2025 VTGOP Convention: Policy Panel on Education

Thank you. Um, so I'm Representative Beth Quimby from Lynden and I serve on the House Education Committee and I'm also a member of the School Redistricting Task Force. >> Good morning. How's everyone doing? >> Good. >> Pretty good. Good. Uh, my name is Rachel Bergen. I am a former state representative from the great state of Florida. I worked on education policy there in the state throughout my time of being in office. And so, we're going to kind of give you a broad overview about education policy this morning and then dig into Vermont specific. So, um, I am been extremely um, engaged in education policy for the last 18 years from many ways, shape, and form. I I'd worked on um some of our educational choice policy in the state of Florida um for the state of Florida as we are right this minute that Florida is a fully educational choice option state meaning that if you want to homeschool, if you want to um send your kids to private school, public school, whatever that looks like, uh you can actually do. this last year, uh, though we worked on it for quite a while, is the the first year that they passed a full education scholarship, um, piece of legislation that allowed families to take that educational scholarship with them to whatever school that they chose. That's been in the work for a very, very long time, and many folks actually worked very hard to chip away at being able to make that happen. Um just a little bit about my background is that I was a home educated student from K through 12th grade and I have went all the way through the system and the first time I stood on a graduation stage per se was when I received my doctorate degree. So you can know that education is really the focus of whatever that parent and those students choose it to be. Uh so in working on education policy um the organization I work for is Americans for Prosperity and we have worked very diligently on education policy throughout the country and there are lots of states throughout the country that allow parents to choose where their child attends school. But I will say and and Beth is going to talk about this a little bit more uh is that uh Vermont has actually one of the oldest educational option legislations in the entire country. Uh it's one of the oldest ones in the entire country and that allows some for some level of flexibility. Now, what that looks like is that um you know, parents may or may not be able to have a school for their child to go to. And it's really really critically important that there is the legislative framework that allows the parents to have that option. Depending on where you are, um it's really going to depend on whether or not your state has that legislative option to be able to do that. uh I had moved to Georgia uh and became a parent of a bouncing baby 14-year-old and um the really I realized even though uh Georgia was a very much a educational option state that there were not there was the framework was not there for children to be able to choose the school that they wanted to go to because there there wasn't the option there. So public school was the option. Um, and so there there's a need for legislative reform to happen within a state to make it to make it uh ability for for parents to actually choose and students to have the opportunity to choose. So, um, just kind of thinking through what education looks like in Vermont. Vermont spends some of the highest uh per per dollar in the uh per capita of of individual student in the entire country. I think it's second. It's Oh, sorry. It's fourth highest in the nation. It's $24,68. It's a very very high dollar amount. Um, if you take Florida into that, our total dollar per student is 11,000 per student that we that we spend to educate. So, the need for educational options and reform Vermont is really critical. And the legislature began working on that last year, which the representative is going to talk about. But what I would say is this and that is that I I was uh there in the in the capitol during the first hearing uh where the governor's legislation was actually proposed and I will just tell you that it was a very strong uphill battle uh because the the folks on the other side that are are uh that are definitely against such things fought very hard to strip out a lot of the good language that would have been in there which which the represent's going to dig into a little bit more. So what I would say is this is that if Vermont is going to get to a place of reform and having educational options available to their students, whether it be public school, private school, uh homeschool, whatever level of education reform that is needed, the the members of the delegation, Republican delegation is going to need some support by members of the public to help make their voices heard to make sure that those changes happen. And what I will say is this. When we first started this in the state of Florida, uh early on about 2006 2007, it was a very very hostile situation and people were very angry about the thought of opening up education options for students and um that in included just a lot of misinformation. There was a lot of back and forth. But what did happen was that over time when students had the ability to to basically be flexible to attend the school of their choice, we began to have students themselves come to this capital to start talking to us about how that school choice option changed their life. And I will never forget one day a young man came to my office and he said, "My goal, my dream is to become a merchant marine." And I am the only way I I've been stuck in a failing school. They're getting Fs year over year and the