Updated at 4:39 p.m.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that the Mid Vermont Christian School must be allowed to participate in state athletics, two years after being banned for forfeiting against a team with a transgender player. The court returned the case to district court for further proceedings.

The ruling comes after several years of litigation by the pre-K-12 private Christian school in Quechee. The Vermont Principals’ Association barred the school from participating in state athletics after the school forfeited a girls’ playoff basketball game in February 2023 to avoid playing the Long Trail School, which had a transgender player on the team.

School officials at the time said they were concerned that playing against “a biological male jeopardizes the fairness of the game and the safety of the players,” and its head of school, Vicky Fogg, told Valley News that allowing “biological males to participate in women’s sports sets a bad precedent for the future of women’s sports in general.”

The Vermont Principals’ Association governs rules around school sports in Vermont, and said at the time that Mid Vermont Christian violated its anti-discrimination and gender identity policies.

The school, along with several parents and students, sued in federal court in 2023, seeking reinstatement of the school’s membership to the Vermont Principals’ Association.

According to Tuesday’s court ruling, Mid Vermont Christian School argued that “forcing girls to compete against the biological males would affirm that those males are females,” in violation of their religious beliefs.

U.S. District Court Judge Geoffrey Crawford in June 2024 denied the school’s request to be readmitted to the principals’ association.

But on Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed that decision and agreed with the school’s claims, writing that they were “likely to succeed” in showing that the association’s exclusion of the school “was not neutral because it displayed hostility toward the school’s religious beliefs.”

Judge Michael H. Park, writing for the court, wrote that the principals’ association “publicly castigated Mid Vermont — and religious schools generally — while the VPA rushed to judgment on whether and how to discipline the school.” Park said that the punishment they imposed on the school “was unprecedented, overbroad, and procedurally irregular.”

The court sent the case back to the federal district court for further proceedings.

Jay Nichols said Tuesday the Vermont Principals’ Association, its officers and employees “do not harbor any hostility towards religious viewpoints,” but declined to comment further, citing pending litigation.

A spokesperson for the state’s Agency of Education declined to comment, also citing pending litigation.

The school was represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a preeminent conservative Christian legal group that has had a growing presence in Vermont education and politics.

The group, in a press release, called the ruling a “victory for religious schools.”

David Cortman, senior counsel and vice president of U.S. litigation for the group, said in the press release that the appeals court was “right to uphold constitutional protections by guaranteeing the school can fully participate while still adhering to its religious beliefs.”

Chris Goodwin, the Mid Vermont Christian School girls’ basketball coach, said in the press release that the school strives “to exemplify biblical truth in and through everything we do.”

“We’re grateful for our legal team at Alliance Defending Freedom who helped us get back in the game,” he said.

Some advocacy organizations disagreed with the ruling. Amanda Rohdenburg, the senior director of advocacy and land stewardship at Outright Vermont, a statewide nonprofit advocacy group for LGBTQ+ people, called the court decision “yet another affront to Vermont’s core values, policies, and laws, which are clear on their commitments to anti-discrimination based on gender identity.”

“Allowing private schools to violate these policies is not only a setback in the progress we’ve made to support all youth, but it also fuels a dangerous collective delirium about kids simply trying to be themselves,” she said.

Monica Allard, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Vermont, cautioned in an emailed statement that while the ruling was “disappointing,” it was “important to underscore that the court did not rule against Vermont’s policy of including trans kids in school sports.”

“This decision does not impact the rights of trans kids to participate fully in school activities — or the responsibilities of schools to ensure that all students have equitable access to educational and extracurricular opportunities,” she said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Christian school that forfeited game over transgender player wins appeal to rejoin state athletics.

Updated at 4:37 p.m.

The former executive director of the Vermont Council of Special Education Administrators was charged with felony embezzlement, the Montpelier Police Department said in a press release Friday.

Darren McIntrye, who served as the head of the organization from 2021 to 2023, embezzled more than $76,000 from the organization and used the funds “for personal gain,” police alleged in the release.

The investigation began in October 2024, when the organization reported the “misappropriation of company funds” to the Montpelier Police Department, Alesha Donovan, a police detective with the department, said in the release.

The Vermont Council of Special Education Administrators has been active in Vermont for decades, supporting special education administrators and employees in school districts across the state.

Mary Lundeen, the organization’s executive director, said in an email that the organization was “bound to promptly report” any irregularities “and to conduct an audit to determine the facts.”

“That is what it has done here,” she said. “We leave it to law enforcement and the courts to decide whether there are criminal acts.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Former director of the Vermont Council of Special Education Administrators charged with embezzling funds.

The town and village of Johnson on Tuesday announced they were entering into a partnership with Vermont State University to relocate town services onto the school’s campus in Johnson.

Essential town services like Johnson’s municipal offices, post office, and the town’s health center could move onto the university’s campus — which sits on higher ground, out of reach from the Lamoille and Gihon rivers’ floodplain, according to a joint announcement from officials with the town, village and university.

Johnson was hard hit by the July 2023 floods. The town offices, health center, post office and grocery store were all displaced, along with many homes and businesses in the area. The town in April this year moved its public library a half-mile through town and across the river — not far from the university’s Johnson campus.

The parties plan to apply for funding from a federal community development block grant for disaster recovery in response to the July 2023 floods, according to the announcement, which was posted on social media.

The project, if borne out, would transform the university’s Martinetti Hall into a Community Services and Resilience Center. While final details will still need to be worked out, officials said the arrangement could blend the roles of the university and the town in new ways.

“We have the opportunity to create something here that’s a new model for how college campuses or other facilities in their communities can more purposefully work together,” said David Bergh, the president of Vermont State University.

Tom Galinat, the town administrator for Johnson, said they were “facilitating, hopefully, a new arrangement that allows both of us to prosper and to grow into a more resilient community.”

“There’s this wonderful symbiosis where the needs are crossing at the same time,” he said. “It’s really exciting.”

Vermont State University is in its third year of an integrated statewide university system. The Vermont State Colleges System in 2021 merged Castleton University, Northern Vermont University and Vermont Technical College into a single institution.

Much of the institution’s building stock is not being used to its current and anticipated needs, Bergh said. Meanwhile, the university, like many small colleges and universities, has seen declining enrollment.

“Across the country, you have college campuses closing, merging, being shuttered,” Bergh said. “Our intent is to keep these campuses vibrant, but to find a way to do so where we’re reducing our operational footprint and expense, and to do so really thoughtfully, and to do so in ways with partners that connect to our mission.”

The parties in their announcement said the “flood-resilient and energy-efficient hub” could “strengthen the campus-community connection, a long-held community goal.”

The futures of the campus and the community are “inextricably intertwined,” Bergh said, and he envisioned the partnership would bring services to campus that could connect to academic programs. A health clinic, for example, could tie in with the university’s nursing program on campus, he said.

“For us to recruit students and employees who want to be there on a campus, they want to come to a place that has a vibrant community with active businesses,” he said. “And then for those businesses to be successful, they need, in part, for us to keep bringing people in the community.”

While both sides expressed optimism for the “one of a kind” partnership, they acknowledged they are still early in the process, and, in their announcement, said “there are hurdles to clear before determining how best to move forward.”

The university will host a forum at the school’s Stearns Hall Performance Space to discuss the partnership on Tuesday, Sept. 16. The final application for the grant is due Sept. 30, Galinat said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont State University, Johnson announce partnership to relocate town services onto the school’s campus.

Laura Walker, the president of Bennington College, will retire from the role at the end of fall term, the chair of the college’s board of trustees announced in an email on Friday sent to staff, faculty and students. 

Walker chose not to renew her contract, Nick Stephens, the chair, wrote in the email. She will continue to serve as president through the end of the fall term “to ensure consistent and steady leadership,” he wrote.

Walker will then continue as a strategic adviser to the board of trustees concentrating on new revenue projects and fundraising next year, Stephens wrote. The board will name an interim president, and then begin a national search for a permanent president, he wrote.

“Along with my board colleagues, I want to express my enormous gratitude to Laura for her leadership, her dedication to and love of Bennington, and the significant positive impact she has had on the college,” Stephens wrote.

Walker, in a statement posted to her LinkedIn page, said she was “so proud of what we’ve done together over the last five years,” and pointed to the college’s “doubling the number of applicants” and “graduating Bennington’s largest-ever class.”

Walker, formerly the long-time president and CEO of New York Public Radio, or WNYC, joined the college as president in 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

She joined the private college in Bennington after a rocky exit from WNYC, facing scandals involving its workplace culture, according to reporting from the New York Times and WNYC..

The email said Walker would be returning to New York City in January, where she will “resume her lifelong commitment to public media, developing new projects in both media and education, at a critical time for both sectors.”

Stephens wrote that the college, under Walker’s leadership, “achieved dramatic increases in fundraising revenue — including the largest gifts in Bennington’s history — and more than doubled the number of applicants, leading to the largest enrollment in the College’s history.”

The college has recently faced financial trouble, and this month announced it was eliminating 15 staff positions as part of the school’s efforts to address budget challenges.

Ashley Jowett, the director of communications at the college, said in a previous statement that the decision was “difficult” but “necessary to place the college on a more sustainable financial path.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Bennington College president will step down at end of fall term.

Middlebury College announced on Thursday it would be closing the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, the school’s satellite campus in California, after its enrolled students complete their degrees in June 2027.

The school’s president, Ian Baucom, said in a press release and accompanying video announcement that continuing operations at the campus in its current state was “no longer feasible.” The college’s Board of Trustees approved the closure of the satellite, which primarily serves post-graduate students, during a special meeting on Aug. 27.

“I recognize the gravity of this moment,” Baucom said in the press release. “I and my senior leadership team made this recommendation after careful deliberation, and the board did not come to this decision lightly.”

The college first purchased the institute and its campus in 2005 from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. The school focuses on graduate degree and certificate programs in foreign languages and international policy. Baucom called it a “leading global center of international studies.”

The closure comes as Middlebury College faces severe financial difficulties. In April, facing a $14.1 million deficit, the school announced a number of cost saving measures, including reductions to staff and faculty retirement benefits, which sparked faculty walkouts and protests.

At the time, college leadership said that $8.7 million of the total deficit was due to low enrollment at the Monterey Institute. One faculty member called the institute an “albatross” for Middlebury College that was sinking finances and morale.

Baucom, in the press release, said the decision was “not a reflection on the quality of our programs or our outstanding Monterey colleagues, whose work is far reaching and significant.”

The institute experienced steep declines in enrollment following the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving programs at the campus with “unsustainable operating deficits,” Baucom said in his video announcement.

All currently enrolled students will be able to complete their degrees. The school will not consider repurposing, leasing, or selling the property in Monterey until students complete their programs in June 2027, Baucom said in the release.

“It bears repeating that this was absolutely a financial decision and not a reflection on the quality of our programs or our exceptional faculty and staff,” Baucom said. “It also should not be left unsaid that (the institute’s) work to educate students who go on to work in diplomacy, interpretation, arms negotiations, and other forms of service to humanity has mattered.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Middlebury College to shutter its satellite campus in California.

Kate Grodin, co-principal of Winooski Middle and High School, describes the cafeteria for high school students at the Winooski Middle and High School as quiet. That is, compared to the “vibrant place of conversation” that is the middle school cafeteria.

The difference, she said, is due partly to the school’s policy limiting cellphone use for grades six through eight, while students in grades nine through 12 are allowed the use of cellphones during lunch or study hours.

But that will change this year. Winooski, like many other school districts around the state, has adopted a district-wide policy banning the use of cellphones or personal devices, often called a “bell-to-bell” ban, across all grades.

The change follows the passage of Act 72, which requires Vermont schools to adopt policies by the 2026-27 school year prohibiting students from using cellphones and other personal devices like smartwatches from arrival to dismissal. The law brings the state in line with 25 other states in the country that ban or restrict the use of smartphones in schools.

But many students will begin the school year Wednesday at schools with new, or strengthened, policies around cellphone bans ahead of the state law’s deadline.

“We’re really trying to lead with this idea that our time together, it’s sacred,” Grodin said in an interview. “And we want to really support that as much as we can, which is why we’re falling in line with the policy a year early.”

Act 72 goes a step further than other state laws, and includes a provision barring schools from using social media platforms to communicate with students, and from otherwise requiring students to have social media accounts to engage in academic and extracurricular activities. That provision took effect immediately after Gov. Phil Scott signed the law in June.

Winooski is not alone in moving forward with a ban on cellphone use ahead of the deadline set by the state. The Champlain Valley School District, the Caledonia Central Supervisory Union, the Montpelier Roxbury School District, and the Woodstock Union Middle and High School also have instituted new policies this year banning personal devices during the school day.

Other districts, like the Harwood Unified Union School District and the Lamoille South Supervisory Union, are entering their second year phone-free.

The Vermont Agency of Education will begin working with stakeholder groups this fall to draft a model policy in line with the new law, said agency spokesperson Toren Ballard. But he pointed to guidance published by the agency in February “for schools that intend to regulate student cellphone use in the meantime.”

Jay Nichols, the executive director of the Vermont Principals Association, said the ways schools are going about their bans are “really a gamut.” Some schools are offering pouches for students to keep their phones in during the day, while others are telling students to keep them turned off and in their lockers.

“But I think what we’re going to find is that schools are going to be in a really good place to do this,” he said, “and there’s essentially a whole bunch of pilots to kind of learn from.”

‘The best thing we’ve ever done’

The Harwood Unified Union School District for years had a policy that phones were expected to be kept away during class time, except at the direction of the teacher, according to Jess Deane, the assistant principal at the Harwood Union Middle and High School.

But those policies were “largely ineffective,” she said. Teachers spent much of their time asking students to put their phones away.

“A lot of the challenge of that just speaks to how addictive phones are,” Deane said. “If it’s in your pocket, it’s distracting you, because it’s buzzing every five seconds.”

During the 2023-24 school year, staff and faculty at the school, with input from the community, decided to create a cellphone ban for the following year. The district used its remaining federal Covid relief funds to purchase Yondr pouches, a container specifically for cellphones that can be locked and unlocked magnetically, for each student.

The feedback was almost universally positive, said Deane and Michael Leichliter, the Harwood district superintendent. 

“What we thought could be a lot of controversy and issues turned into a lot of people and students who were appreciative of the ban on cellphones during the school day,” Leichliter said.

Students were paying attention again, and teachers were ramping up the difficulty level of their courses to match the newly found engagement.

“The overwhelming staff feedback at the end of the year in our reflections was like, ‘This was the best thing we’ve ever done,” Deane added.

The school saw improvement across the board. Students checked more books out from the school library, overall grades improved, and instances of bullying and harassment decreased, Deane said.

During the 2023-24 school year, Deane said there were 21 ninth-grade students who were failing three or more classes. The next year, when the cellphone ban was put in place, only two ninth-grade students were failing three or more classes, she said.

“We’ve had some measurable gains,” Leichliter said. “Now, while we can’t say definitively that it’s because of cellphones, there’s been a lot of evidence that would suggest that that was a big piece of it.”

Other schools hope to replicate that success. Adam Bunting, the superintendent of the Champlain Valley School District, said the district will offer students similar pouches that students can keep their phones in during the day but will not require they use them, yet.

Bunting describes his district’s policy as less of a ban and more “symbolic.” Students are expected to keep their phones put away for the entire day, rather than only during class time like the previous school year, but they will not be required to turn them in at the beginning of the day.

“We are going to kind of err on the side of trust first. We don’t feel like we need to start by locking (phones) away,” he said. “That plan may work and it may not, but we want to start there.”

The new state law, and the districts getting ahead of it, mark a growing reexamination of the emotional and cognitive impacts of smartphones and social media on teens in particular.

Rep. Angela Arsenault, D-Williston, who spearheaded the initiative in the Legislature last session, said she’s not surprised districts are moving ahead with their own policies before the law requires it.

“There’s just a greater awareness of what these products are actually doing to us,” she said. “And so there is more willingness to react in ways that feel very relevant and most protective of kids.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: As classes begin again, more Vermont schools are restricting cellphone use ahead of statewide ban.

Since 2021, religious schools in Vermont have been receiving an increasing amount of money through Vermont’s school tuitioning program. But Act 73, Vermont’s wide-ranging education reform law signed into law in July, effectively halts that trend.

Last week, the state Agency of Education finalized a list of 18 private schools (called independent schools under state law) that remain eligible for the public tuition dollars under the new law’s provisions. Students who were already enrolled in ineligible schools prior to the law’s passing can continue receiving public dollars until they graduate. 

Vermont’s public tuition system allows families in districts without a public school for certain grades to use public dollars to send their children to public or private schools elsewhere.

Under the new law, however, private schools located in the state must now pass two tests to remain eligible for public funding: they must be located in a school district or supervisory union that does not operate a public school for some or all grades, and they must have had at least 25% of their student body from the 2023-24 school year funded by a Vermont public school district.

The provisions leave the 12 religious schools that last year received public tuition dollars ineligible for that funding. That includes Rice Memorial High School and Mount St. Joseph Academy, two prominent Catholic high schools based respectively in South Burlington and Rutland that, like others, have received an increasing share of public dollars since 2021.

