Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: During our break and we sort of talked about, let's do a pilot project, so people can see how it works. But the fact is, we're not the fact. I think one observation I would have is that every area where we might target is different than the other area that we might target for very different reasons. So if we were a more standardized state, it could work. So then the question becomes, okay, we're gonna do it. It is really as a cost savingopportunity gaining thing. I'm not sure I'd call it a pilot since everybody's different.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: Like one point zero?

[Unknown Member]: Yeah. Transformation one.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: And if we do wanna make this part of what we do, it's hard to, how do we accomplish things in a way that they actually happen without us having to apply it, not just a carrot, but a stick. There is the concept that Senator Ongard's put out yesterday, which was sort of a, if you don't do it in this much amount of time, whatever it happens to be, that it's forced. So anyway, talk, talk about yourself. To add

[Unknown Member]: to that while you're saying that, you've kinda been contending all along that voluntary merger's probably not gonna happen. This is kinda funny just over the course of the last couple months how so many people have

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: been saying, Well, you know these school systems, they're talking about it.

[Unknown Member]: So I'm just wondering if there were a two year window, they were, know, time for the talk is over, get it done, or it happens.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah, but I'm only talking within the topic of regional high schools and the high school schools. Or you could broaden it, say, within the topic of school building consolidation. I

[Emily Long (Member)]: was just going say, I

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: know I put this on

[Emily Long (Member)]: the table yesterday, but I'm still trying to think in my head around are we talking about encouraging, use that word intentionally, encouraging a model. Won't say it was the word pilot, so I'm going to say model because models feels very positive to me. Modeling a single system, a school merger type of thing? Or are we talking about opening up a program for a model that you would have a limit on to how many could agree to go into and set the parameters around it? I mean, to me, if we truly are going to ask Vermonters to be partners with us in this process, we should have sort of a, really thinking off the top of my head a bit here, but some kind of program that we put into place that we offer for people to step up for. And then if no one takes us up on it, we've got a different conversation that we need to have. And so I guess I'm really trying to work with Vermont. And I'm saying that very broadly, intentionally, because I don't think there's any one area that isn't impacted by what we're doing here. And I really want to give everybody the opportunity, because I actually think there's a lot of conversations going on across Vermont in our local towns about what are our next steps. What do we do? How do we get ahead of this? How do we prevent this? How do we join this? I think there's a lot of those conversations and maybe if we present opportunities, we'll have some I'm always trying to be very optimistic about this, and I actually do feel optimistic about it.

[Unknown Member]: And I do like that. My concern is always the piecemeal effect or somebody being left out because those around them joined together and did this and they didn't. And they're now a desert. So trying to make sure every region of Vermont can be included in these opportunities and have positive

[Emily Long (Member)]: outcomes. I

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: guess a fairly important point. Trying to wrap my head around how we would make something like this mandatory without funding, first of all, and wondering if this would happen organically within the foundation formula of new districts. So that's what I hear you saying that the plan that I put on the table is actually the way you wanna go. Course you would hear that.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: You're hearing me.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Right, yes, so I think the answer to your question is, I mean, the point of having larger districts is to provide the governance structure the room to maneuver, to adjust to the foundation formula, especially in those areas that are going to probably be getting less. But that's sort of the, to me that's like, if we don't do anything, we're probably just gonna keep devolving into crisis and it's gonna happen organically too.

[Unknown Member]: Very, very negative ways.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: And it is. I mean, this is a really it's a really hard choice of entering an area that is not Vermont's strength of statewide control. Over a statewide problem that has traditionally been controlled locally. I mean, you know, is there, we often talk over the years about this, we need a base closing commission to just come in and say, these are all the schools that got to close and they're going to close. But could you imagine doing that? Could you imagine finding any person in Vermont who would be willing to serve on that commission?

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: Not even sure I agree that we should have that commission.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So let me ask you, Leanne, you have been the strong advocate for keeping schools open. How do you believe we need to address declining enrollment?

