After a two-week glide-path, Gov. Scott and Democrat and Republican leadership skillfully navigated the big H.454 Education bill home to a successful landing on Monday. There were many voices trying to reroute the governor’s mission to reform, and the solution will not fully satisfy everyone. But it strikes a balance that we can all live with to achieve the goals of improving quality and reducing costs of Vermont’s education system that we so desperately need.

The keys to reform are larger districts and a foundation formula. First, larger districts do NOT necessarily mean larger schools and closing smaller schools. It means encapsulating more schools within a larger district, enabling sharing of vital services and new opportunities across schools with a reduction of redundant administrative overhead. It will foster a larger sense of community and achieve quality/opportunity improvement while more of our education dollars will flow to our students rather than the bureaucracy.

Larger districts also enable communities to equitably and compassionately plan for declining student populations.

Second, a foundation formula regains the equitable and controlled funding of education across the state. This mechanism directly ties the funding and thus school district budgets to the number and type of students they serve. This ensures every student is provided ample funds to be well educated.

The foundation formula values and weights are constrained to no more than the NIPA inflation index of about 2.4%/yr. The Vermont Joint Fiscal Office estimates this effect alone will provide $321M in tax savings to Vermonters during the first four years of the phase-in period.

The three-year timeline compromise is the right amount of time to define the new school districts, construct voting wards, elect new school boards, and perform all the legal hand-offs from current to future districts. We added a 5-year phase-in to school funding and property tax changes. This may sound like a long time for tax relief, but it is as fast as humanly possible given the seismic changes being made. The governor will do his best to buy down rates until the new controls are in place, and school boards will begin shaping their budgets to smoothly transition to the new rates before they take effect.

Even with this bill passed, we’re not done. After the Vermont Districting Task Force does its work this off-season, we’ll be ready in next year’s session to continue our work on education reform.

Rep. Rob North

Ferrisburgh