To be sure, a very small percentage — about 100 students, or less than 4% — of the state’s roughly 3,000 students who used public funds for independent school tuition were going to religious schools. Meanwhile, a little over 2% of the $59,752,073 in education fund dollars that went to private schools in 2023-24 flowed to religious schools.

But the effect that Act 73’s eligibility requirements have on the state’s formerly eligible religious schools marks a departure from a trend seen in recent years that followed significant federal court rulings which bolstered the use of public tuition for religious schools.

In 2021, a federal appeals court judge ruled that three Vermont school districts could not exclude Catholic school students from the state’s tuition system.

Then, in 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Carson v. Makin held that Maine — which runs a similar tuition funding program to Vermont’s — could not award some parents a “public benefit,” specifically, tuition money, while in other cases “denying the benefit based on a recipient’s religious exercise.”

Since then, the number of religious schools receiving tuition has increased, as well as the amount of public funding flowing to them.

Rice Memorial High School received $644,385 in public tuition dollars for the 2023-24 school year, according to data provided by the Agency of Education, a more than 60% increase from the $386,925 in tuition dollars the school received during the 2022-23 school year.

Other prominent schools now ineligible for public funding include the Mid Vermont Christian School in Hartford, the Rutland Area Christian School and Mount St. Joseph Academy in Rutland. The latter received $395,250 in public tuition funds for the 2023-24 school year — a roughly $70,000 increase from the prior year.

VTDigger used information on schools’ websites to identify religious affiliation since the Agency of Education does not categorize schools as “religious.” Data for the 2024-25 school year was not available.

‘Non-religious criteria’

Now that that funding has been halted, questions remain over whether Vermont’s new independent school eligibility requirements, and their effect on religious schools, could be litigated.

Peter Teachout, a professor of law at Vermont Law School, said in an interview that the criteria around independent school eligibility is on solid footing regarding religious schools, at least based on the precedent set by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Carson v. Makin case.

The criteria that state lawmakers used in determining public tuition eligibility are religiously neutral, he said, and potential plaintiffs seeking legal action would need to prove these criteria were “somehow surrogates for excluding private, religious, independent schools.”

“That would have to be the argument: that in fact, the Legislature was seeking to exclude private, religious schools, and then it came up with non-religious criteria that would achieve that consequence,” he said. “That would be an extremely hard case to make, because the state is absolutely free to decide which independent schools get funding or don’t get funding, provided the criteria are not exclusively based on religion.”

Lawmakers who spoke to VTDigger said that the changes to funding for religious schools were a side effect of the policy changes enacted last session.

“The fact of the matter is what we implemented was really just a generally applicable standard to reflect continuing use of those schools that have served historically as public schools,” said Rep. Peter Conlon, D-Cornwall, the chair of the House Committee on Education who helped craft the final contours of Act 73.

Sen. Seth Bongartz, D-Bennington, the chair of the Senate Committee on Education, said he and others advocated for tuition dollars to continue to go to schools that “were integral to the delivery system” of education in Vermont.

Still, religious school officials said this will have an effect.

David Young, the superintendent of schools for the Diocese of Burlington, said the new eligibility requirements “certainly will hurt.” But he specifically took issue with the July 1 deadline imposed by lawmakers around independent school eligibility.

Young said the process around Act 73 feels “in disarray,” and noted that, while Act 73 immediately set requirements around the state’s tuitioning system, many aspects of the law remain unresolved.

As part of Act 73, Vermont’s School Redistricting Task Force has begun work to consolidate Vermont’s 118 school districts, contained within 51 supervisory districts or supervisory unions, into anywhere from 10 to 25 future districts.

“I just feel like it would have been better to say, ‘Let’s be clear on the procedures in the process. Let’s then set the date,'” he said. “If you’re going to draw these lines that encompass some of the larger districts in with others, you probably ought to understand that first before you upset the apple cart a little bit.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont’s new education law signals an end to state funding for religious schools.

Bennington College announced in a social media post Friday it was eliminating 15 staff positions as part of the school’s “ongoing efforts to address budget challenges.”

Ashley Jowett, the director of communications at the college, in a statement called the decision “difficult” but “necessary to place the college on a more sustainable financial path” while ensuring the school’s ability to support returning and incoming students.

“This is a painful moment,” the school’s president, Laura Walker, said in the statement. “Like many peer institutions across the country, we are confronting an uncertain economy and a challenging overall environment for higher education. I remain profoundly grateful to the dedicated staff, past and present, who make Bennington such a singular place.”

The college said it was providing severance proposals to affected employees.

The college employs a total of 90 full-time faculty members and 214 full-time staff members, Jowett said.

The announcement comes just months after the college finalized collective bargaining agreements with three groups that make up Bennington College United. The union is backed by AFT Vermont, an umbrella labor union for higher education and health care workers.

Those agreements increased wages and bonuses for staff and faculty members, and guaranteed tuition exchange and benefits for family of staff, according to previous reporting.

Twelve of the 15 staffers were members of the union and performed work at the school in academic services, institutional research and in the college’s business office.

The union in a statement said members were “very concerned about the ability of the reduced workforce to keep the college functioning and to make sure that students receive the services they need to thrive.”

The union said it has requested information related to the decision “and will be requesting a meeting to discuss alternatives to the layoffs.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Bennington College announces layoffs of 15 staff members.

Dozens of unionized staff and faculty members at the University of Vermont protested on Thursday, demanding an end to an ongoing health insurance audit that union leaders say threatens the sensitive information of their members.

Members of the UVM Staff United, United Academics, and United Electrical unions, which together represent more than 2,500 staff and faculty members, gathered on the steps of the Waterman building, and later marched inside of the university’s executive offices, to express their fears around handing over personal information to a third party company.

In July, the university began asking employees to submit personal documentation, such as birth certificates or marriage certificates, to Willis Towers Watson, a multi-national insurance brokerage company. The university hired the firm to verify whether family members and dependents enrolled on employees’ insurance plans were eligible for health benefits.

The university is paying the company a fee range of $109,000 to $114,000 to conduct the audit, according to Adam White, a public information officer with the university.

If employees fail to complete the verification process, their dependents will be removed from the university’s medical, dental and vision plans, according to information posted on the university’s website.

The audit comes as the University of Vermont, like many institutions and companies in the state, has seen ballooning health insurance costs. The university said on its website that it has a “fiduciary duty” to ensure that plans are only used by employees and dependents who are eligible.

In a statement, Chris Lehman, the chief human resources officer at University of Vermont, said that while the audit “differs from past practices at UVM, it is critical for how the university can care for its employees, as it ensures the integrity and sustainability of its healthcare plans.”

Verifying eligibility, Lehman said, “helps protect all employees by minimizing unnecessary costs and mitigating broader financial risks to employees and the institution” and can “help preserve the university’s capacity to assist those who may be in more vulnerable situations.”

“Employee cooperation strengthens the university’s collective ability to care for every member of its community,” he said.

But members of UVM Staff United, United Academics, and UE Local 267 on Thursday decried the process, and said the university administration was forcing its employees to share sensitive family documents with an “unaccountable” multi-national firm.

The university has not produced evidence of insurance fraud, union members said.

In a press release, union leaders pointed to a data breach that Willis Towers Watson reported in 2023 that compromised individuals’ names and social security numbers.

“We’re talking about sharing our birth certificates, our marriage licenses with a company that’s going to have all of our sensitive information that is not our employer, and is not accountable to us,” said Claire Whitehouse, a co-president of the UVM Staff United.

More than 650 unionized employees, in a survey about the audit, said they had concerns about data privacy. And at the rally on Thursday, members described their fears of handing over sensitive documentation to a company with a history of data breaches.

Ellen Kaye, a member and co-president of the UVM Staff United, described the audit as “harmful and chilling,” and likened the practice to the federal government’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

“The practices of a federal government that is dismantling institutions and firing workers on the premise of getting rid of ‘waste, fraud and abuse’ has come home to Vermont,” she said at the rally.

One employee, whose statement was read anonymously, said they worried about a family member on their insurance plan who was assigned a different gender at birth than is on their documents now.

“If that information gets breached, that could be a problem for that person in this political environment,” Whitehouse said.

Lehman, in a statement, said that the university’s information security office “conducted a thorough review of WTW’s system and approved its use.”

He added that the company “recommends redacting social security numbers from submitted documents, which adds another layer of protection to the process.”

Kaye, Whitehouse and other union members called on the university’s new president, Marlene Tromp, to meet with the unions next week to discuss the audit process in bargaining.

If not, they said they would “take their message to the incoming class of 2029 at convocation,” Kaye said.

“The university wants to review its health insurance options, that’s within its right,” Whitehouse said, “but how it affects employees and its implications are mandatory subjects of bargaining, and we want to bargain how that impacts us.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: UVM faculty and staff unions protest third-party health insurance audit, citing privacy fears.

The Woodstock Union High School and Middle School building is in bad shape. Its HVAC, electrical and sewage systems — products of the mid-1960s — are now well past their useful life, according to school officials.

Sherry Sousa, superintendent of the Mountain Views Supervisory Union that operates the school, said the district “can’t guarantee, based on where our systems are now, that our sewage system is going to work.” 

For those familiar with Vermont’s public education system, this sort of story is hardly new. Districts throughout the state routinely deal with general disrepair and disruption caused by aging school buildings.

Over the years, education officials have pleaded with the state to restart a long-dormant state aid fund for school construction, which previously supported up to 30% of construction costs. But Act 73, the new education reform bill Gov. Phil Scott signed into law last month, is creating optimism among education officials that state aid could begin again.

Mountain Views Supervisory Union officials are banking on that. Last week, members of the school board and central administration announced they would press ahead with a new working committee to oversee plans for a new high school and middle school building under the terms of Act 73.

“We’ve decided that we can’t wait. We have to move forward. We need a new school,” Keri Bristow, the Mountain Views Supervisory Union’s board chair, said in an interview. “We have to do something before we have a catastrophic failure.”

‘Cart before the horse’

Vermont’s new education law seeks to address the state’s “languishing” school infrastructure through implementation of a new state aid for school construction fund. Act 73 provides preliminary rules around what schools could be eligible for state aid, and which projects should be prioritized.

The newly created State Aid for School Construction Advisory Board, set to first meet on or before Sept. 1, according to state Board of Education Chair Jennifer Samuelson, will work with the Agency of Education to further develop and finalize those parameters before the School Construction Aid Special Fund is officially created July 1 next year.

The advisory board is one of the first facets of the new law to get off the ground. The School Redistricting Task Force has already started work to consolidate Vermont’s 118 school districts, contained within 51 supervisory districts or supervisory unions, into anywhere from 10 to 25 future districts. The school construction advisory board will work concurrently with that task force.

David Epstein with the Burlington architecture firm TruexCullins has worked with a number of Vermont’s school districts’ on facilities needs. He called the new framework in Act 73 a “positive sign.”

But he and others have cautioned that while the law sets up a framework for a revived school construction fund, the law does not directly address where funding will come from.

“Until a funding source is identified and the scale of that funding source is understood, it’s hard for me to be too optimistic,” Epstein said.

In a press conference Thursday, Scott said school construction is “going to be very important” once new school district maps are drawn and plans for consolidation are considered by the Legislature.

“That’s an appropriate time to talk about school construction,” he said. “We should be prepared for that, I realize that, but I think we’d be putting the cart before the horse in terms of school construction.”

To bond or not to bond

Vermont’s schools are the second oldest in the country and have continued to depreciate since state lawmakers paused construction aid nearly 20 years ago.

The Agency of Education has previously estimated schools will need upward of $6 billion in infrastructure investment over the next two decades.

“The level of investment has not been keeping up with the needs, and so there’s a tremendous amount of need,” Epstein said.

The disrepair in school facilities has forced districts to try and finance fixes through voter-approved bonds. Last year, the Colchester School District put forward a $115 million bond to modernize its aging schools — which, similar to the Woodstock High School, were built in the mid-20th century.

Colchester residents narrowly approved the bond proposal in November, but other districts that have floated bonds have not had such luck.

In March 2024, residents of the Mountain Views Supervisory Union’s seven member towns voted down a $99 million bond measure — throwing in flux plans to replace the Woodstock High School building.

And in 2021, voters in the member towns of the Harwood Unified Union School District sunk a $59.5 million construction bond. Without voter approval, the district is now stuck using general fund dollars to complete patch work repairs.

“We’re spending a lot of money on capital needs for things that really require wholesale renovation, new construction,” said Michael Leichliter, Harwood supervisory union’s superintendent.

Leichliter said the Harwood school district hired TruexCullins to conduct a review of its buildings, which he said should be completed by the end of August.

The Orleans Central Supervisory Union also hired TruexCullins to conduct a facilities assessment of school buildings. Dan Roock, the chair of the facilities committee there, said the district has $108 million in deferred maintenance across its eight school buildings.

Officials there are hoping to begin a community outreach campaign to gauge willingness for any new renovation projects.

Uncertainty over taxpayers’ appetite for million-dollar bond investments has created a tricky calculation for districts that fear catastrophic failure in their school buildings.

The more they wait, the more expensive repairs will cost, Roock said.

“We know we’ve got to do something,” he said. “We know it’s going to cost a lot of money — even if it’s no new construction, just fixing what we have.”

‘We’ve been patient’

For districts with construction plans in the works, like Orleans Central Supervisory Union, the decision whether to proceed with bond votes has been further complicated by the redistricting process underway.

“Some districts are waiting to see what the new districts are like,” Epstein said. “Some districts want to move forward with projects while they still can, while they still have control of their destiny, so to speak.”

Uncertainty around whether state lawmakers will even fund the new state aid construction fund only complicates that decision.

Sen. Seth Bongartz, D-Bennington, chair of the Senate Education Committee, said there is “a general recognition that we have to figure out a way to help with school construction funding.”

“But there’s also a recognition that, right now with what’s happening nationally, we’re in uncharted waters, and we’re really going to have to see where we are come January and see what kinds of immediate crises we may be facing, or not,” he said.

In the Mountain Views Supervisory Union, officials say they can’t afford to wait any longer.

“I think we’ve been patient, and the board has been really responsible,” Sousa said. “Now, we really have to fill in the gray spaces of Act 73. We want to work with the Agency of Education to fill in that gray space and acknowledge, how does this school district move forward?”

Ethan Weinstein contributed reporting.

Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘We can’t wait’: Vermont school districts seek guidance from new education law as school construction needs compound.

The night before the state’s school redistricting task force met for the first time, more than two dozen school officials from the Northeast Kingdom met to discuss the possible effects of the task force’s work, and how they could advocate for themselves.

The mood was stark at the Thursday night meeting, with many officials expressing resentment for attempts to further consolidate Vermont’s school districts. But the ad hoc group of board members and school officials from the North Country, Essex North and Orleans Central supervisory unions planned to develop a shared plan to try and lobby the task force.

“We do believe that given what’s coming, we may have a chance to influence where things are going,” Praneet Menon, the chair of the North Country Supervisory Union, said during the meeting.

On Friday, the 11-member School Redistricting Task Force had its inaugural meeting, which was mostly procedural. Created under Act 73 to craft new school district boundaries for Vermont’s public education system, the task force, made up of legislators, former superintendents and school officials, went over logistics and laid out what they hoped to accomplish. 

“This is our moment to create significant change that will benefit our children,” Dave Wolk, a former state senator and former president of Castleton University who was appointed to the task force by Gov. Phil Scott, said at the Friday morning meeting.

As the work to overhaul Vermont’s public education system begins in earnest, supervisory unions and school districts are bracing for impact. Some, like the three Northeast Kingdom supervisory unions, are coordinating how to influence that process.

Part of Act 73, Vermont’s sweeping education law passed during this year’s Legislative session, the new task force will work to consolidate Vermont’s 118 school districts — contained within the 51 supervisory districts or supervisory unions — into anywhere from 10 to 25 future districts.

These new larger districts would oversee a minimum of 4,000 prekindergarten through grade 12 students, but no more than 8,000 students “to the extent practical,” according to the law.

The law’s new mandates around class size minimums and consolidations has created anxiety for school districts and their local communities. Rural communities fear the law’s implementation will eventually force the closure of their schools.

“What you’re working on right now has the potential to have a massive impact on the quality of life for young families and children in our state,” Cheryl Charles, the chair of the Windham Northeast Supervisory Union board and the chair of the Rural Schools Community Alliance, said during the Friday task force meeting.

In the Northeast Kingdom, “there’s a lot of concern among our constituents that what they’re suggesting at the state level will not work for us given the rurality of our area,” Menon, who organized the ad hoc committee, said in an interview this week.

The goal, Menon said, is to formulate a unified plan to present to the task force. That could mean devising an in-house consolidation plan among the three supervisory unions to present to the task force. Or to tell the task force they reject the premise of their work altogether.