only way that I've been able to actually make any progress is because my mom the sacrifice of my mom to help me go to an independent school. And I really just want to be able to to graduate and and achieve my dream. And it was students like him and many others that began really making that impact and changing the hearts and minds of legislators to the point where you couldn't go home to your district anymore if you hadn't voted for options for students. So just to give you a couple of those ideas and and broadly give you a perspective as to where Vermont is just in the northeast region too. New Hampshire spends about $20,000 per student and Maine spends about 18. So you are all in a pretty high level of per pupil spending, which means that it costs you as a taxpayer quite a significant amount of money to educate your student. So with that, I will pass it over to the representative to kind of dig into Vermont specific and then we'll open it up for questions and kind of go back and forth. >> Sure. Um, so I'll talk a little Vermont specific issues. Um, so one thing about education policy in Vermont is that education is actually in the Vermont Constitution. It's the only government service that's in the Vermont Constitution. So a lot of the changes people would like to see are not possible due to constitutionality. Uh we are required to provide substantially equal educational opportunities to all students. Um, which is why we pay into a common fund and then the money is redistributed. Um, so we don't have gold towns and poor towns. So it kind of has really hit ahead u based on our demographics. We've gone from about 120,000 students in Vermont down to 84,000, some places even less. Uh, when I started teaching, I had over a 100 students that I taught. And when I retired, I had 50. The population declined by 50%. And it's going to be expensive in Vermont because of how rural we are. So, the education reform, I said it really hit ahead with the homestead property tax increases, which would have been worse if we hadn't bought them down. But homestead property taxes only pay 25% of the education budget. It's a sliver. Nonhomestead property taxes make up 40% of the education budget. And then another 35% roughly comes from other sources. For example, every penny of sales tax goes there and nowhere else. We spend over two and a half billion dollars a year in Vermont on educa in the education fund. 30% of that roughly comes from federal funds. And as we've said earlier with housing, that's very volatile. To depend on a third of our budget to come from the feds is not very sustainable. Um, a lot of So, we have 52 supervisory unions or districts, 119 school districts, and over 285 public schools in Vermont. Uh, very expensive. It's going to be because of our rural nature. We're going to have to have some really small schools in some really remote areas. That's just the way it is. But we're not to scale in other areas of the state. And people who will say that Act 60 didn't work. We already consolidated and work. Well, we didn't. Some places did, a lot of places did not. And some, it's only in name only. Where I taught, we had six elementary schools that had their own school districts and one regional high school. We changed that to one school district for all of the elementary schools, one for the high school, and changed nothing else. So, it changed in name, but nothing else. So, I'm not surprised there was no savings or changes in any way. The places that did really consolidate under Act 60 did save millions of dollars and they spent it. They didn't save it because our current funding system gives you no incentive to save money. It's like for every dollar you spend, it's like getting two. Um so the original H454 put forth by the governor within a day was basically scrapped completely and became a strike all amendment. So what came out of the house bore almost no resemblance to the original plan. uh which is why it was a no vote as it came out. Um then it went to the Senate. A lot of changes were made and then it was reverted almost back entirely to what we had passed out. So the committee of conference report I was a yes vote then. I didn't like everything in it but it had enough in it to move the process forward. So there's really three parts I would say to the current Act 173 education legislation. Quality. Uh we don't even have um common graduation requirements across the state to graduate from Danville High School versus Burlington versus Rutland versus North Country. It's it's not consistent statewide and we're a very small state. So there's a group working on that. Um another part is governance. That's what the task force is working on. Do we need 52 governing units for 80,000 students? Probably not. or not to scale. So, the task force is working at that level, not at the school level, um, at supervisory unions, school districts. And then there's the funding, which is a big piece, the foundation formula that's been proposed. A lot of people think that's some unheard of, strange thing. There's only two states in this country that don't use some version of a foundation formula. Wisconsin and Vermont. Every other state uses some form of it. Um, so there are some we heard a lot as I've going on public hearings that we should just fix health care. If we fix health care costs, then education won't be so expensive. Well, our demographics make that difficult. We're an aging state. You know, about twothirds of Vermoners are on Medicare, Medicaid, or both. That's not a moral judgment. That's just the math, you know. So for every one person paying commercial insurance rates, they're basically paying for three people just because of the demographics