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: Well, I will say I would sort of reframe that not that I'm a strong advocate for keeping schools open that shouldn't be open, but for local ways having a stake in when and how they lose. I think there is a fundamental difference in those two things, and that's, I would put myself more on the side of the other. What should we do about defining enrollment though? That's the question you're asking me?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Well, how does the education system adjust to our demographics? If not, the number of buildings we have.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: Again, I think that I am in favor of some larger regional high schools, I think that those will be shiny and appealing to some people. I think that my position more is that I'm not in favor of forced closures for communities that want to try a little bit harder to really meet the standards and the price caps that we put in place. If they can do that, I think that that's a value judgment and we should allow them to do so. And I think that there is no hope of economic recovery in the regional area where you have closed all of the nearby schools. And so in a sense, we're stopping them from sort of any future.

[Unknown Member]: I hear from people in my region the flip side of that, and being on the task force and traveling around the state, every point seems to be valid on both sides of the issues because it's different from place to place. So in choice towns, Kirby's growing. People move there because they have choice, because there isn't a school in their community. So they're growing because they don't have a school, but they can choose where their child goes to school. So what I'm hearing from them is when designation happens to the choice, how can I be the driver for them, their population increase? So there's every issue that comes up, depending on where you are in the state, hear, this is great, this is awful, And they're both right because it's different, so different from place to place in the model, but works in different communities.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: So I think that this is sort of my big frustration when we talk about equity being one of the reasons that we're doing this and all of the different ways that you can look at equity. We talked this morning about how the schools in Chittenden County are full to capacity. Like there's no merging them and most of them. And so, you know, students are going to have within a 10 mile radius three different schools that are within that county. And that's because most people live in that area, but that doesn't mean that other people don't live in other areas. And so I just don't think we can expect the schools to be of the same size in those areas. And for me, the equity is like, does every region have reasonably close schools?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah, I don't think anybody would argue with you that we're not gonna have CVUs all over the state. Even if you took Danville, Cabot and Twinfield and push them together into one school. I

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: guess my point is, it feels like we're not asking the kids and the families in Chittenden County to change or sacrifice anything. It doesn't feel like equity to me. I

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: think you're missing the other. I think in my district, same issue, and what are we gonna give up? We're gonna give up funding. We're not gonna get the same amount of funding as, you know, Slate Valley. We are gonna get the

[Unknown Member]: same amount of funding. Actually, but that's less than what we're spending today.

[Emily Long (Member)]: Actually asked the secretary that question when she was sitting here a couple of weeks ago.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: And I

[Emily Long (Member)]: said, are you saying that since you're acknowledging there are schools that will not be able to achieve the scale that we're aiming for, are the larger school districts going to have to help offset those extra costs? And she said yes. So I think that means

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: Well, that's a sacrifice then. Okay, I'll retract.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: But it was for anybody else. It's a result of getting less money and also we get? Less progress. Lower taxes. Which is something else that people have to do. It's all, everything you pull has a positive and negative reaction.

[Unknown Member]: The opportunity is really important to me in this. We talk a lot about the money, we talk about a lot of how far they have to travel. What's available to those students and what's not available to those students? And what I continually see in my region is when a budget has to be cut, what gets cut? Sports, art, music. And you can't find Well,

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I'll talk about

[Unknown Member]: it later. But that's what gets cut. And a lot of it sometimes gets cut because you cannot find a qualified teacher who will go do it. It's like, Oh yeah, I'll be the art teacher, I gotta teach in three different schools, because you need me for a day, and you need me for two days, and you need me for two days, and I'm not doing that.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: We've agreed on that. We've agreed, I think, as the state or as representatives of the state that we need to have more uniform graduation requirements. Well, if you're a very small high school, can you actually offer enough things to meet those graduation requirements?