“Either way we go, I think it is somewhat of a push back, because in one way, we’re saying, ‘Here’s what we want,’ and the other way we’re saying, ‘We don’t want anything that you’re suggesting whatsoever,'” he said. “What we want to do out of this is influence the task force’s end result so that we can carve out something that is favorable to our constituents, our students, and the regional needs of our area.”

“The mentality is, this is coming, and if it is coming, then we might as well try and figure out how we can influence the process,” Menon added.

Tight timeline

The task force is taking on a significant task on an ambitious timeline — about five months to draw up no more than three new possible configurations to the Legislature by Dec. 1.

“We will do the best we can with the time that we have,” Rep. Edye Graning, D-Chittenden-3, said during the task force meeting. Graning, who together with Sen. Martine Gulick, D-Chittenden Central, was named a co-chair of the task force.

The Legislature plans to take up the task force’s recommendations during the next legislative session, but they are not bound to accept their recommendations.

Much of Act 73’s sweeping provisions hinges on the Legislature eventually agreeing to a new map next session during an election year. In the Northeast Kingdom, some officials on the ad hoc committee questioned whether the process will move forward at all.

“There’s a strong possibility that the whole thing just goes away,” said John Castle, a board member with the North Country Supervisory Union and the executive director of the Vermont Rural Education Collaborative.

“Now, I can’t guarantee you that. I don’t know that,” he said during the meeting, “but there’s a part of me that feels like we should be the biggest pain we possibly can be, and join others in the state to be a real pain, to see the whole thing go away.”

There was plenty of skepticism during the task force’s meeting as well. The consolidation proposed under Act 73 would mark the “biggest governance reform in 100-and-something years,” Rebecca Holcombe, D-Windsor Orange-2, said during the meeting.

She was skeptical of the state’s ability to see such a process through.

“It’s pretty clear we are not capable of doing what we already have on our plate,” she said.

Others on the task force expressed optimism that the work over the next five months could help transform Vermont’s struggling public education system.

Jay Badams, recently retired as superintendent of School Administrative Unit 70, said he led his former district through a consolidation effort that “ultimately ended up closing five schools, eliminating 300 teaching positions and cutting central office in half.”

“We saved money by consolidating. We saved significant sums of money,” he said during the task force meeting. “And for us to get better outcomes, to bring equity where I would argue there isn’t right now, or even substantially equal resources for all of our kids, is going to require some hard choices.”

He said the task force should involve the public in the work and be transparent. He also said the task force members will have to “acknowledge that if we’re going to be successful in this work, there will be sacrifices that we’ll be asking some entities to make.”

“I think you as legislators will have tons of pressure from people who will oppose a lot of those ideas,” he said. “But it can be done.”

The redistricting task force has yet to schedule its next meeting.

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier photo caption on this story misidentified the meeting that was taking place.

Read the story on VTDigger here: As the school redistricting task force begins its work, some supervisory unions hope to sway the process.

The Trump administration on Friday announced the release of the remaining $18 million in federal education funding for the Vermont’s Agency of Education and the state’s local school districts.

Vermont Education Secretary Zoie Saunders, in a press release issued on Friday, said the agency will begin their regular process for distributing the funds to school districts on Monday.

The U.S. Department of Education announcement comes less than a month after the agency first announced it was withholding more than $6 billion in funding for six federal grant programs nationwide. The federal government withheld roughly $26 million from Vermont school districts that help fund after-school and summer programs, and English language instruction.

A portion of those dollars also helps fund Vermont’s adult learning centers, institutions which offer residents a path to earn a high school diploma or GED certificate, as well as English language classes and workforce development programs.

In the statement, Saunders called the release of the dollars “a positive development for our most vulnerable students.”

“Vermont school districts will now be equipped to begin the school year knowing they have the resources to staff critical positions and provide the meaningful and tangible opportunities that these dollars represent,” Saunders said. “Vermont schools deserve to have confidence that they will be supported with resources that have been promised.”

The release of the funds ends weeks of uncertainty for the state’s school districts. School board officials set their fiscal year 2026 budgets assuming the federal funding would be in place. Then on June 30 — just hours before the start of the new fiscal year on July 1, when the funds have historically been made available to states — the Trump administration announced they were withholding the money pending a review.

The transfer of the money to the state also brings to an end a brief hiring freeze implemented in the state’s Agency of Education earlier this month. With the federal funding restored, the agency “now has the flexibility to begin hiring for vacant roles,” said agency spokesperson Toren Ballard. 

“Let’s be clear: Today the administration solved a problem of its own making by finally releasing funding for our public schools that it illegally and unconstitutionally withheld,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, said in a release on Friday after the Department of Education’s announcement.

Two weeks after the funding freeze was announced, Attorney General Charity Clark joined 24 other states in a lawsuit against the Trump administration for “unlawfully freezing” those federal funds.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Education announced it was releasing some of the funding allocated for Vermont — roughly $6.5 million — specifically for afterschool programs.

But districts and adult learning centers were kept in limbo, with more than $18 million in funding still withheld. The Winooski School District, for example, relies on those federal funds as a high-poverty district.

Sarah Haven, the director of finance and operations for the Winooski School District, said the district was thankful the funding was being restored and was “once again supporting local budgets.”

“We’re relieved to move forward without disruption and hope that future decisions will protect the stability our educators, students, and families rely on,” Haven said. “We look forward to a wonderful school year.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Trump administration releases remainder of withheld federal funds for Vermont school districts.

BURLINGTON — Marlene Tromp, the University of Vermont’s new president, says she wants to prioritize in-state student enrollment, collaborate with the Legislature and city leadership, and plans to protect academic freedom in the face of the Trump administration.

Tromp, the former president of Boise State University in Idaho, took the reins in Vermont this month at a precarious time for higher education in the country.

President Donald Trump’s administration has targeted universities like Harvard and Columbia, cut federal research funding, and has cracked down on protests on campus.

Many leaders in higher education have resisted, and in June, hundreds of colleges and universities — UVM included — signed on to a letter protesting the “unprecedented government overreach and political interference.” Other institutions, like Dartmouth, have taken a more neutral stance.

Meanwhile, the University of Vermont faces its own challenges internally, including how it manages in-state versus out-of-state enrollment, how it balances its overall enrollment against the realities of the local housing market, and how it manages budget pressures and tuition rates.

In a wide-raging interview, Tromp spoke with VTDigger about these and other issues.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

VTDigger: This year, the university was designated as an R1 institution. But it coincided with the Trump administration’s pausing, terminating and just general disruption of federal research grants. Could you describe what impact that has had on the university thus far and how the university is working around that?

Marlene Tromp: I don’t want to diminish the real impacts that those disruptions have had and the ways in which that can have real impacts on people and on places. The work that was being done with those grants, it could be vital research to health care. It could be vital research in a community. Those kinds of things are real. 

But it’s a really powerful moment — and this is happening now across higher education in the nation — for people to ask the question: Is this a time for us to ask questions about who we should be partnering with in order to make sure that the research that we do, that’s so valuable to the world, is well-funded and continues?

We’re also not being passive in the face of it. We’ve gone and met with folks, met with agencies and really tried to determine how we can work really actively to ensure that we restore as much of that funding as possible. But I think we have to really think carefully about going forward, how we partner, how we make sure that research is funded.

It’s real. It’s serious. We’ve had an awesome response here so far, and we’re looking forward, thinking about how we can get more creative going forward.

VTD: UVM has one of the lowest percentages of new in-state students of any large public university across the country. But last year, the percentage of enrolled in-state students increased for the second year in a row, bucking a longer-term decline in in-state enrollment. Is that a goal of yours, to continue to increase that, and how would you build off of that?

MT: For the (Vermont) students who choose to apply to college, so many of them apply here, and we accept a huge proportion of those students to UVM. But our population is so small that that really affects who comes to school. Even if we’re doing really well, proportionally, if other states were doing as well with in-state students as we were, they’d have a huge range of in-state students.

We’re actually helping to drive the economy by bringing students in from out of state. In fact, one of the most interesting things I’ve learned since I’ve been here is that for every Vermonter that graduates from UVM, two of their out-of-state peers end up staying and working in Vermont. It really helps for a state that has an upside down population (demographically), to drive the economy, and bring it vigor and vitality and new ideas into the state.

But the other part of your question, is that a priority to me? It’s absolutely a priority to me. Vermont and Wyoming are the only two states in the country that have a population smaller than Washington, D.C. The notion that there are talented people around the state who aren’t considering college or who aren’t considering UVM is significant to me.

The UVM Promise is a program that lets any family that has an income under $100,000, their students can basically come to school tuition free, and that means we’re really opening the doors for access. We want to make sure people know about that program.

But at my last institution, I built a lot of programs that were designed to really reach out into the state and make sure that students that were place bound had an opportunity to think about how they could still engage with the university.

While rural college attendance declined by about 50% nationally after the pandemic, we saw a 20% to 50% increase in those communities where we created a program that was about engaging in rural communities. So, I think there are some opportunities here to make sure people know that this is Vermont’s university, and we want those young people to come to school here.

VTD: Overall enrollment is increasing at UVM. But I wanted to ask about a law that was introduced this legislative session that proposed limiting enrollment to UVM when Burlington’s housing vacancy rate is below 5%. What do you think is the university’s responsibility in terms of managing enrollment against the realities of the housing market? How do you balance that?

MT: I do think the university has a responsibility to think about the community. I think it’s intimately connected to the community. I just met with (Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak) this afternoon, and she and I were talking about this very issue.

One of the things that I explained to her, and it’s probably something that you know about, is the demographic cliff. It’s the decline that we’re seeing in the pipeline of people who will age out (of) high school to be able to come to college. That percentage is declining over time, and (the decline is) the most significant in the Northeast.

There’s some states that are continuing to grow, like California, Texas, Arizona, Idaho, and those states are going to see less impact from the demographic cliff, because there’s so much in-migration to those states, but states around the Northeast are seeing actually a lot of out-migration.

We’re actually aiding the economy by bringing people in, but we also want to be really thoughtful to make sure that we have all the resources here that we need to serve the students, and that we’re partnering with the cities that surround us in ways that help us both thrive.

What happens in Burlington and South Burlington impacts the university and vice versa. In my conversation with the mayor today, one of the things we really talked about is, how can we be the kind of partners that help each other thrive. So that feels actually very exciting and positive to me, and less about a kind of adversarial relationship.

I did a lot of projects at my other institutions that were about how partnerships could actually increase housing options. We were partnering with the city of Boise, which was experiencing a lot of the same challenges. We were partnering with the city to think about how we could create projects that helped alleviate the stressors for both the city and the university.

VTD: That bill never made it far, but if it were to proceed, how would the university handle that?

MT: I would really want to talk to legislators to understand exactly what their concerns revolved around. Let’s actually work together and trace out where the concerns are, and think about how we can work together. I think that allows us to be responsive, and as a land grant institution, one of our great commitments is to the state, and to the well-being of the state, so I take that very seriously, and would want to think about: How do we work together to solve the common problems that we have.

VTD: Last year, the university increased tuition on both out-of-state and in-state students, the first time tuition had been increased for in-state students since 2019. University officials cited rising health care costs — like many other institutions in the state — and the school was forced to use reserve funds to fill a $10 million budget gap. Do you expect another budget gap this year, and do you expect to increase tuition again?

MT: I think we’re going to have to get all the data about our class, about what’s happening federally, because, as you noted, that’s a huge factor in how the university will operate. That’s a factor in our budget.

Whenever it’s possible, I don’t want to raise tuition. Nationally, what’s happened in the last couple of decades is states’ dollars, their public money coming into public universities, have decreased because they’ve had to spend money on a lot of other things. A lot of state monies have gone into things like corrections, health care. So, more of that cost is borne by students and their families. I’m very keenly aware of that.

We have to be really sensitive to those costs because we want to ensure that students have access to education. We also want to give them the best quality education that we can, and it is incumbent upon us to be as smart and creative financially as we can be, so that we can find ways to create efficiencies, reduce our own costs, so that we can become more and more efficient, so we’re not passing on the inflationary costs that every entity in the country has experienced.

We saw record inflation and didn’t even raise tuition here during that period of record inflation. It was only when it became absolutely necessary. I have a lot of respect for the people who made those hard choices to keep those tuition dollars flat. I hope we can continue to do that as much as possible, but as all these things are changing and factors are rolling in, we’re going to have to assess that. But we’re going to keep looking for ways to be really efficient.

VTD: UVM is the second largest employer in the state. When you were officially announced, the university was in a hiring freeze. Is the university still in a hiring freeze?

MT: Everything goes back to that first question you asked: Until we have a little more clarity about what’s going to happen with the federal funding dollars, we just want some of the dust to settle. We realize we may not have absolute certainty about what’s happening, but until some of that dust settles, I think it would be premature for us to lift the freeze.

VTD: There’s been some layoffs recently. An op-ed we published written by co-presidents of UVM Staff United — signed by a coalition of unions — called into question about a half dozen layoffs in various departments at the university. Could you respond to that? And maybe speak to the general economic climate around hiring and employment at the university, and where you draw the line in terms of cuts to staff and employees here?

MT: For me the priority is to care for our community in the best way that we can. We don’t want to create a situation where we have some costs that escalate so much that people can’t afford their own health insurance as these costs escalate.

It’s not a dualistic situation, where we either support our employees or we don’t. There’s so many factors, and it matters to me to be in dialogue with our unions and with our staff association and our faculty association, and to really create some transparency around budget issues so people actually have a deep understanding of how the university is making decisions.

Part of the reason it’s important to me to build a strategic plan is so that we’re all on the same page as a community, and understanding what our priorities are, and caring for our community is one of those priorities

I’m really sensitive to those issues, and nobody wants to go through the loss of people’s jobs. It’s hard on them, it’s hard on their families, it’s hard on the larger community outside of the university. But we don’t know what we’re up against. We have some really challenging issues on the national front that are putting a lot of pressure on the university, but I hope we can bring people together in a dialogue to talk about those.

VTD: I asked you this when you were announced as president, but to put it more pointedly, I’m wondering how much the political climate in Idaho motivated you to search for other jobs? And did the political climate of Vermont specifically draw you here and motivate you to pursue this role?

MT: I’m very conscious about how the institution that I served for a long time is implicated in your question. I felt very fortunate to serve there for six years. And I am so grateful to be in a place that cares so deeply about education and believes in education, and I feel so grateful to be in a place where people care about other people as a very high priority.

I feel really excited to be in a place that values public education, that values higher education, and so for me, it’s a thrill to be here. There’s challenges in every environment. I just went and spoke at a program for new university presidents where I was one of the speakers, and one of the questions people asked in a dozen different ways during that session was, help us understand how what you saw can help us understand what’s happening nationally right now.

We have an obligation to really deeply understand and to move nimbly as we move forward, and so I’m grateful to be in a place that’s committed to those kinds of things.

VTD: I did want to bring up some criticism you faced in your previous role, as detailed in a ProPublica story, that you capitulated to pressure from right-wing state lawmakers around DEI policies. Now that you’re here, in a state with a less hostile Legislature, would you operate differently? And what is your stance on DEI policies at the university, considering that that federal threat still looms?

MT: If you look at the period when that story was written, it was when the very first anti-DEI, anti-CRT legislation was being written in the country. And at that time, I don’t think anyone thought that that was a real threat, or that it was something that could really undermine the functioning of a university.

It comes from a specific moment in time, and it was written by somebody who was from a very progressive place, who had never seen those kinds of things happening before. Now, I think everybody in the country understands: We’ve seen universities make changes that people could have never imagined years ago.

We never compromised on serving our students, serving our faculty or serving our staff, and I am so proud of that because it was a very, very challenging period. There were stories circulating about the university, what our motives were, what we were doing, and we worked really hard, because the misconstruction of what we were doing on campus was so damaging to the university. So, we worked really hard to educate people, and we saw a lot of minds changed over those six years about the services that we were providing and the support that we were giving our students, faculty and staff, and the impact that was having.

I am really grateful that now I’m in a place where there’s people who really don’t see the work that we’re doing to serve our community as somehow disadvantaging other people. That’s an amazing context to operate in. But it was tremendously stressful and tremendously hard to face the mischaracterization of our work all the time.

I wish that there was a more rich national conversation right now because I think it becomes so polarizing so quickly, and it took years for us to help communicate with people in Idaho about what we were really doing.

Things have happened so fast nationally. It hasn’t given people a lot of time to even have the practice of having those conversations. But I believe universities are the place where just those kinds of conversations should happen, and so I think there’s a real opportunity, and I think the University of Vermont can be a real national leader in helping people understand how democracy works, what it means to be engaged in serving people, what freedom of expression and academic freedom are, and I think we can take a step up onto the national stage to do that work. That’s one of the things that excites me about the University of Vermont.

VTD: Students last year camped out on campus to protest the conflict in Gaza. How would you handle a similar protest, one that specifically violates university policy? Would you discipline students for that and how would you handle that type of situation?

MT: I can tell you what my philosophies are because I think so much depends on the specifics of what happens. We met with student groups across the university when I was president at my last institution, and we said, ‘We want you to have the opportunity to express your perspectives. We believe in freedom of speech and academic freedom,’ and there were state laws that prohibited some activities, and we wanted to educate them about the state laws because we wanted them to feel safe too.

