's say, a non democratically elected board that does not have the power to tax or enter contracts. Would that be a representative board, like, school district sending a

[Sen. Brian Campion (Chair, Senate Education Committee)]: board to the SCU board? All different. Is that all good?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: But but, yes, essentially, it is, know, the way most places are set up, you send to one or two people from your board to the SU board. So you have tiny districts and large districts sending the same number of people to an SU board, and therefore making it sort of unrepresentative. Although they're working service providers, that's why And they don't have their powers are very questionable.

[Robert Hunter (Member)]: Will there still be potentially regionalized high schools or middle schools that would be developed within these SUs?

[Sen. Brian Campion (Chair, Senate Education Committee)]: It could be we haven't gotten into that level of detail we're just trying to do the math of it but the notion of regional high schools and especially if we're moving toward trying to make as many of them comprehensive as we possibly can that's a long term challenge with new builders and so we're not, we didn't go there.

[Robert Hunter (Member)]: Do you know how, approximately how much money before the other changes like regional or merge districts this would save?

[Sen. Brian Campion (Chair, Senate Education Committee)]: No, we haven't done any kind of a physical mode yet.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Also you mentioned BOCES, do you envision shared services?

[Sen. Brian Campion (Chair, Senate Education Committee)]: Well certainly if you have a larger, the larger unit the closer you are almost to a BOCES and you can do some of the same services almost within an SU or a couple of that, two or three SUs can get together and put POCs on top if that's what they want to do. Some of them may just decide to do those services themselves if they have enough scale or they may, you know, two or three may get together.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Where is your committee on this proposal or others? What's the status of where things are? Well, it's always

[Sen. Brian Campion (Chair, Senate Education Committee)]: we're in the middle of the process we took some testimony yesterday we're taking more testimony tomorrow we have some time set aside just for school boards to come in and talk about boundary any boundary adjustments that they think make sense and working on language and hope to have something that's real language in front of the committee soon. So it's hard to, you know, I would never predict where try to tell you exactly where it goes.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: And they're coming in specifically on this proposed law as opposed to anything else that's been proposed. Committee, any other questions? Just a reminder that the language and the map are both now up on our committee page as well. Alright. So the target governance framework, 25 SUs managed by 25 superintendents.

[Sen. Brian Campion (Chair, Senate Education Committee)]: How many in the map? I guess that does that take into account sort of what the gray part in the middle would evolve into? Yeah. I think I forget now. I think there's 23 SDs in that area, and it will get down to 12. By the way, numbers don't quite line up, they might be off by one or two, but I know we want it, the idea is to get down to the 11 SUs and I think it's 12 SDs within that gray area. That would be the half.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: No more than 11 SU statewide, no more than 45 member school districts within those SUs.

[Sen. Brian Campion (Chair, Senate Education Committee)]: Okay. Well, the language probably in the end won't cite 45, it'll say half, just by half. Yeah,

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: just sort of am doing the very crude math of 11 supervisory unions, 45 of 46 member school districts within that. It's been meaning four school boards per per SU, but some might be more. Anything else that you would like to highlight for us before we wrap up?

[Sen. Brian Campion (Chair, Senate Education Committee)]: I don't think so. It's really this map devolved from beams of testimony, I'll say that a lot of testimony especially from rural Vermont.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Any other questions from the committee? Thank you very much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. Okay everybody, we're gonna