in this state. So unless that changes to have a lot of young working families paying health insurance, that that's something I you can't just fix overnight. Um if so some have said we should just switch and pay with income tax instead of with property tax. Well, we pay for other things with income tax. If we add two and a half billion dollars of spending onto what we need to raise with income tax, that's going to be tricky. Uh virtually every state in this country uses property tax or property tax and income tax to to fund education because it's a more stable, consistent, predictable revenue stream than income tax. Um, so I'm on the House Education Committee, which is made up of 11 members, four of which are Republican, seven of which are Democrats. I would say twothirds of those members were on the committee last year, four or five of us are new to the committee this year. Um, five are retired or current teachers. We have school board members. Um, so a lot of knowledge in the room and we have had lots of bills proposed to us. We're trying to focus on this for the most part. And what came out of the final legislation was this school redistricting task force which is tasked with looking at the governing structure, not the school level, the superintendent, school district level. So, we were tasked with proposing no more than three map proposals to the legislature by December 1st. The task force is not a decision-making body. We are issuing a report. It is the legislature that will have to decide this. The legislature regulates municipalities in Vermont and school districts are municipalities. Um, so we have three proposals kind of in the works now. One is based on where comprehensive high schools should be across the state. Um that would involve some construction dollars for sure. We don't have a map really to go with that yet, but we have a meeting on Monday. Uh another one is about boards of cooperative education overseeing things. Again, a lot would have to happen underneath those five units. Otherwise, you're just adding another layer of administration on top of what's already there. Again, more to come on Monday. The third proposal that's currently on the table is building your current um governing units, and I'm going to call them governing units because it's another whole issue around where career and technical centers are located across the state. My committee in the House looked at that proposal in January. um they're about 14 or 15 depending on how you divide them up. Pretty equally distributed around the state. Manchester has a little bit of a hole there that would have to be dealt with. It's not perfect. Uh again, Monday of this week and Waterberry will be looking at the these maps that have been adjusted and voting at that point to decide which one or ones of these will go in the report to go to the legislature due on December 1st. Um, at least one of these proposals, assuming there's more than one, has to include the idea of supervisory unions as well as supervisory districts. That's been a real sticking point. I know in the rural area where I live, supervisory union structure is very important to us because we tuition. We don't we we have to tuition. We don't operate K through2 systems. In all of Essex County, there is one high school and that's Kanan on the Canadian border. Um, where I live in Lynen, we don't have a public high school. There isn't one. We go to Lynen Institute, St. John, St. Johnsbury Academy. Um, we don't have K to2 systems. So, having supervisory union structure in in certainly in a lot of places in the state has been in something I have supported all along. Those who don't like tuitioning, those who don't like choice, don't like supervisory unions, may prefer supervisory districts. Um, so that's kind of where we're at. That was a really quick overview, only half hour and I assume people will probably have some questions in the last 10 minutes or so that we have. Back of the room was the first hand I saw. >> Yep. >> We put a lot of the affordability. >> Yep. >> Mhm. >> Ended up being about 110 million to buy down the rate to about 1%. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And the govern plan of five districts was not possible seem to be popular. So my question is going forward how are we going to keep the season what's the messaging we should have? It's an excellent question. Um, for me it it is really about scale. We are not at scale and there are some places in this state that are going to have to remain small and remote. I'll keep pointing to Kanan High School. It's the only game in town. There are other areas of this state that that's not the case where there are I'll give an example where I taught. They still are maintaining six elementary schools that are all half empty and they are still maintaining those buildings. They are still they maintaining staff. They can't even hire staff. After I left, they've gone through three math teachers since I left. They they can't even staff the buildings with teachers. Everyone's remote licenses. um we just can't afford to continue to operate this many governing structures and the pay they're getting and supervisory unions for example can't they're not taxing authorities they're paying leases on their buildings in a lot of cases it's it's really got to be about consolidation and yes it's not very popular what I've heard a lot going around the state is yes we want you to change everything but don't change what I change everybody else, but don't change what I have. And it's going to have to come to a point where people are going to have to say, okay, what's good for the entire state? What works, it's not going to be a one-sizefits-all approach. What