We also recognize that there can be powerful collisions when people disagree. So one of the things we were very concerned about was making sure people really understood the (state) laws in our case and the policies that we had on campus. We often reached out to make sure that we were communicating those things with people, but we kept a lot of really open dialogue.

VTD: What would your stance or your strategy be if the Trump administration were to attack the University of Vermont?

MT: My priority is to protect academic freedom, freedom of speech, the work of our faculty and staff, and our students.

A lot of times that filters down to individual choices. So for example, does the faculty member think that what they’re doing is so important they need to take a stand? I want to support that.

I want to protect people’s academic freedom to make those choices, and that’s the hill we have to stand on. That’s what makes universities what they are.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Q&A: New UVM President Marlene Tromp on in-state enrollment, staff layoffs and the future of DEI on campus.

The South Burlington School District’s superintendent, Violet Nichols, resigned from her position on Tuesday night following months of pressure from the district’s local teacher’s union, who cited a toxic working relationship between the superintendent’s office and staff. 

The district’s school board received a resignation letter from Nichols on Friday, according to board chair Seamus Abshere. She announced her decision during a special meeting on Tuesday, at which the board voted unanimously to accept the letter. 

Nichols’ resignation, effective Aug. 1, was first reported by The Other Paper. 

“It is with a heavy heart — but with clarity and conviction — that I announce my resignation as superintendent of the South Burlington School District,” said Nichols, who has led the district since 2022, at the public meeting. “It was a privilege to show up every day and to lead this district with professionalism and purpose.”

Her resignation, and the weeks of contentious board meetings that preceded it, underscores what became a deep rift between the district’s administration and the local teachers’ union as the district responded to an increasingly tight budget for the coming school year. 

One of the larger school districts in the state, the portion of state education funding allocated to the Chittenden County district was reduced following Act 127, which made changes to the current funding formula that went into effect last year. The district’s budget restrictions led the school board to cut 15 full-time positions.

The district, meanwhile, remains in open contract negotiations with the teachers’ union, Abshere said.

The South Burlington Educators’ Association said that their grievances do not stem from budget difficulties but rather from Nichols’ leadership and her handling of those challenges. Union officials and staff at board meetings over several months said Nichols created a chaotic and toxic work environment within the district.

The relationship between Nichols and the board spilled into the open in April, when members of the South Burlington Educators’ Association came out en masse to a board meeting to publicly voice their grievances with the district’s leadership.

There, tensions spilled out over two racial discrimination complaints that had been filed against Nichols. An outside investigator was brought in and ultimately determined that no wrongdoing occurred.

Union leadership called for a change in leadership for the district in a press release issued last month, citing a survey of more than 300 teachers and staff members that they said showed educators had a “distrust and fear of district leadership,”

Beth Adreon and Noah Everitt, the co-presidents of the union, wrote in the release that it was “overwhelmingly clear to faculty and staff that we need and want new leadership for our students in South Burlington. It is time for change.”

Everitt, in an interview on Wednesday, noted that when the district has been forced to cut programs in previous years, “it’s been very clearly communicated how we’re going to continue to do this work.”

“In this cycle, it was chaotic at best, including a last minute adoption of a budget that had cuts that nobody had seen,” he said.

Abshere also cited a different survey conducted by the central administration months before the union’s, showing poor morale among staff. Nichols did not share the results with the board until April, he said.

Abshere said that and other performance issues guided the board’s process. He emphasized that the union’s actions did not influence the board’s actions.

Over the last several weeks, Nichols pushed back on criticisms of her tenure. Before her announcement on Tuesday night, she asked the district’s human resources director, Daisymae Brayton, to note that there were no officially recorded grievances filed against her by staff members.

But, after a more than hour-long executive session Tuesday night, Nichols announced she had tendered her resignation, effective Aug. 1.

“I am incredibly proud of the transformative work we’ve accomplished together,” she said.

Board turnover

Nichols’ resignation marks a continuation of what has been a dysfunctional year for the South Burlington School District.

The board’s former chair, Chelsea Tillinghast, resigned from the board in May, just the latest departure in a spate of turnover on the board since Nichols’ tenure began. 

On Monday, Tim Warren, a school board member, announced his resignation in a press release, citing “several months of growing concern about the board’s direction, particularly in its treatment of our superintendent.”

“Over the past several months, the board has devoted a disproportionate amount of time and energy to efforts aimed at removing the superintendent, rather than building a constructive, working relationship,” he wrote. “The majority seems unconcerned with the consequences of this effort or what comes next.”

He added, “This focus has come at a significant cost, not only in legal fees but also in lost time, trust, and progress. As we face pressing matters such as contract negotiations, budget planning, and a looming, seismic change in the education landscape, I consider the board’s continued preoccupation to be a harmful distraction.”

The board now has to fill two vacancies on the seven-member school board, and begin the process to find an interim superintendent with less than two months before the start of the new school year.

During a meeting earlier this month, board members voted to make an amendment to board policy governing that the superintendent “shall not retaliate against or discipline a District employee” for speaking to the board or to central administrative staff.

It appeared to be a direct response to the allegations aired in April. But Nichols alleged the on-the-fly amendment violated open meeting laws, as well as the term of her contract.

Some at Tuesday’s special meeting expressed dismay with the board’s treatment of Nichols in previous meetings. Three former board chairs of the South Burlington School District — including House Rep. Bridget Burkhardt, D-Chittenden — decried what they characterized as unprofessional treatment of the superintendent.

Kate Bailey, former chair of the board, said that holding the special meeting with little notice was “not transparent,” that the board was “coercing our superintendent to follow what you say, instead of the district’s own policies and procedures,” and that it was “pressuring her to resign.”

Tillinghast, the former board chair who resigned in May said that the board was “purposefully colluding with members of staff to fire the superintendent.”

Burkhardt, a former chair of South Burlington’s school board, cast doubt on whether the board was equipped to face challenges ahead “with regards to… changes that are coming from the state level.”

“For this district to move forward and face the challenges it’s going to face, there needs to be collaboration between the board and the superintendent, we need to be moving in the same direction,” she said.

Abshere said during Tuesday’s meeting that the board will begin the process to find Nichols’ replacement in the coming weeks.

Clarification: This story has been updated to provide more detail from the South Burlington school board chair about its review of the superintendent’s job performance.

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story incorrectly implied that the school district’s board initiated an improvement plan for the superintendent in response to unsubstantiated complaints. An improvement plan was initiated for other reasons.

Read the story on VTDigger here: South Burlington School District superintendent resigns following months of pressure from local teachers union.

Vermont’s landmark education bill, signed into law this month, queues up some big changes to the state’s education system in the months and years to come. But one immediate impact is the bill’s effect on private schools, called independent schools under Vermont law.

Those changes, which went into effect on July 1 — the same day Gov. Phil Scott signed Act 73 into law — have left some independent schools and advocates uncertain, and others reeling.

Under the new law, private schools located in the state now have to pass two tests in order to be eligible for public funding. First, they must be physically located in a school district or in a supervisory union — an administrative unit made up of multiple districts — where at least one school district does not operate a public school for some or all grades as of last July.

Second, for a school to remain eligible, students funded by a Vermont public school district during the 2023-24 school year must comprise at least 25% of the student body. (Private therapeutic schools that serve special needs students are exempt from these requirements).

While some independent schools on the margins are waiting for the Vermont Agency of Education to confirm what side of the line they are on, others already know their eligibility status. 

“There’s a large number of schools that, right off the bat, are just out of the mix,” said Oliver Olsen, a former state representative and a lobbyist for the Vermont Independent Schools Association.

The population of publicly-funded students at Vermont’s independent schools make up a minimal percentage of Vermont’s overall kindergarten through 12th-grade population. Although around 9,680 students attended K-12 independent schools in Vermont during the 2022-2023 school year, according to the Vermont Agency of Education — roughly 10.5% of the total K-12 student population that year — only slightly more than one-third of those students, around 3,540, were being paid for by their public school district. 

But the issue took on a large share of attention as the Legislature crafted Act 73 this year. Public school advocates took issue with perceived conflicts of interest among lawmakers with ties to independent schools.

Meanwhile, significant limitations on the use of public funds to pay for private schools were put in place.

Olsen estimates that, under Act 73, more than half of Vermont’s independent schools that were previously eligible for public funding will now no longer be eligible.

As part of a transition mechanism in the legislation, students who were already enrolled, or were accepted to be enrolled in now ineligible independent schools before July 1, will still be eligible to receive public tuition to attend those schools through graduation.

But for future students, options will be limited going forward, Olsen said.

“H.454, now Act 73, results in the biggest reduction in access to independent schools in the history of Vermont’s education system, without question,” he said.

Uncertainty in Bennington

Independent schools have historically served more rural parts of the state that don’t have public schools for certain grades, often in middle school or high school. This dynamic has played an important role in many of the state’s supervisory unions, which function as administrative superstructures that allow otherwise distinct member school districts to share services.

A half dozen independent schools that serve mostly publicly-funded students — St. Johnsbury Academy and Lyndon Institute in the Northeast Kingdom, Thetford Academy and Sharon Academy in the Upper Valley, and Burr & Burton Academy in Manchester, among them — will easily pass both tests in the law.

But other private schools are still unsure whether they will qualify for public funding under Act 73’s new provisions. The state Agency of Education is working to validate enrollment data for the state’s independent schools and the school districts that send students to them.

Education Secretary Zoie Saunders, during a state Board of Education meeting this month, said that the validation process for eligibility remains underway. The agency set a July 28 deadline for schools to certify their 2023-2024 enrollment data with the state.

She noted during the meeting that the effective date for the new eligibility criteria “coincided with the date that this was enacted into law, so that creates a little bit of a challenge.”

Rep. Will Greer, D-Bennington voted against H.454. In an interview last week, Greer said he worried the law does not achieve what the Legislature set out to do — reduce the burden on taxpayers — and may have negative consequences for public and independent schools alike. 

In his district, the Village School of North Bennington will still qualify for the public tuition program, Greer said, but it is uncertain whether the Southshire School or the Hiland Hall School will still qualify under the 25% threshold.

It’s not the only part of the law he’s concerned about: Restricting multiage classrooms to two grade levels for kindergarten through eighth grade — one of the law’s new requirements for public and private schools alike — is certain to negatively impact the Southshire School and the Hiland Hall, Greer said, because they often place students from three grades in the same classroom. 

Many students with learning disabilities benefit from being paired with students with similar skill sets, rather than students who are in the same grade, he said. 

‘Huge impact’

Some schools already know where they stand, including The Grammar School in Putney, a small independent school serving 85 to 95 students in pre-K through 8th grade. 

The school was immediately disqualified by the 25% threshold requirement, said Nick Perry, the head of the school. “It was a non-starter for us,” he said. “It would be nearly impossible for us to reach that 25% threshold.”

While the total population of The Grammar School does not meet the 25% threshold, Perry said it would if just the upper grades were considered, rather than the school’s whole student body. 

Neighboring school districts serving the towns of Vernon, Dover, Grafton and Westminster pay for almost half of the school’s seventh and eighth grade student population every year, he said.

Perry said he has talked to parents from those towns who were looking forward to sending their students to The Grammar School for those grades. But now, those parents have fewer options and do not know if they will be able to afford the tuition without the public funding program, he said. 

The Grammar School aims to accept as many students through their financial aid program as possible, but Perry said he is “projecting a huge impact” on both their budget and school community in the coming years. 

The nearby Putney School, a high school with around 230 students, will also not be able to receive publicly-funded tuition anymore due to the new 25% floor, said head of school Danny O’Brien. There are typically only five to 10 publicly-funded students there every year, he said.

While the school community appreciated having as many Vermont students as possible at the Putney School, the school plans to continue to bring in students from Vermont through need-based financial aid. 

On the other end of the spectrum, the Long Trail School is among the independent schools that will still qualify under the two-prong requirements. The school resides in a district that does not operate a high school — Taconic & Green Regional School District — and had 73% of its student body receiving public tuitioning funds in the 2023-2024 school year, according to Head of School Colin Igoe.

Igoe noted that there are “real problems” that have risen from Vermont’s “byzantine” education funding system. But, he said, the restrictions placed on independent schools do not solve those issues and will have unintended consequences.  

Particularly, Igoe said he is concerned that the requirement for average class size minimums under the education reform legislation could cause a “devastating” impact on students’ educational experience at Long Trail and other independent schools. 

Under the law, an average of at least 10 students per classroom would be required in first grade, 12 students in grades 2 through 5, 15 in grades 6 through 8; and 18 students for grades 9 through 12. 

These class size minimums would take effect in July 2026 for the 2026-27 school year and would apply to both public schools and private schools that receive tuition from public school districts.

Igoe said there is a misconception that independent schools cost taxpayers more. No public funding goes to capital projects, such as building construction or large purchases, for independent schools, he said.

Not only is the public tuitioning program a “drop in the bucket,” Igoe said independent schools serve a “public purpose” for rural communities that don’t have accessible public school options. 

“Independent schools have stepped in to fill the gap where we don’t offer public schools,” Igoe said. “ We shouldn’t want to try to dismantle that because we’re not in competition with public schools.” 

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Hiland Hall School. Because of an editing error, a previous version of this story misnamed the Lyndon Institute.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Independent schools weigh the impact of Vermont’s new education reform law.

The Trump administration last week announced it was releasing a portion of federal funding for local school districts’ afterschool programs that had been withheld earlier this month.

Roughly $6.5 million was made available to local school districts Monday, according to Toren Ballard, a spokesperson for the Vermont’s Agency of Education.

These funds, Ballard said, will provide “integral summer and afterschool programming, and enables students across Vermont to receive engaging, structured support to ensure that they return to school in the fall ready to learn.”

The resumed flow of money offers some relief for both state education officials and local school districts who rely on the funding for staffing and programming.

School districts were left in limbo this month after more than $26 million from six federal grant programs were withheld, including Title IIA and Title IIIA grants, which fund, respectfully, professional development for teachers and staff, and support services for English language learners.

The U.S. Department of Education informed state education officials June 30 it would be conducting a review of several federal grant programs but provided no timeline for when that review would be completed.

School districts around the state had budgets for the 2026 fiscal year, which began July 1, with those federal dollars already built in.

The state’s Agency of Education last week entered into a temporary hiring freeze to protect federally-funded positions at the agency. The agency uses a portion of the blocked federal funds to administer federal programs.

While the release of funds offers some relief for afterschool programs, concerns still remain for other federally funded programs. More than $18 million of congressionally-approved federal education funding for Vermont remains locked up, pending review by the Trump administration.

“Federal education dollars support our most vulnerable students and withholding these funds, even temporarily, disrupts districts’ ability to staff critical positions and provide a wide range of programming,” Ballard said in a statement Monday.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaking at a press conference Monday, said he has had “lengthy” discussions with Education Secretary Linda McMahon since the freeze began. He called the release of funding for afterschool programs a “partial success that will help a lot of struggling school districts.”

“But the truth is that most of the money in those appropriation bills are still being held illegally by the administration,” Sanders said.

Vermont was one of 24 states that last week sued the Trump administration to restore the funding, arguing the freeze was unconstitutional.

The funding pause generated bipartisan backlash in Congress, with senators on both sides of the aisle expressing concern over the impact.

Sanders said the federal government released the $1.3 billion in federal funding for afterschool programs nationwide in part because of that pressure. More than $6 billion was initially frozen by the Trump administration.

In Vermont, those dollars help fund nearly 100 afterschool and summer programs in Vermont that serve 11,000 students, Sanders said.

“Congress clearly and unambiguously passed this education funding and the president signed it into law. The Trump administration has no right to withhold or impound it,” Sanders said in a release issued on Friday.

Alice Finno contributed reporting.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Trump administration partially lifts funding freeze, sends $6.5 million to Vermont schools for afterschool programs.

The Vermont Agency of Education announced Thursday it was implementing a temporary hiring freeze, citing difficulties created by the Trump administration’s recent federal funding pause.

The agency is implementing the freeze “to protect federally funded roles at the agency,” spokesperson Toren Ballard said in a statement. 

“While the agency is aware of other state education agencies that may be preparing to lay off federally funded staff, the agency is thankfully not in this position,” Ballard wrote.

The U.S. Department of Education on June 30 informed state education officials they would be conducting a review of several federal grant programs but provided no timeline for when that review would be completed. Roughly $26 million has since been withheld from Vermont.

Ballard said the agency uses a portion of those federal funds to administer federal programs, and the Trump administration’s freeze “impacts the agency’s budget in addition to denying opportunities to Vermont students.”

The freeze is not expected to affect new roles created by Act 73, the state’s new sweeping education reform bill signed into law earlier this month, Ballard said.

Ballard wrote that Education Secretary Zoie Saunders “is proud of the professionals at the agency who have been ahead of other states in responding to these challenges and supporting the field.”

“The Secretary remains confident in the agency’s continued leadership in delivering quality services and navigating the uncertainty with professionalism,” he wrote.