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: Yeah, I mean, I think the uniform, I have mixed feelings. South Burlington or Burlington or Essex, do all of them have forestry programs and they're on woodlots?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: They're on what? Woodlots, Forestry programs? I no idea.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: Okay, so this is sort of one of the things I'm thinking about when I think about opportunity, right? There's different opportunities exist in different places in the state. Should we be putting forth a bill that all of those schools need to come up with a forestry lot and have a forestry program? I mean, obviously, no. For the public record, that's not really my I don't

[Emily Long (Member)]: think we can get towards the limit.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: That wasn't really the point I was trying to make, but just that I think that sometimes opportunity isn't always recognized for its differences around state, right? And Opportunity in a really rural school with a rich environment of trees around it is going to present itself differently than opportunity somewhere else where there's like 5,000 internships within walking distance.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I think probably a future funding, and this goes back to what Chris said, maybe we just have a funding formula and then let it shake out. Because some of these smaller schools that might offer that might also cost $28,000 per child, per pupil. And it's going to be harder and harder to offer those unique programs, not at scale. Also there are, just at the high school level, I think that there are, we have very inequitable system in it. There are some due to the fact that the community does not support budgets of a certain level that simply don't offer what others do.

[Emily Long (Member)]: Or because of decline. Stabbing. Right, absolutely, because it's all wrapped up as a formula.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So, if we were to sort of here's an assignment to think about, and to talk to the context that we or you all have about, you know, whether at least this concept of larger or what should we call them regional and central high schools and middle schools, how we can make that happen instead of what is a financial incentive we could use besides school construction? Do we start thinking about the same sorts of incentives that we did with Ag forty six? How do we have the money for?

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: I'd say for those of us who weren't around for Ag 46, if you can maybe like give us high level overview of what the I mean, there were tax incentives, but just to

[Emily Long (Member)]: $150,000 150,000

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: And so there were two main incentives? Yeah, there was a grant,

[Emily Long (Member)]: dollars 100,000 or $150,000 can't remember what it was, but it was at least $100,000 grant that you would get for the cost of the material processing to help offset the cost. And tax rate decreased. It was an $8,006.42. What was that? Since. On the tax rate. And Off tax

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: then if you sort of lost your small schools grant, you got a merger support grant that is ongoing and continuing. So it was significant.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: And that all added up to approximately what, say, how

[Unknown Member]: much that all costs, just depends on the

[Emily Long (Member)]: We never did give her The

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: question is, what did all the financial incentives cost?

[Emily Long (Member)]: Yeah, because

[Unknown Member]: the tax decrease

[Emily Long (Member)]: into mergers. Were districts around the state that were still feeling

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: pretty bad. And it's sort of like the, I think it was sort of like the property tax rebate program. It's funded by the education fund. So it sort of goes in a circle.

[Unknown Member]: So the tax rate, the yield would have to be set to pay to pay for

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: the service. Sort of like people who receive the property tax rebate, pay for the property tax rebate. And it's actually

[Emily Long (Member)]: a really good question because what I've read most are very clearly, especially in my region where quite a few mergers did take place, smaller and larger. Some were just two school districts merging into one because we have a lot of different types of choice. So there were some that couldn't merge with others because they had to merge with districts. The incentives were a really big deal because at that moment in time, because it

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: was a follow-up on Act 153 and as

[Emily Long (Member)]: we heard from 156, there were school districts who were really struggling to say, how are we going to keep our programming? And enrollment was declining in. So it was a significant help. I mean, that tax rate decrease for those years was a significant impetus to move forward. And I don't want to minimize it in any way, even though some didn't take advantage of it, some were in a lot tougher place and really felt compelled by those incentives.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: And others said, the ones who were already SUs said, well, we're gonna get forced to merge anyway, so let's do it voluntarily. So that's if they get the financial incentive. And so that was a carrot and stick approach, because it was basically do it voluntarily, get the tax breaks, or you're going to get forced to do it anyway.