works in Montpelar is not going to work in Kanan, I'll use Kanan again. What works in Essex County and Grand Isle County is going to be completely different than what's going to have to happen in Chittenden County. So, there has to be some flexibility there. But, you know, for 84,000 students to operate 285 schools, 119 school districts, and 52 supervisory unions is not a very efficient use of dollars that we don't have. >> Can I chime in just real fast a second? And that is that in a the great state of Florida, 50 27 million people that are there, there are 566 school districts. So you're looking at 119 here in the state of Vermont with half a million people and geography a 27 million person state has 56. So thinking about the cost that it requires to maintain that structure is significant to the state which is why you're looking at 11,000 versus 24,000 per student to just give you an idea. >> Well and one thing for me isn't all about cost. It's about efficiency. Um because if you're not using your time efficiently then you know if a superintendent for example and where I has two school districts to deal with two budgets two board meetings two of everything in a month as opposed to the district or supervisor union north of me has 15 different school districts in it. That means that superintendent is going to 15 board meetings a month dealing with 15 budgets. they're spending all their time on that paperwork and not being an educational leader to their principles. So, it's an inefficient system which is cost you time on tasks as well. >> So, I I used to be a teacher. I got my degree in West Virginia which has a very completely different structure. >> Yes. Vermont is very unique as far as how we um you know there's a lot of local control. >> Yes. >> And that's been really difficult to convince people to change the model because >> how how are you planning to kind of message to the public that >> yes, you know, save money, but there's there's just this real There is there is so I'll say two things on that. That's one of the reason I'm not opposed to supervisory unions as opposed to supervisory districts. I'm not sure a supervisory district is less money than a supervisory union if it's an efficient supervisory union. Uh, one thing that was in the original governor's proposal that was tossed out, uh, that I'd like to have come back, which I've stated on the record, was that every school had an advisory board with spending authority. And for me in my life, what local control means to a lot of people is their school. It's not I really care about the entire supervisor union. I care about my kids in my school, the playground, the sports teams, what's happening within these walls. And if every school had that board, it's more than a booster club because they also have some spending authority and say, "Here's what's happening at my school. Here's what we care about at our school. We care about getting new playground equipment. I don't care what's going on five schools away from here. I care about my kids." I would like to amend that legislation to put that back in about the every school having their own board advisory board. Um, you know, what local control do you have to vote no on your budget, but you can't really line item it? Um, I had a former superintendent came in, testified before our committee with the new foundation formula and wrote a mock budget for a supervisory union with 50 schools in it. He said, "I had more control. I had more choices with this funding model than I had in the old one. And I had money left over. I had more than enough. And we could make those choices about this school needs a guidance counselor. That's what we're going to fun. Oh, this school, we really care about our music program. That's what we're funding here." Um, so in some senses he felt he had more local control with the foundation formula than he did in the existing funding model. But yeah, having a local board because it's really your local school you care about the most. And again, it's really about having local elementary schools, more centralized middle schools, and more regional high schools. Um, so we have one minute. I was told I can talk to you any day, so I'm going to call him this guy. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> Y >> I had to get off at 8:00. educator yet,000 student >> and we spend 24,000 students which is a good number >> but we where do we rank average in the country results >> and I don't think that has to do with rural nature so I Right. And I would agree. I've been to public hearings all across the state and the vast majority of those who stand up and speak anyway who come to the microphone are school employees. And I and we are getting a lot of other input that aren't people standing at the mic. And maybe it's just the comfort level with doing that. Maybe it's that people feel their voice isn't going to matter. That's, you know, so I'm getting a lot of emails. We're getting a lot of written public comment. Um there are organizations that are trying like the Rural Schools Community Alliance is really kind of like trying to funnel that. But yes, a lot of people who are employed by schools and I would say the same thing I in the House Education Committee, the people that are in the room every single day and of course that's their job. I mean, are the Vermont Superintendent Association, the Vermont Principles Association, DNA, that's who's there. Um, yeah, I think we're out of time though, but I'll visit visit here for a few minutes. >> We'll visit, but there's another there's another group coming in to talk about affordability. So, >> thank you. Let's see how I'm quoted on the Vermont this week next Don't let