The pause in federal funding has left school districts and adult learning centers in limbo. Six federal grant programs were affected by the freeze, including Title IIA and Title IIIA grants, which respectively fund professional development for teachers and staff, and support services for English language learners.

In Vermont, the grants for years have helped fund nearly 100 after-school and summer programs, serving more than 10,000 students as well as an array of English language programs.

The Trump administration announced the funding cuts on the evening of June 30, Agency of Education officials said previously, less than 24 hours before the new state fiscal year was set to begin July 1.

On Monday, Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark joined a 24-state lawsuit against the Trump administration accusing them of illegally halting funds for six federal education funding programs previously approved by Congress.

Clark in a press release said the Trump administration “does not have the power to freeze these funds — funds that Vermont schools are counting on.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Agency of Education announces hiring freeze amid federal funding pause.

The State Board of Education heard arguments from a central Vermont school district Wednesday about why its larger size should grant it a greater number of board seats on a shared supervisory union’s governing board. The debate foreshadowed tensions that could broaden in the coming months as state officials work to craft larger, consolidated school districts. 

The political row before the state board pits the Paine Mountain and Echo Valley school districts against each other. Each district serves students from two towns and both are under the umbrella of the Central Vermont Supervisory Union.

Supervisory unions function as administrative superstructures that allow otherwise distinct member school districts to share services. 

In November of last year, a majority of board members in the Paine Mountain district voted to request that the state Board of Education rework the number of seats allotted to each district on the supervisory union’s board to give them a clear majority.

Both districts now have three seats on the union’s six-person board, but officials with the Paine Mountain district argue it should be changed to more accurately represent each district’s overall resident and student population.

The Paine Mountain School District operates four schools for the towns of Northfield and Williamstown, which have an overall resident population of roughly 6,000 and 3,500, respectively. The Echo Valley School District, meanwhile, operates two schools in Washington and Orange. Both towns each have populations of just over 1,000.

Dan Morris, the chair of the Paine Mountain district’s board, told state Board of Education members Wednesday that his district serves 80% of the students in the supervisory union while Echo Valley serves only 20%.

He said the arrangement has created an imbalance in the supervisory union, and in a letter to the state board of education wrote that their current designation “does not provide adequate representation for the students and taxpayers it serves.”

During Wednesday’s meeting, Morris pointed to the supervisory union’s recent hiring of a new superintendent as evidence of the imbalance. The 3-3 voting split on the board, he said, was “unduly magnifying Echo Valley’s voice and diminishing Paine Mountain’s.”

Morris said during the meeting meeting that this, and other issues arising out of the imbalance, were “pretty distressing for people in our two towns.”

He asked the board to consider changing the proportion to a 4-2 split, or adding seats to the board to create a 5-3 split, with the majority of voting members allotted to the Paine Mountain district.

Echo Valley School District officials disagreed. 

In a letter included in the board’s June meeting minutes, Michael Concessi, a current member of both the Central Vermont Supervisory Union and Echo Valley School District boards, wrote to state Board of Education members that Paine Mountain’s proposal sends a clear message that large districts can overpower smaller ones, which could lead to mistrust and threaten collaboration.

On Wednesday, Matthew Flinn, chair of the Central Vermont Supervisory Union board, asked the state board to deny their request.

“This petition is the first of its kind in Vermont. Whatever you decide will set a precedent, not only for supervisory unions statewide, but also for the redistricting committee’s work ahead,” he said.

The State Board of Education moved to deny the Paine Mountain district’s petition. But the issue highlights broader questions around proportional representation as the state will soon begin work to overhaul the educational landscape. While school districts are required to allot representation on governing boards proportionally based on population, the same is not true of supervisory unions. 

The School Redistricting Task Force, the body tasked under H.454 — now Act 73 — plans to meet for the first time within roughly the next two weeks, on or around Aug. 1. The body is charged with designing new school district boundaries for the state’s public education system.

Members on that task force will almost certainly be faced with questions about the role of supervisory unions and how they should be governed as they aim to consolidate Vermont’s 119 school districts — contained within the 52 supervisory districts or supervisory unions — into anywhere from 10 to 25 future districts.

The new education reform law requires at least one of the new district maps the Legislature will consider next year include supervisory unions. Some advocates believe that administrative structure is important to allow private schools to continue educating public school students from communities with which they have historic ties.

While that task force proceeds, the School District Voting Ward Working Group, set to first meet by Oct. 1, will begin creating voting wards for the new school districts as soon as possible — depending on what the task force has accomplished.

That group will eventually make recommendations to the Legislature for how to draw voting districts within each new school district “that are compact, contiguous, and drawn to achieve substantially equal weighting of votes” while meeting other state and federal requirements, according to Act 73.

State Board of Education members pointed to this uncertainty in moving to unanimously deny the Paine Mountain district’s request.

Jennifer Samuelson, chair of the state board, noted after the vote that the upcoming work of the redistricting task force “does give me pause about the board sort of stepping into waters where borders are being shifted in real time, potentially.”

The division highlighted what could be a difficult balancing act for the state’s recently constituted task force crafting new school districts.

In his argument Wednesday, Morris, Paine Mountain district chair, pointed to five other supervisory unions in Vermont that allot board seats to member districts in proportion with student population.

The list includes the Lamoille North Supervisory Union, which Morris said gives 13 seats to the Lamoille North school district, and six seats to the Cambridge School District.

Other districts, including the Bennington-Rutland, Windham Central, Windham Southeast and Windsor Southwest supervisory unions, also allot their members’ board seats based on population, Morris said.

“These examples show that reconstituting the (supervisory union) board to be a more proportionate reflection of the students served would not make our (supervisory union) an outlier,” he said. “Many other (supervisory union’s) already take this same approach.”

This line of thinking goes against the intent of laws governing supervisory unions and supervisory districts, Flinn and other Echo Valley district officials said.

“Equity in representation does not always mean proportionality — it means ensuring that both districts have meaningful input into shared governance,” Dominique LaFond-Copeland, the chair of the Echo Valley district, wrote to the state Board of Education. “In this case, equal representation has yielded effective collaboration and should be preserved.”

Many other Vermont supervisory unions, including the Rutland Northwest, Two Rivers and Windham Northeast supervisory unions, she wrote, maintain equal board representation despite unequal district sizes.

Board members, in discussion, were cautious about making changes to a supervisory union that they said appears to be functioning well — that is, aside from this political squabble.

The board, in its motion, left open the possibility of returning to the request at a later time. But members said now was not the right time for such a change.

“I would hate to do something now and then have to undo a change that we might make just because there’s going to be another change that needs to happen,” state Board of Education member Lyle Jepson said on Wednesday. “That does not make sense to me at all.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: A political row between 2 central Vermont school districts foreshadows challenges ahead for new redistricting task force.

School districts and adult learning centers across Vermont are beginning to feel the impact of the $26 million in federal funding President Donald Trump’s administration is withholding from the state.

The U.S. Department of Education told state education officials on the evening of June 30 — less than 24 hours before the funds were set to be dispersed — that they would be conducting a review of the grant programs. No timeline was given for when that would be completed.

The funding pause was part of a broader freeze by the Trump administration of more than $6 billion nationwide for after-school and summer programs and English language instruction.

Six federal grant programs were affected, including Title IIA and Title IIIA grants, which respectively fund professional development for teachers and staff, and support services for English language learners.

In Vermont, the grants for years have helped fund nearly 100 afterschool and summer programs, serving more than 10,000 students, as well as an array of English language programs, according to the office of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

The abrupt pause in funding has left many school districts in limbo. The announcement, which came just days before the Fourth of July holiday, has sent school officials scrambling to realign their budgets without federal funds.

That is likely to be a tough task for some districts. In the Winooski School District, the funding pause has left a roughly $700,000 budget hole for the high-poverty district, according to the district’s director of finance and operations, Sarah Haven.

The district has primarily used those dollars to fund staff salaries and has signed contracts with its staff through the 2025-26 school year, Haven said.

Because the district is a designated high-poverty district, officials have been able to pool those federal grant dollars together and have primarily tied them to salaries, Haven said.

“The hardest thing about what’s happened here is that this decision came after we had done a lot of financial planning, and we’re caught really off guard,” said Michael Eppolito, the director of curriculum and learning with the Winooski School District.

“We don’t really know what the impact is going to be, other than somebody is going to have to pay for it, particularly because most of this money is tied up in positions that we’ve already agreed that we will pay,” he said.

Eppolito said he expects to cut programming that is not vital.

“We need to start looking anywhere we can to trim things that are not essential,” he said. He pointed to a digital program teachers use to support math and English language arts instruction in the classroom.

Haven said she expects leadership to begin developing an action plan in the coming weeks. Any changes to the district’s budget allocations will need board approval.

She anticipates the district will be able to manage the hit this upcoming school year but said harder decisions may need to be made during next year’s budgeting cycle.

“In the long run it is going to impact the students that have the fewest resources or the most vulnerable students — there’s no doubt that they’re going to be the ones that are hit,” Eppolito said. “And it will be really apparent in Winooski because anything that we cut out is going to affect those kids right away.”

Budget shocks

Other districts took similar hits to their budget. The Essex Westford School District had allocated in its fiscal year 2026 budget more than $400,000 from federal grant funding, according to Mark Holodick, the district’s new superintendent.

“It’s a significant source of funding for us,” he said. “We’ve already had a number of internal meetings. We’re beginning to plan accordingly if these dollars are not released.”

In the Harwood Unified Union District, Superintendent Michael Leichliter said the funding pause is forcing the district to pause professional development programming.

Leichliter said the federal funding pause threatens to exacerbate an already difficult budget climate for school districts in the state.

“We’ve already been in that trim back mode,” he said. “We’re getting to the point where in order to provide basic services, it will be challenging to reduce any further.”

Holodick, likewise, said his district over the past two years has cut $10 million from its budget.

“What I don’t want to see is the mindset shift from the expectation being, ‘We are providing an outstanding education to our students,’ to ‘This is an adequate educational system where we’re getting by,'” he said. “That worries me greatly with the way we’re chipping away at our budget and resources for our students and families.”

‘Wait and see’

Local school districts are not the only organizations that are affected. The grant money also helped fund adult learning centers, institutions which offer residents a path to earn a high school diploma or GED, as well as offer English language classes and workforce development programs.

Tara Brooks, the head of VT Adult Learning, which runs adult learning services in seven counties throughout the state, said the funding pause will “drastically impact our ability to serve students.”

Her organization last year served nearly 1,500 residents, helping some earn their GED or bolster their English language skills.

Brooks estimated the pause will amount to a nearly $500,000 hit to her organization. If the funds are not released, she said she will have to cut staffing.

“There’s no way around it,” she said. “We already have wait lists for a lot of our bigger locations, so in Chittenden and in and some of our southern locations … it’s only going to increase the wait lists that we have if we have to reduce staff.”

Sean-Marie Oller, who operates The Tutorial Center in Bennington County, said the roughly $36,000 cut to her organization means she will have to cut back on night classes.

“We will continue to do the work with what we have, but I’m cutting people’s hours back, I’m cutting two classes that would be in the evening,” Oller said. “Things like that impact people directly.”

The Vermont Agency of Education has yet to hear from federal officials since their decision last week, according to Toren Ballard, a spokesperson for the agency.

Ballard said the agency is “closely coordinating with the governor, the attorney general and our congressional delegation on next steps, as well as continuing to provide intensive support to school districts.”

It’s unclear what the Trump administration will ultimately decide about the funds. Similar federal funding cuts in other sectors have resulted in litigation against the federal government.

Sanders wrote to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought last week, demanding they immediately reverse what he called “their illegal and unconstitutional decision” to withhold those funds.

“Your unexpected and cruel decision has sent shockwaves, distress and heartbreak in local communities all over America who now may be forced to cancel or substantially delay summer school activities that had been planned for months,” Sanders wrote.

“Further, your illegal actions have denied teachers the funding they rely on for professional development,” he added. “Important services for English learners have been halted. Thousands of school principals, superintendents, and school board members may be forced to lay off dedicated staff. And school district budgets in every State and community have been negatively impacted. That is beyond unacceptable.”

Patrick Barham, a spokesperson for Sanders, said they have not gotten a response to their letter.

Some are holding out hope that the funds will be released. Brooks said her organization is “in a wait and see mentality.”

“We’re trying not to knee-jerk react to the news yet,” she said.

Catherine Kalkstein, the head of Central VT Adult Education, which serves Washington, Orange and Lamoille counties, said her organization is relying on reserve funds in the meantime.

“We don’t want to impact our students in any negative way and disrupt the services that we’re currently providing,” she said. “We don’t know whether these cuts are going to stick.”

“But,” Kalkstein added, “it’s not something we can continue to do long term.”

Holodick hoped that officials at the federal level would “come to their senses and release this funding — not just for kids in Essex Westford, or Vermont, but for the students across this country right now.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Sean-Marie Oller’s name.

Read the story on VTDigger here: School districts and adult learning centers are feeling the impacts of the Trump administration’s funding pause.

Legislative leaders have appointed 11 lawmakers and education officials to the School Redistricting Task Force to craft new school district boundaries for Vermont’s public education system.

The task force was created by H.454, now called Act 73, the sweeping education reform bill that Gov. Phil Scott signed into law this month. Six lawmakers and five former superintendents and school business managers have been appointed to the task force.

The appointees plan to work to consolidate Vermont’s 119 school districts — contained within the 52 supervisory districts or supervisory unions — into anywhere from 10 to 25 future districts.

These new larger districts would oversee a minimum of 4,000 prekindergarten through grade 12 students, but no more than 8,000 students “to the extent practical,” according to the law.

Three lawmakers and two former school officials were nominated by Senate and House leadership, while one member was appointed by Scott.

One day after signing the education reform bill into law, Scott appointed Dave Wolk, the former state senator and the longtime president of Castleton University, to serve as his lone appointee on the task force.

Wolk has previously served as a principal at both Barstow Memorial School and Rutland High School, and the superintendent of schools in Rutland City.

Scott said in a press release that Wolk’s experience in education and the Legislature “will bring an important perspective to this work and will prioritize what’s best for our kids.”

Wolk said in the release that he plans to “approach the Task Force with an open mind, knowing that the results of the endeavor are not likely to be popular or widely embraced across the state.”

“But it is important work, with a short timeline, and it must be done thoughtfully, with a focus on what is best for all of our students and educators, as well as Vermont taxpayers,” Wolk said. “It will be very challenging but very necessary, for the benefit of Vermont.”

This week, leadership from the House and Senate announced their own picks.

The Senate Committee on Committees — composed of Sens. Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, and Ginny Lyons, D-Chittenden Southeast, along with Republican Lt. Gov. John Rodgers — appointed Dr. Jennifer Botzojorns, a retired superintendent for the Kingdom East School District, and Chris Locarno, a retired director of finance and facilities for the Central Vermont Supervisory Union.

Senate leadership also appointed Sens. Scott Beck, R-Caledonia; Martine Gulick, D-Chittenden Central; and Wendy Harrison, D-Windham to the task force.

“I look forward to working with colleagues to create an educational landscape that is right-sized and provides equity within a thriving public education system,” Gulick said.

Beck, the Republican minority leader, was one of three senators who along with three House members helped craft the final contours of H.454 before being sent to Scott.

He’s drawn the ire from public education advocates for his association with private schools, called independent schools under state law. (Beck is a teacher at St. Johnsbury Academy).

Last month, Beck and Sen. Seth Bongartz were accused in ethics complaints of using their positions to advance provisions that benefited the private schools they are associated with.

In a press release, Beck said he was looking forward to “this important work and providing Vermont students from all corners of Vermont with an excellent education.”

On Tuesday, House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, announced her appointment of Reps. Edye Graning, D-Chittenden-3; Beth Quimby, R-Caledonia-2; and Rebecca Holcombe, D-Windsor Orange-2, to the task force.

Krowinski also appointed Jay Badams, a former superintendent, and Kim Gleason, a former school board member.

Krowsinki, announcing her appointments in a press release, said the task force “is an important step in building a public education system that is more equitable, more sustainable and more responsive to the needs of students and communities.”

Gleason, a former member of the State Board of Education, said she was grateful for the opportunity “to represent the important voices of school boards in governance and community engagement as these systemic changes in the Vermont education landscape are being considered.”

During its first meeting later this summer, the task force plans to select two co-chairs from among its members — one from the House and one from the Senate.

The body is then expected to finalize and deliver new school district maps to the Legislature by Dec. 1. Lawmakers then expect to take up the new maps for consideration during next year’s session, which begins in January.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Legislative leaders appoint 11 lawmakers and education officials to school redistricting task force.

Aidan Pearl, 22, graduated in May from Champlain College with an undergraduate degree in law. He’ll be one of the last cohorts of students to graduate from the school through that program.

In June last year, the private, non-profit school began phasing out five majors — law, broadcast media production, data analytics, finance and accounting — announcing then that students would no longer be admitted for those majors beginning this upcoming fall, according to Nicole Junas, the chief executive of Junapr, a public relations firm working with Champlain College.