[Unknown Member]: And if you were just an existing SU that had always worked together with it, surrounded by everybody feeding into a single high school, you do eat forest. Yeah, perfect example where I taught, Orleans Central, six school districts, all elementary schools, all feeding into Lake Region High School. Emerging, we already all had the same contract. We already all did a lot of stuff together, professional development together, because it was just easier to work together.

[Emily Long (Member)]: But it was a hard work.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: Well, contracts is actually keeping the mind. I was just thinking about, we decide, does it make more sense? Obviously, you're going to need more buy in than just the teachers and the support staff themselves. But like, does it make more sense for the incentive and to be that you're merging districts where one set of workers is the main because you're gonna need to do some contract negotiating if we're gonna merge some districts together. So like one that has much higher than the other so that they can see like now you get paid more and this is good for your workers, or does it make more sense to choose two districts that are pretty much the same so that for at least for now, we're not necessarily focusing on that kind of rebargaining because they're already pretty much the same.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So if you were to take my back, one of the goals that I One of the reasons I went with not much larger, but larger districts was to avoid the leveling up. So just regionally, salaries tend to be the same anyway. So I think that the geographic ranges I made, probably there's not a lot of difference among the salaries. As we know how the NDA negotiates, they tend to be very similar different regions.

[Unknown Member]: Makes sense, because you live near each other.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So I don't know, you said maybe you could pair a higher paying district with the lower paying district, but I think geography has them already not too distant from one another.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: Maybe, I mean, depends on, I mean,

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Chittenden County aside.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: Right. And I've also even thinking about the, I won't get into it right now,

[Emily Long (Member)]: but it's not always exact. There's often one larger community yeah. Surrounded by a lot smaller ones.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: I know that when I have looked at the very few places I can switch to, I have always been like, wow, that's a lot lower actually than what I am.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah, but I think geographically they tend to be more similar, is why I would think it's bigger but not huger, because of the level of detox.

[Unknown Member]: I know that's been part of the conversations with a couple of, I think they're SDs, NSUs, in my area that were having conversations about getting together. And they said, we wouldn't have a lot of leveling up. It's like we all operate the same kind of schools. We all kind of feed into the same high schools. We all are very similar. We're close to each other. And our scallery schedules are pretty close, so there wouldn't be a lot of leveling up. It would make perfect sense for us to get together if people wanted to get together. So there have been some conversations in my region that have talked about that very issue.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: Just to be clear though, it's not just salary, federal is just the salary. There's a lot of tiny little I've pieces of

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: associated many of those contracts very hard to align them.

[Leanne Harple (Member)]: Yeah. If you have a mascot conversation, most of the time.

[Unknown Member]: And we if we were just sitting here deciding mascots. Mascots. Thanks, Rev Harple, for bringing that up. Which mascot do we pick?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I won't make us talk unless people wanna continue to talk. But as we prepare to have a week off, we have to remember the system that we have.

[Emily Long (Member)]: I

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: thought that having the broad range of opinions of the teachers that we heard yesterday was really great, because I think you heard some real lamenting about the system that we have now and the unpredictability of funding year to year, security and program security and all that. And, can we do better? Do people want to do better? It's really hard because we have multiple constituencies here. We've got taxpayers, we've got people who are losing their healthcare, we've got, know, people are going we're never not going to talk about affordability for at least the next twenty years. And then we also have, you know, we have the educational community and our desire to provide a world class education. So it is hard to balance it all, and I realize that. And I guess the question will be, when we come back is who feels prepared to make a hard choice? Because I don't see any easy choices that move the needle. And if people have them, that's great. I don't. And so maybe we come back feeling like, well, you know, some system that we have is what we have and it works. We continue to sort of spiral downward from a financial and whatever point of view, that crisis is what's going to drive change. That's certainly what is going on now. But anyway, we'll close there. Are going to adjourn, but remain here. We're just gonna watch what happened in another committee room earlier this morning.

[Emily Long (Member)]: Is it exciting?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I don't know if it was exciting.

[Emily Long (Member)]: It was It was

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: a lot.