The move is part of a broader strategy by the Burlington-based school to design a new “career-focused” curriculum for the fall of 2026 “that is focused on and driven by employer needs and student interests,” according to a fact sheet provided to VTDigger by the college.

That effort includes redesigning the school’s 27 majors and streamlining academic offerings by merging or phasing out programs with lower enrollment numbers, according to Alex Hernandez, the college’s president.

The accounting program, for instance, saw its enrollment decline from 60 students in 2015 to 20 in February 2024, according to documents from the school’s Academic Affairs Committee. The law program, similarly, had little student interest, Hernandez said, and had only three students apply in the fall of 2023, while the data analytics program had only two applications.

“Our majors evolve over time to meet the needs of Vermont, to meet the needs of our students,” Hernandez said in an interview. “And so we’re really looking at, where are there career opportunities?”

The adjustments to curriculum, the school wrote in a fact sheet, “are not about reducing academic opportunities,” but are “about modernizing how Champlain delivers education in ways that preserve the college’s distinctive strengths while creating more room for student agency, innovation, and adaptability.”

But students who have either recently graduated, or who remain in programs being phased out, fear for the school’s future, and said the administration is playing down their impact.

As part of the college’s restructuring last year, a “very small number” of faculty members were eliminated, said Junas, the public relations executive. The college could not comment beyond that, she said, citing “individual personnel matters.” She noted though that “no widespread layoffs occurred as a result of the program phase-outs.”

Still, that has caused some consternation among the students still enrolled in the college’s accounting program and others being eliminated. (Students still enrolled in those programs will graduate with a degree).

Pearl, who served as the head of the college’s student government before graduating, estimated that 12 people were laid off, while 20 additional staff members and faculty left on their own.

“My worry is, whatever the direction is, whatever the efficacy of that plan is, we are losing people along the way that would execute that plan,” Pearl said in an interview. “I truthfully think the direction we’re going in is going to lead to the doors closing.”

‘Social capital risk’

The changes at Champlain College come as small, private colleges and universities across the country are facing tremendous financial pressures. Responding to declining enrollment and increased operating costs post-Covid, many schools have been forced to cut programs and staff, or close altogether.

Champlain College is no different. Enrollment numbers reported at the start of the school’s fall semesters have steadily declined since 2016. That year, the school enrolled 4,778 graduate and undergraduate students at the beginning of its fall semester, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

By fall 2023, enrollment had dropped to 3,328 students, down more than 30% from 2016. This past school year, the school saw this trend continue, with roughly 3,200 undergrad and grad students enrolled in the fall of 2024, according to the college’s fact book for the 2024-25 school year.

The college’s finances, meanwhile, are facing headwinds. The school ran budget deficits in 2023, 2021 and 2019, according to publicly available tax forms filed by the non-profit.

A more than $60 million bond the school issued in 2016 to refinance its debt — and to finance the construction of the Eagles Landing student housing project on Burlington’s St. Paul Street — has weighed on the college’s cash flow.

A federal audit of the school’s finances in 2023, conducted because the school was a recipient of federal grant money, found the college was “not in compliance” with a minimum debt service coverage ratio — meant to measure whether an organization has enough cash flow to pay its debts.

The college corrected course in 2024 after bringing on a consultant, a federal audit conducted in 2024 noted. But earlier this year in May, the college’s bond rating was lowered, and its outlook downgraded to “negative” by S&P Global Ratings, which cited “the college’s history of significant enrollment declines” in its analysis.

The ratings agency noted in their report there was a “social capital risk, as fewer graduating high school students expected in the region” may continue to put pressure on the college’s enrollment expectations. 

Their negative outlook “reflects our expectation that as both enrollment and operations remain pressured,” the school will have to draw from its endowment or reserve funds, “further worsening financial resource ratios” compared to the college’s peers, the ratings agency wrote.

Hernandez, the college’s president, remains optimistic, and said the school has been “really strategic and worked really hard to improve our finances over the last couple of years.”

While 990 tax filings are not yet available for 2024, Hernandez said the college “made an important step forward in 2024” to improve the school’s financial health.

“We expect to do that again in 2025,” he said.

‘Growing our community’

The school’s recent reorganization is meant to lean in on the school’s strengths, Hernandez said. While several programs are being phased out, Hernandez said schools are being “redesigned” to offer a more fluid education for students.

The college now offers 27 different majors for its on-campus students, Junas said, while more than 130 degree and certificate programs are available through both the school’s in-person curriculum and through Champlain College Online, which Hernandez noted has seen growing enrollment in recent years.

Hernandez said there was a “natural evolution” of adding, redesigning or stopping programs.

Hernandez, who teaches entrepreneurship in the college’s Robert P. Stiller School of Business, noted that while an accounting program is no longer available, students are still offered accounting classes through the school’s new Business Administration major.

“We’re moving towards a more flexible approach to our business programs, where you can study things like entrepreneurship, finance, accounting underneath a broad business umbrella,” Hernandez said. “It’s just a different strategy.”

The college has added programs in years past, including an animation and sonic arts program, Hernandez said. The school’s Game Design major has been ranked by The Princeton Review as one of the top ten Game Design programs in the country, alongside institutions like the University of Southern California and New York University.

Champlain College was also one of the first in the country to offer an undergraduate cybersecurity major, Hernandez said, which has since been nationally designated by the National Center of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity and by the National Security Agency, according to the school’s website.

“Part of growing our community, growing our enrollment on the on-campus side, is really driven by this new curriculum and the vision for what experiential, hands-on, flexible learning looks like in this world of AI, in this world where students need experience when they go out into the job market,” he said.

He added that, “more than anything, we’re just trying to stay focused on, how does higher education, how can Champlain College, evolve to meet the moment that we’re in knowing that there’s a lot of challenges right now for the sector.”

But amid these trends, students and faculty members who spoke to VTDigger say they are uncertain of the college’s strategy.

With fewer professors and academics on staff, some fear it will lead to a worsening educational quality, which could further compound declines in enrollment.

One student, still in the college’s business school who requested anonymity to speak candidly out of fear of retaliation, said the college has relied increasingly on adjunct professors since faculty from the school were let go. The quality of teaching they’ve brought in, the student said, “has not been up to the standard it should be.”

“It’s not prepping people for what they need,” they said. “They have said that they are going to give us the same quality of education that we’ve had in the past — which I think that most people would agree that it hasn’t been.”

Pearl said the changes were not effectively communicated to the broader community, and the cuts to programs in 2024 led to worries among the student body.

“At that time, students were finding out about the layoffs and the departures, because those faculty and staff were messaging students and saying, ‘Hey, I’m leaving,'” he said. “The correspondence we got was very much not aligned with the severity of what was going on. Most students didn’t learn of the full extent of the layoffs until the fall.”

Hernandez and Junas pushed back on that criticism. A fact sheet provided to VTDigger stated the college “communicated its academic program adjustments clearly and directly to the campus community in June 2024, with specific outreach to students enrolled in affected majors.”

‘Climate of uncertainty’

Faculty members also expressed concern the college was not fully committed to its existing programs and faculty members.

According to records and minutes of the school’s Academic Affairs Committee obtained by VTDigger, some in the college were hesitant to eliminate a program like accounting. While the committee ultimately voted to approve the discontinuance, concerns remained.

“The thought of having a named business school without offering an accounting major may have negative effects on the school overall,” the committee wrote. “Given the evidence, and the college’s need to boost enrollment, this seems like a major that the college may want to invest in rather than cut.

“However, given the curricular transition that the college is currently experiencing, that opportunity may not fit the direction the college has chosen to pursue,” the committee wrote. “In such a climate of uncertainty, this was a very difficult decision for this committee.”

One former faculty member, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said it was disconcerting to see “programs that had been there for a while, people who had been there for a while, sort of just being cast aside.”

Pearl said he agreed broadly the school should tighten its belts amid declining enrollment. “I will not defend that the law program should have stayed. The law program was declining,” he said.

But he worried programs with high career success rates, like accounting, were being eliminated. 

“We let good programs die that truthfully, had we put more investment into them, I think would have done the college a lot of good,” he said.

Hernandez disagreed, telling VTDigger that 90% of students who leave Champlain College “are employed or have a successful career outcome within six months of graduation,” while over 80% of students take jobs in the fields they studied.

But “if we don’t have enough students for a program, it’s challenging to run a program,” he said.

Hernandez is confident in the college’s ability to transform and “to really meet the moment that we’re in right now.”

“It’s no secret that higher education as a sector is experiencing a lot of different challenges,” he said. “We’ve been really intentional and strategic around that — we’re designing a new curriculum right now that is intended to be even more experiential, even more flexible.”

But faculty members worry that with fewer programs, declines in enrollment may only continue.

“You have to bring in a certain critical mass of students,” said another former faculty member who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. “And if those students aren’t there to bring in, you start running in the red.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Facing declining enrollment and financial headwinds, Burlington’s Champlain College reshapes its academic programs.

The Trump administration announced this week it was withholding $26 million in federal grant funding to Vermont’s public schools, part of a broader freeze of more than $6 billion nationwide for after-school and summer programs and English language instruction.

Funds for these programs were supposed to be distributed on July 1. But the U.S. Department of Education alerted the state Agency of Education they were holding the funds back “on the evening of June 30,” according to a press release by the Agency of Education.

The federal department told state education officials they will conduct a review of the programs, but did not provide a timeline for when that would be completed, according to the agency’s press release.

The abrupt pause in funding will likely disrupt local school districts’ operations. Those federal funds are built into local districts’ budgets for the 2025-26 school year, according to the release.

Vermont Secretary of Education Zoie Saunders said in the release the decision to withhold these funds, “disrupts districts’ ability to staff critical positions and provide a wide range of programming, including efforts to reduce chronic absenteeism and improve literacy outcomes.”

“This decision also contributes to a culture of uncertainty that takes away from the important work our schools need to focus on to support our students,” Saunders said.

Six federal grant programs were affected by the funding pause, according to the Agency of Education, including programs to provide instructional and support services to migrant children and their families.

The funds supported the University of Vermont-run Vermont Migrant Education Program that serves children who have relocated alone or with their families to obtain seasonal or temporary employment in agriculture, the Agency of Education release said.

Another program has supported instructional services and supports within school districts for English language learners. Those grant dollars were used to fund multilingual liaisons to help families integrate into their schools and communities through summer school and after-school English language services.

Other federally funded programs helped finance mentoring programs and professional development for teachers. The state agency said in its release the programs were “essential to improving academic outcomes as well as supporting the retention of effective educators.”

Another program supported programming for mental health services, which the state agency said was critical to reducing chronic absenteeism.

The Agency of Education said it was “actively working with districts to mitigate the impact of this decision by conducting outreach and providing one-on-one intensive support to the field.”

“The Agency is proud of the critical investments that Vermont public schools have made using these federal funds and will continue to support districts in navigating the uncertainty in the federal funding landscape,” the agency said in its release.

Read the story on VTDigger here: US Department of Education withholds millions in funding for Vermont school districts.

Gov. Phil Scott on Tuesday signed a landmark education reform bill into law, laying the groundwork for a historic transformation of Vermont’s public education system.

“While this session was long and difficult and uncomfortable for some, we were able to come together and chart a path towards a system that better serves our kids and one that taxpayers can afford,” Scott said, surrounded by top legislative leaders and other dignitaries, before signing the bill.

He noted, however, that the legislation was “just the beginning,” and work to continue public education reform in future legislative sessions “will be just as difficult and just as important as what we did this spring.”

The signing marks a significant political milestone for the Republican governor, now in his fifth term, who used electoral gains in the state’s Republican Party in November to set the tone for education reform. While the ambitious plan that Education Secretary Zoie Saunders set before lawmakers in January was not adopted wholecloth, what came to Scott’s desk contained similar elements.

Over months of contentious debate this session inside committee rooms and both chambers, Scott put pressure on the Legislature’s Democratic leaders to press on with reforms he wanted, even through deep disagreement within their own caucus.

But lawmakers at the signing lauded what they called a bipartisan achievement. 

Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, said the legislation that emerged “was a substantially bipartisan bill.” House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, called it the “most significant education transformation” in decades. And Rep. Peter Conlon, D-Cornwall, said the bill will “ensure that every Vermont student will have access to high quality public education regardless of where they live.”

The law comes as the state’s public education system faces declining enrollment. The bill states that over the last three decades, the number of students being educated in the public school system has dropped by almost a quarter, from around 110,000 students to approximately 84,000 students. 

“Many schools have lost a significant number of students and, with them, the ability to offer robust services and programs at every school,” the bill’s preamble reads. “Vermont’s youth need to be prepared for a rapidly evolving future.”

Lawmakers went into overtime to get a bill passed this session at Scott’s insistence, working weeks past the Legislature’s typical end date to get the bill over the finish line. The governor went so far as to tell lawmakers that if they adjourned without a major overhaul bill, he would use his emergency power to call them back into session.

Votes in the Senate and House were far from unanimous. Most of the Senate’s Democratic caucus members voted against its passing. The bill then passed the House via a controversial voice vote.

Broadly, the new law tries to achieve two goals: equalize educational opportunities across the state, and, over time, make public education more affordable for taxpayers.

Supporters of the legislation have said the law’s changes will slow the rise of education costs and stabilize property tax increases, which were exacerbated in 2024 by changes to the current education finance system and the transition mechanism for them that the Legislature put in place.

But, as the governor noted, the wide-ranging reforms laid out in the bill are far from guaranteed, and the work is hardly over. 

“There’s so much work to do that I can’t even see the finish line,” Senate Minority Leader Scott Beck, R-Caledonia, said at the signing ceremony on Tuesday.

The law contains several caveats and contingencies, and will require years of work by state agencies — particularly the Agency of Education and the Department of Taxes — and various advisory committees and working groups before the transition is complete.

Specifically, several dominos need to fall before the Legislature can enact a new education funding formula, which itself will be phased in over a five-year period and, like many of the biggest reforms, would not begin to go into effect until 2028 or beyond.

However, right away, the law puts limits on Vermont’s longstanding practice of public school districts paying tuition to send students to private schools (called independent schools in Vermont law). Starting July 1, out-of-state private schools will no longer be eligible to receive public tuition for new students. Public schools in other states will remain an option. 

Private schools located in the state will have to meet two tests to maintain their participation. First, they must be physically located in a school district or in a supervisory union — an administrative unit made up of multiple districts — where at least one district does not operate a public school for some or all grades as of last July. 

Second, they will need to have at least 25% of the student body composed of students funded by a public school district during the 2023-24 school year. 

A spokesperson for the Agency of Education said the state is working to validate enrollment data for these schools, and has set a July 28 deadline for independent schools to certify their enrollment.

“Once we have those numbers validated, we will have a clearer picture of how many schools will no longer be eligible to receive public tuition,” said Lindsey Hodges, an agency spokesperson.

A transition written into the law requires public school districts to continue paying for current students, or students who have already been accepted through graduation.

Now, the next step for a select group of lawmakers is to craft the proposed boundaries of new, larger school districts. Their colleagues must then approve a proposal next year, sure to be a contentious undertaking. 

“At the end of the day, we will have another vote next year to continue this effort, so people will have a chance to speak with their representatives, and the entire process will begin over again,” Baruth said Tuesday.

If lawmakers cannot come to an agreement on those maps, the rest of the law’s provisions likely won’t see the light of day.

Here’s what will happen next now that Scott has signed H.454 into law.

Redistricting

The next step for lawmakers is to adopt a new configuration of school districts by consolidating the state’s 119 school districts — contained within the 52 supervisory districts or supervisory unions.

The School District Redistricting Task Force, expected to meet “on or before” Aug. 1 this year, will work on “not more than three” options for new school district boundaries, according to the law.

The task force will have 11 members, including six lawmakers and five former superintendents and school business managers, according to the law. To compose the six lawmakers, three will be nominated by the leadership of each chamber and cannot all be from the same party nor same school district. Of the five others, two each will be nominated by leaders of the Senate and the House, with one nominated by the governor. 

The group is expected to bring back plans with anywhere from 10 to 25 future districts. At least one of those options will incorporate the supervisory unions and supervisory district structure, which advocates believe are required to allow for the continuation of historic tuitioning relationships between certain independent schools and specific geographic areas without an operating public school for at least some grades.

These new larger districts would oversee a minimum of 4,000 prekindergarten through grade 12 students, but no more than 8,000 students “to the extent practical,” according to the law.

That directive is likely to bring major upheaval to Vermont’s public schools. Currently, only the Champlain Valley School District in Chittenden County has more than 4,000 students, with other larger districts, like Burlington and Essex-Westford in Chittenden County, hovering around 3,500 students.

The new law mandates that the task force “work closely” with the Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont, created as part of 2024’s Act 183 to study Vermont’s public education system.

The commission is tasked with conducting public outreach sessions, and making recommendations to the Legislature about what roles and powers should remain at the local school district level versus what should be moved up to the state level.

But that commission has floundered since January, when Scott and Saunders released their education proposal. And last week, two members of the commission resigned, saying in emails to colleagues that the commission was “never fully embraced” by the Legislature.

The commission will submit its final report in December, and will then dissolve by the end of the year.

The redistricting task force, meanwhile, is expected to finalize and deliver new school district maps to the Legislature by Dec. 1. Lawmakers will then take up the new maps for consideration during next year’s session, which begins in January. 

Because of the time needed to create representative voting districts for school boards within the new districts, their boundaries would need to be approved and signed into law before the end of the year for the rest of the timeline to remain viable. 

Class size minimums

Under the law, at least 10 students per classroom would be required in first grade, 12 students in grades 2 through 5, 15 in grades 6 through 8; and 18 students for grades 9 through 12. These class size minimums would take effect in July 2026 for the 2026-27 school year and would apply to both public schools and private schools that receive tuition from public school districts.

Some classes and programs would be exempt from those requirements, including prekindergarten and kindergarten, as well as Advanced Placement courses and career and technical education programs, according to the law.

The law allows the State Board of Education to close a school that doesn’t meet these minimums after three years, but the board isn’t required to do that, and the bill allows for a waiver process that would let schools petition for an exemption.

The law does anticipate that small rural schools will continue to exist and reserves some support for them. By Dec. 1, the State Board of Education, per the law, will submit a written report to the House and Senate Committees on Education with proposed standards for schools to be deemed “small by necessity” or “sparse by necessity.” 

Districts with schools meeting those definitions would be eligible for additional support funds.

New school board elections

While the redistricting task force begins its work, the School District Voting Ward Working Group, set to first meet by Oct. 1, will keep an eye on its progress. The law requires the group to consult with the task force by Oct. 15.

That working group will begin creating voting wards for the new districts as soon as possible, depending on what’s been accomplished.

Chaired by the secretary of state, the group, like the redistricting task force, will make recommendations to the Legislature for how to draw voting districts within each new school district “that are compact, contiguous, and drawn to achieve substantially equal weighting of votes” while meeting other state and federal requirements.

The group will recommend to the Legislature the “optimal” number of members on each new board, as well as the boundaries for voting wards within each new school district.

The first school board elections for the new districts are expected to take place in a special election in November 2027, according to the law. The new school districts, with their new board members, would then take over operating schools in July 2028 for the 2028-29 school year.

The law provides staffing and resources to the Agency of Education and State Board of Education to help guide current school districts as they transition their operations to the newly formed districts. That will involve a myriad of legal and administrative tasks, ranging from a new district adopting shared rules and procedures to taking over a former district’s debt obligations.

Prior to the transfer of school operations, the law will also attempt to address one of the more significant expenses affecting local school districts: aging school infrastructure and its cost to repair or replace.

The law creates the State Aid for School Construction Advisory Board, expected to meet in September of this year, to advise the Agency of Education and both current and new school districts on state financial assistance with construction.

That board would work to develop rules for accessing the School Construction Aid Special Fund, which the Agency of Education will administer once the fund is created on July 1, 2026. The law anticipates that the agency’s annual budget request will include the fund’s expected spending. 

Education finance

One of the more contentious issues the bill hopes to address is how to allocate funding for public education in the state.

The new law has the state gradually pivoting away from its current funding mechanism — which allows school districts wide latitude in determining how much to spend or not spend — toward a so-called foundation formula, a construct used in most states across the country.  A foundation formula will provide each school district with the same amount per student, weighted to account for the increased costs of educating certain students, such as English learners and students with disabilities. 

Effectively, while school district governing boards would likely still set a budget, the foundation formula would largely give the state control over the size of that budget, and how much the district spends on each type of student.

Full implementation of the new funding formula, however, will not occur for some time. If new school districts are adopted and specific studies completed, the foundation formula would go online July 1, 2028, and would be phased in over a five-year period.

Local districts could raise additional funds from local property taxpayers with voter approval. But that spending, termed supplemental spending, would start out capped at just 10%, though districts can spend less. That cap would be ratcheted down every year until the cap hits 5%. 

The first opportunity voters would have to weigh in on that supplemental spending would be likely in March 2028. 

Phase in

Under the law’s timeline, the commissioner of taxes would call the first meeting of the Education Fund Advisory Committee in July 2026 to assist in the “transformation” of Vermont’s education finance system. Recommendations on specifics related to the mechanics would then be due in December of that year.

The Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Office would have already found one or more contractors with “expertise in Vermont’s education funding system” to study a number of portions of the new formula and submit a report due in December 2026.

During this phase-in period, the Vermont Department of Taxes is tasked with leading a shift in the state’s mechanism for income-sensitive property tax relief, moving from one based on tax credits to a tax exemption.

The new framework allows Vermonters making $115,000 or less to exempt a portion of the value of their homestead, which is a dwelling occupied year round and up to two surrounding acres, from property taxes. 

The exemption creates a sliding scale, with lower-income homeowners eligible for bigger exemptions. Up to $425,000 in home value is eligible for the discount. The law suggests there will be a mechanism for the income threshold and property value threshold to be increased in the future to account for inflation, requiring reports from the department on how to do it.

By Dec. 15, 2026, the tax department, in consultation with the Joint Fiscal Office, will submit a proposal to legislative committees in both chambers on how to design a homestead exemption structure that minimizes the property tax impacts for homestead property owners and avoids a sudden dropoff in eligibility often called “benefit cliffs.”

By the same time the following year, Dec. 15, 2027, the department, in consultation with the Joint Fiscal Office and the Agency of Education, will report to House and Senate lawmakers on an implementation plan “to ensure that education property tax rates do not increase as part of the transition.”

Separate rate for second homes

Perhaps the most uncertain portion of the law is a proposal to rework how second homes are taxed in the state.

The law creates two new categories of property for taxation purposes. One is called “non-homestead residential” property. Lawmakers hope to use this new classification to raise taxes on second homes, which would potentially cover the cost of the homestead exemptions or otherwise alleviate property tax pressure on Vermont resident homeowners. Another new category of “nonhomestead nonresidential” would apply to other properties.

The tax department is tasked with reporting by Dec. 15 of this year on how the new property tax classifications would be implemented. In 2027, the department would need to develop a form that allows property owners to report how their property fits into the classifications. 

However, the new classifications would also be repealed if the Legislature has not approved a new school district map by Jan. 1, 2027. Another deadline is July 1, 2028. By then, lawmakers need to have assigned different tax rate multipliers to the new categories of property or they also go away. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Gov. Phil Scott has signed Vermont’s education bill into law. Here’s what happens next..

Updated 2:31

Ethics complaints filed with the Vermont Senate against Sens. Seth Bongartz, D-Bennington, and Scott Beck, R-Caledonia, allege they used their positions on a critical committee negotiating the final form of a wide-ranging education bill to advance provisions that benefited the private schools they are associated with.

Beck, the Senate minority leader, is employed as a teacher at St. Johnsbury Academy. Bongartz, the chair of the Senate Education Committee, served almost two decades on the board of Burr and Burton Academy.

The complaints, filed with the Senate’s Ethics Committee by Friends of Vermont Public Education board member Geo Honigford, allege that both senators violated ethical standards set forth in state law by negotiating this session’s major education reform bill in a committee of conference — which was charged with reconciling differences in the House and Senate versions — despite their associations with private schools, called independent schools in state law.

The Legislature passed the bill June 16, and Gov. Phil Scott is expected to sign it into law Tuesday.

Honigford, in an email to Senate Ethics Committee members, wrote that the two senators “used their positions to advance provisions that directly benefited the schools they are associated with.”

“I believe this crossed a line,” Honigford wrote. “Vermonters should be able to trust that lawmakers are working in the public interest, not using their influence to benefit their employers or clients.”

Beck, in a phone interview, brushed aside the alleged conflict, saying that “every senator has a connection to their school districts, to their schools.”

“They’re going to advocate for their schools. I would expect nothing less,” Beck said. “That’s what we’re supposed to do. We’re supposed to represent and advocate for our area. I’m no different than that.”

“I do happen to work at a school, but there are other people in the Legislature that work in schools, and we defend our schools and we defend our districts and our towns that make up those districts,” Beck added.

Bongartz, meanwhile, in a phone interview, called the complaint filed against him “complete garbage” and an “amateurish attempt at intimidation.”

“I just think that bringing this level of attempted intimidation to Vermont politics is something I thought I’d never see in this state,” he said. “This is just beyond the pale and completely baseless.”

He added that the “problem is that I understand independent schools, I understand the critical role they play in the areas they serve, and they don’t like that.”

“They don’t like the fact that I’m an articulate voice for something that they don’t like,” he said.

Earlier this month, Bongartz, Beck, Sen. Ann Cummings, D-Washington, and three House members served on the Committee of Conference that shaped the final contours of H.454, the landmark education reform bill set to transform the state’s public education system.

Among its many components, the bill set new limits on which independent schools would remain eligible to receive public funding in the future and how much they would be able to charge. 

The final version of the bill requires that a task force set to craft new school district boundaries include at least one option that maintains the current supervisory union and supervisory district administrative structure, which would support the continuation of historic tuitioning arrangements with independent schools.

In a press release announcing the ethics complaints, the Friends of Vermont Public Education alleged that both senators either fought against, or advocated for, changes that would benefit the independent schools they work for.

Bongartz, for instance, fought to set the threshold for public tuition eligibility for independent schools at 25%, “a number many observers couldn’t explain,” the release said.

The organization noted that Bongartz, through his company, Gubb and Bongartz Nonprofit Consulting, worked on behalf of the Maple Street School in Manchester in 2021. This school, “one of his clients, has 33% of its students publicly funded,” the release reads. 

“A higher threshold, like the 51% number proposed by the House, would have cut off their public dollars,” the group alleged in their press release. “The lower threshold preserved them.”

Bongartz in an interview said he has not had any professional contact with the school since his work was concluded in 2021.

Beck, meanwhile, pushed for increased funding for independent career and technical education centers and high schools, including a provision allowing independent schools like St. Johnsbury Academy and Lyndonville Institute — which operate such centers — to set their own tuition rates for public school districts who send students there, according to their release. 

Current law, unchanged by this bill, allows public high schools with career and technical centers also to set tuition rates for districts that send students there. Whether and how this may change under the new funding system is a question legislators plan to take on during the 2026 session.

“St. Johnsbury Academy stands to lose significant taxpayer support under the bill’s new funding formula,” the release reads. “Beck’s efforts helped insert carve-outs and funding increases that will cushion that impact and protect the school’s revenue.”

Beck downplayed that allegation, saying that he was simply “advocating for the status quo.” 

Public and independent career and technical education programs in Vermont are allowed to set their own tuition rates, he said.

“If I had gone in and tried to get something new, like some special good deal for St. Johnsbury Academy, maybe that would be a different story,” he said. “But, effectively, all I was advocating for is the status quo, which is that they get to be able to set their tuition as a CTE center, just like a public school CTE does.”

This story was updated with more details related to the history of Sen. Bongartz’s relationship with Maple Street School in Manchester.

Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify the way that current law governs how tuition rates to attend public schools with career and technical districts are set for students from other school districts.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Complaints allege Vermont senators with private school ties violated ethics rules during education bill negotiations.

Two members of the Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont, including the commission’s chair, announced last week they would be resigning, saying they no longer believed their efforts would make any impact.

Meagan Roy, the chair of the commission, and Nicole Mace, the former representative of the Vermont School Boards Association, both announced they would be leaving the commission in June 19 emails to fellow commissioners viewed by VTDigger.

Both members said the commission’s refined role, as laid out in the landmark education reform bill approved by the Legislature last week, H.454, does not give the commission the power to inform or influence the state’s efforts to reform public education policy.

“Even with the revised charge of the Commission, I cannot in good faith dedicate my professional time and energy to a body that I can’t be certain will be legitimately part of the work moving forward,” Roy wrote.

Likewise, Mace, who serves as the vice chair of the Winooski School District Board of Trustees, wrote in her email that the commission was “never fully embraced” by policymakers since its creation during the 2024 legislative session.

“I supported the basic framework for education reform that was built in the House-passed version of H.454,” she wrote. “But what has transpired since then has revealed this process of reform will go down the same path as many failed reform efforts of the past — carve-outs for powerful interests, last-minute deals based on political expediency and not what what’s best for the system, and a disregard for the educators who show up every day and do extraordinary work on behalf of the children of our state.”

Mace added that she “cannot continue to participate in a process that sacrifices equity and accountability in favor of power, privilege, and political games.”

Roy said in a phone interview that independent schools were the only group lawmakers prioritized and protected when they crafted the bill. 

“What we’ve witnessed is a process that’s become very political and driven in that way, not driven by good education policy,” she said. 

The resignations come as Gov. Phil Scott waits for legislative lawyers to finalize the language in the education reform bill, which he is expected to sign. The bill calls for a radical transformation of Vermont’s public education system over several years by consolidating the state’s 119 school districts and creating a new education funding formula.

The Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont was first created as part of 2024’s Act 183, the law that set the double-digit average property tax increases needed that year to keep pace with ballooning public education costs.

The law established the 13-member body, composed of lawmakers and education officials, and tasked it with studying Vermont’s public education system and making recommendations to reduce costs while ensuring equal educational opportunities for all students. The commission must create a final report due in December.

But the commission, Roy wrote in her resignation letter, was “undercut” in January when Scott released his own sweeping proposal calling for the consolidation of Vermont’s 119 school districts down to as few as five regional administrative districts.

From then on, the commission lacked buy-in from all sides of the political spectrum, and members were uncertain of the point of the commission, according to commission members.

In H.454, lawmakers gave the commission room to “work closely” with the state’s School District Redistricting Task Force, which is expected to begin meeting in August to craft new school district configurations, according to the bill. 

The task force is expected to utilize the commission’s public engagement efforts “to maximize public input regarding the development of the proposed new school district boundaries,” the bill states.

The bill also tasked the commission with making recommendations to the Legislature about what roles and powers should remain at the local school district level versus what should move to the state level. The commission, the bill reads, should also recommend “a process for a community served by a school to have a voice in decisions regarding school closures and recommendations for what that process should entail.”

In an interview, Roy said these remain critical questions to answer, but “we don’t have evidence to suggest that the General Assembly actually wants our opinion.”

“There’s not a track record to demonstrate the commission will be listened to,” she said.

It was not immediately clear who would replace Roy and Mace, or serve as the chair. Their positions on the commission are listed as vacant on an agenda for a future meeting.

Roy in her resignation letter said she will be “focusing my professional energies on supporting school districts and school leaders as they navigate the uncertainty to come.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described Nicole Mace’s tenure at the VSBA.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Two members, including chair, resign from the Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont.

A virtual public meeting hosted Wednesday evening by the Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont was sparsely attended. But the dozen or so people who logged on had plenty to say.

Small schools matter and bring value to their communities, one Twinfield Union School staff member said. Another attendee said school choice should not be expanded. And most said the proposed transformation of public education in Vermont — the outlines of which key lawmakers are debating this week at the Statehouse in Montpelier —  is happening far too quickly, and without much input from the public.

“I just don’t see how, at this time, we should be rushing through a process to make the governor happy, and the (Agency of Education) happy, and the Senate happy, and the House happy, when they haven’t really consulted with the people in the field,” Keri Bristow, the chair of central Vermont’s Mountain Views Supervisory Union board, said during the meeting. 

“I do not think that what’s going through right now is in any way equitable,” Bristow said. “I think it will be a huge detriment to the public school system.”

Wednesday night’s listening session was the final meeting in a series of five that a consultant hired by the commission has held over the last two months. The meeting capped efforts by the commission to gather public opinion about what Vermont’s public education system should look like, at least until it gets more direction from the Legislature.

The creation of the Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont was part of 2024’s Act 183, the law that set the double-digit average property tax increases needed that year to keep pace with ballooning public education costs.

The law gave members of the 13-member body, composed of lawmakers and education officials, a wide-ranging charge. Among other things, they were tasked with studying Vermont’s public education system and making recommendations to reduce costs while ensuring equal educational opportunities are afforded to all students, with a final report due in December 2025.

But since its first meeting in August 2024, the commission has lacked buy-in from all sides of the political spectrum, several of its members said. 

Some commission members haven’t shown up to meetings in months, according to commission members and meeting minutes. And after Gov. Phill Scott introduced his sweeping education reform plan in January, the commission struggled to find a role for itself.

“It is relevant that the commission was created in a law that was vetoed and then ultimately overridden. That is relevant to, I think, where we find ourselves,” Meagan Roy, the chair of the commission, said in an interview.

Now, as education reform proceeds, with only minor input from the body, the future of the commission tasked with studying the future of public education in Vermont is, itself, uncertain.

Jay Nichols, the executive director of the Vermont Principals Association and a member of the commission, said, “I feel a little bit like we’ve been floundering.”

‘Up in the air’

The commission delivered its preliminary findings on how to rein in public education costs in December. But the group shied away from offering specific recommendations on how to contain costs in the short term.

The document offered an assessment of the situation facing public education in Vermont, along with some key education data trends. Roy, a former superintendent, said in an interview that there were commission members who were disappointed that the report did not have cost containment recommendations. But she noted that the report found the issue was “more complicated than short-term cost containment.

“We really aren’t going to make wise decisions by focusing on the short term,” she said.

A month after the commission’s report was shared, Scott released his sweeping reform plan, calling for the consolidation of Vermont’s 119 school districts down to as few as five regional administrative districts.

“That pretty much changed everything, because at that point, the commission and everybody else was responding to the governor’s plan,” Nichols said, adding that he felt the commission was “bypassed” by Scott’s proposed timeline.

Since then, the commission has turned its focus toward a public engagement campaign. The commission began holding meetings for public input around the state, and later hired Afton Partners, a consulting group, to host virtual listening sessions and to gather the input provided for the commission and lawmakers. The group has so far been paid $24,375 for its work, according to Toren Ballard, a spokesperson for the state Agency of Education.

“At every meeting, we have citizens that come up and say things like, ‘Please keep this commission going, because it’s one place we feel like we can really be heard,'” Nichols said. “But until final legislation is settled on between the House and Senate and the governor… I mean, we could end up with not having a commission. And there’s several of us that have said publicly, including myself, that I don’t want to be part of a commission unless it’s doing real work.”

Peter Conlon, the House Education Committee chair who is part of the legislative negotiations and a sitting member of the commission, said his hope moving forward is that “we can better focus” the commission’s public outreach campaign “to provide really good public information to the Legislature come January.”

“The Legislature, which created the commission to begin with, would be best served by the commission really capitalizing on its outreach in terms of, what do Vermonters think of this new vision of Vermont, how it should operate, how it can best serve Vermonters,” he said in an interview.

The committee by law is scheduled to release a final report with recommendations for public education reform by December. But that has been difficult to home in on, Conlon said, because the commission’s future role “has been very much up in the air.”

In the current version of H.454 proposed by the House members, the commission remains, but lawmakers have refined its focus to address “the state of future larger districts, the role of school boards in those future larger districts, and the role of the electorate,” Conlon said while introducing that section to the conference committee on Wednesday.

The bill finalized by the conference committee would go to the full Legislature for a vote and then to Scott for his approval.

Low turnout 

Nichols and others admit that the commission has “not had strong turnout” for the in-person and virtual engagement sessions. A presentation by Afton Partners reported that only 18 people had attended the four listening sessions in May.

“It worries me. I think that a lot of the public doesn’t have any clue of what’s going on in the Legislature,” Nichols said.

Roy, in an interview, said the commission struggled with whether to host the virtual sessions at all. 

“Eventually, what the commission decided is that the optics aren’t good for us to talk for months about how important engagement is and then cancel the input sessions. It just didn’t feel right,” she said.

She added that the commission is still pursuing public engagement. “But we’re trying to be honest with participants,” she said. “‘You are informing us as the commission. You’re not necessarily informing the Legislature right now.'”

Conlon in an interview acknowledged the commission’s public sessions “have not been as well publicized as we would like.”

“But we have a lot of time left on the calendar, and once the commission gets settled as to whether it’s continuing with its current statutory framework, or if it’s moving ahead in a new statutory framework, that will help guide that work,” he said.

Roy said the commission remains an important tool for ensuring education reform is done thoughtfully.

“I think the commission is needed more than ever to do this work,” she said. Other states that have undergone systematic transformation, she said, “created a body to monitor how successful it’s been. That’s what I think our role should be.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: As lawmakers negotiate over education reform, the year-old Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont faces an uncertain future.

The White River Valley Supervisory Union last week moved to withdraw its membership from the Vermont School Boards Association, highlighting deep divisions among the state’s school districts and supervisory unions over the trajectory of education reform.

The White River Valley board’s decision marks an overt break in unity with a prominent advocacy organization at a critical time for public education in Vermont.

State lawmakers are working overtime to strike a deal on legislation that would lay the groundwork for major systemic reform in the coming months. House and Senate members were locked in strained negotiations last week, but leaders in both chambers, along with Gov. Phil Scott, said they were committed to working out a compromise on the bill, H.454, by June 16, when lawmakers are scheduled to reconvene for a vote.

The Vermont School Board Association collects annual membership dues from every school district in the state and lobbies on behalf of its members. 

The White River Valley Supervisory Union, a collection of six school districts that serves students from 10 central Vermont towns, was paying the association roughly $10,000 a year in membership dues, according to Kathy Galluzzo, chair of the supervisory union’s board.

But in recent weeks, board members with the supervisory union questioned the association’s lobbying efforts. At a May 27 meeting, board members had strong words for the association’s support for legislation that would do away with supervisory unions.

“They don’t believe in us, so they can’t lobby for us,” supervisory union board member Bill Edgerton said at the meeting.

Leaders of the Vermont School Boards Association said the majority of the organization’s members support its position on supervisory unions.  

In a press release announcing the decision, White River Valley Supervisory Union board members said their withdrawal arose from disagreements around the association’s support for versions of H.454 that they said would result in “long bus rides for students, the dissolution of supervisory unions, no community involvement in decisions surrounding the future of rural schools, and no path to tax relief for Vermonters.”

The statement went on to say that the association’s advocacy went “against the communities that WRVSU serves and the children they educate.” 

The White River Valley Supervisory Union is the first to break with the association, but it may not be the last.

Districts within the Lamoille South, Twin Rivers and Greater Rutland County supervisory unions have had similar discussions and plan to consider resolutions this month to suspend their dues or withdraw their membership, according to board meeting minutes and interviews with board members.

In Windham County, board members with the Windham Southeast Supervisory District — one of two districts in the Windham Southeast Supervisory Union — voted on a resolution calling on the association to refrain from supporting legislation “not grounded in sound research or lacking clear fiscal impact modeling, especially on consequential issues like school governance and consolidation.”

Timothy Maciel, a board member with the southern Vermont school district, in an interview said the board would consider suspending their dues to the association “if basic standards of democratic representation and accountability are not met.”

“There’s really good folks in the VSBA,” he said. “But primarily, they have to represent our values and positions. If they aren’t representing those values, then we, in my opinion, shouldn’t continue with them.”

Why supervisory unions?

Vermont has 52 supervisory unions or supervisory districts — two different governing and administrative models for the state’s 119 school districts. 

State law only gives school districts the power to set budgets and to raise money through bonding. A supervisory union or supervisory district generally provides back office functions such as accounting and payroll and may oversee the provision of special education services and curriculum coordination, though their specific roles differ across the state.

The supervisory union structure, which was relied upon during the push for school district consolidation driven by Act 46, provides a unifying structure for school districts with vastly different operating structures — a way for them to share resources while maintaining independence.

The White River Valley Supervisory Union is a particularly diverse example, with six districts following four different operating models. One of the school districts — the White River Union District, for the towns of Bethel and Royalton — operates all grades from pre-kindergarten through high school. Another, serving Granville and Hancock, operates none, and provides tuition to its resident students to the public and private schools they choose. 

Of the other four districts, two pay tuition and allow choice for middle school and high school for the towns of Rochester, Sharon and Stockbridge, while two provide tuition and choice just for high school for the towns of Chelsea, Strafford and Tunbridge. 

The school choice allowed in five of the six districts in the White River Valley Supervisory Union lets students attend private schools like nearby Thetford Academy and Sharon Academy.

Flor Diaz Smith, the president of the Vermont School Boards Association, said supervisory unions make it difficult to “have aligned outcomes and support for all our students.”

“We’re trying to create coherence through this system,” she said.

Complicating matters is the number of public school students that districts across the state are paying to send to private schools. There were around 3,500 students using public money for private school tuition in the 2022-23 school year — a small fraction of the almost 83,000 students educated in public schools that same year, according to the Vermont Agency of Education.

But that smaller group has played a big role in the education debate, and supervisory unions that allow students publicly funded choice want to keep it that way.

Galluzzo said that school choice is an important factor for her supervisory union, and the region’s independent schools provide educational options that are often closer to home for some families.

“Families make that choice,” she said. “Kids find their fit in some of the independent schools for different reasons. I think more choice is better than less choice.”

Scott’s education proposal, unveiled in January, would have eliminated the supervisory unions governance structure and instead established five regional districts of roughly 10,000 to 15,000 students each, except for the Champlain Valley region district, which was more than twice that size. In another change, the new districts’ boards would have been empowered to designate certain private schools as “choice schools” available to all students in the larger district via lottery.

Sue Ceglowski, the executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association, said during the White River Valley Supervisory Union Board’s meeting that the organization came out strongly against the governor’s plan.

However, the association could not publicly support legislation that required the inclusion of supervisory unions because it was “paired with allowing for the continuation of a tuitioning system that provides continued access to independent schools,” she said.

Ceglowski said most of the organization’s members supported its position on supervisory unions and that its stance was “based on resolutions that have been passed by our members.”

In an interview, Diaz Smith also said there was “a lot of interest from the supervisory union advocates to stay with (school choice), to have everybody change but them, to have this system change around them.”

“That is not collaborative,” she said. “That is not all coming to the table.”

A rural school lobby

After their vote to leave the association, the White River Valley Supervisory Union Board voted during their May 27 meeting to shift the funds that would have gone to the Vermont School Board Association to the Rural Schools Community Alliance, an organization formed in January that has quickly emerged as an advocate and lobbying arm in the Statehouse for Vermont’s rural schools.

The board in its press release said the alliance “has established itself as a strong ally, helping rural schools vocally oppose legislation that forces school closure.”

“We were paying an entity to lobby for us, but they were lobbying for us to be closed,” Galluzzo said in an interview Thursday. “I think at this point in time, we need to put our money toward somebody in Montpelier that is going to fight for us.”

As fears mount over the possible closure of small, rural schools, the White River Valley Supervisory Union and others have turned to the Rural Schools Community Alliance to advocate on their behalf as education reform has progressed this session.

Since its formation in January, the alliance has grown to represent more than 100 towns in the state, according to Margaret MacLean, a steering committee member with the organization.

She said the alliance sees supervisory unions “as essential structures for rural schools,” that offer more democratic representation and local control for smaller communities.

MacLean and her organization have come out against Scott’s proposal for five regional districts, and said that consolidated structures won’t work “when you have towns that are distinct and separated by geography and mileage.”

“We don’t see that as more efficient. We see that as less democratic,” she said. “Yes, democracy can sometimes be messy, but the benefits of it pay off in terms of engagement and involvement and community voice in support of schools.”

Officials with the rural alliance and the school boards association have met and discussed their visions for Vermont’s public education system, both sides said. But disagreements remain between the two organizations over the efficacy of supervisory unions.

“It’s not to be difficult. It’s not to be inflexible,” Diaz Smith said. “It’s just the data was not there to support supervisory unions.”

Not everyone is on board with ditching the Vermont School Board Association. In Peacham, the school board will also take up a resolution to discuss reducing the amount of money they sent to the association.

But Mark Clough, the district board’s chair and the vice chair of the school board association, said he’s “heard over and over again from a lot of districts and (supervisory unions) around the state that they really want tighter controls” of schools and districts under their purview.

“The state feels, in general, that districts are the way to go, because it just provides more control to get costs and student outcomes in a better place than allowing it to just go off on its own with supervisory unions,” Clough said in an interview. “The (supervisory union) model, as good as it is for rural areas — and it does fit for some rural areas — it doesn’t fit for all regions.”

Galluzzo left open the possibility of rejoining the association at some point in an interview. But at the May 27 meeting, board members with the supervisory union concluded they had no other choice but to withdraw their membership.

Stacey Peters, the chair of the Granville-Hancock Unified School District, which is part of the supervisory union, said during the meeting last week she considered it a matter of “life or death” for the future of their schools.

“You’re asking us to kind of sign away our livelihood here, and I think that that is not a simple difference of opinion,” she said at the meeting. “Being asked to pay for our own execution does not feel like a position that I think we should be supporting.”

Correction: Due to an editorial error, an earlier version of this story was incorrect about the change in the number of supervisory unions after the implementation of Act 46. Because of mergers of pre-existing supervisory unions, the number decreased. Also, the membership of the Rural Schools Community Alliance was inaccurately described.

Read the story on VTDigger here: A supervisory union’s break with the Vermont School Boards Association reveals statewide fault lines in education reform.

Three months after the disruptive police chief controversy in Hinesburg and Richmond, officials in the two Chittenden County towns are renewing efforts to share police services. 

The two towns in April renewed a contract to share a police chief through March 2026, ensuring a continued cooperation that began between the two departments in 2023.

Now, a police committee formed in April, made up of officials from Hinesburg and Richmond, is aiming to hire a new interim police chief to replace Anthony Cambridge, who departed Hinesburg under scrutiny and was later sacked as Richmond’s police chief hours before his start date.

Hinesburg police officer Frank Bryan has been serving as the interim chief since Cambridge’s departure, overseeing both the Hinesburg and Richmond departments.

It may not be easy to find a candidate willing to take on the job. But town officials hope to find a candidate who could help fulfill a long-held objective to fully merge the two departments and pool resources amid a slim labor market for police officers.

“It just doesn’t make sense to me anymore to have a single department town by town,” Hinesburg Selectboard member Mike Loner said at a recent police committee meeting. “I’m really hoping we can find somebody who has a lot of experience in an organizational background to help us figure out what are the hurdles to a merger and how we’re going to get around those.”

Both police departments were facing staff shortages when they signed an inter-municipal contract in 2023. Under that agreement, Richmond paid Hinesburg an annual fee for contracted patrol and general services.

The agreement later evolved to include the sharing of police chief services, with Cambridge acting as the de facto chief of both departments. In January, Cambridge announced he was leaving Hinesburg’s department for Richmond but would remain the chief of both departments.

But those cooperative efforts hit a snag earlier this year when Richmond backed out of a plan to hire Cambridge as its police chief.

In the weeks leading up to his departure from Hinesburg, Cambridge came under scrutiny by town and police officials there for allegedly deleting police security footage and shredding documents. He left Hinesburg weeks before his scheduled end date.

Richmond then withdrew Cambridge’s job offer after twice delaying his start date.

Both towns have been mum on the issue, while Cambridge has maintained the allegations were part of a smear campaign.

He later said in a social media post that his relationship with Hinesburg Town Manager Todd Odit broke down and there were persistent efforts to undermine his “ability to effectively act as chief.”

Since then, town officials in police committee meetings have plotted a renewed effort for cooperation with Richmond. To help guide the hiring process for an interim chief, the committee heard from Jim Baker, a police consultant in Vermont and former head of the Vermont State Police with decades of experience in policing.

Baker cautioned the committee that “going out for a police search right now … is going to be very, very difficult” but noted it would be “a fool’s errand” to try and find a police chief for each department.

He told the committee it should focus on bringing in an administrator to help finalize an arrangement to merge the departments.

Baker, who lives in Arlington near the New York border, pointed to the merged police department shared between Cambridge and Greenwich, New York, as an example of a success.

“I think you have an opportunity to recreate what safety will look like between those two communities,” he said. “What I’m really proposing here really hasn’t been done in Vermont.”

Town officials are optimistic that Hinesburg and Richmond could take the first step toward regionalizing police services. Bard Hill, a Richmond Selectboard member, said in an interview their efforts represent “the point of the spear on how we can share services across towns in Chittenden County.”

“How many different police departments do you need for towns of 4,000 or 5,000 people?” Hill said. “There’s an economy of scale and efficiency, especially for towns that can work together effectively and have some similarities.”

But merging departments “has some subtleties and complexities” that will make it complicated, Hill said.

“It’s a somewhat awkward developmental stage, because you still are operating as two separate departments with separate policies and separate data sets,” he said.

Officials were faced with a wrinkle at the most recent committee meeting Tuesday. While the towns’ police chief contract has been renewed, their contract for patrol services ends June 30, and Odit said during Tuesday’s meeting that Hinesburg officers are hesitant to proceed with a contract that isn’t reciprocal.

Hinesburg currently has three officers, including Bryan, the interim chief, while Richmond has just one. It’s an unequal relationship, with Hinesburg officers covering both towns while getting little in return.

“I’m just going to be pretty blunt. I know from Hinesburg officers’ position, continuing with a contract that’s not reciprocal is not tenable to them,” Odit said Tuesday. “It may be that there’s a pause in that contract while we figure out what we do.”

Richmond Town Manager Josh Arneson said the town has budgeted for four police officers and the town is actively trying to fill those positions.

“But hiring police officers is very challenging,” he said. “There’s not a large pool.”

Committee officials are mulling an offer from Baker to search for an interim chief for both departments, but it remains to be seen whether the towns will renew their patrol services.

“If we don’t end up with a services contract, you know, are we going to find a chief that wants to manage two departments that aren’t working together?” Odit said in an interview. “It all feels up in the air now.”

Still, officials feel that proceeding with some type of a merger remains a worthwhile pursuit.

“Everybody seems to think it makes sense, it’s just who’s going to do it, and how are they going to do it?” Hill said in an interview. “You have to be clear about what you’re trying to achieve and persist in achieving it, and I’m crossing my fingers that we have that combination of factors between the two towns right now.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Hinesburg, Richmond try to chart new course for shared police services after police chief controversy.

Jason Eaton, the man accused of shooting three Palestinian students in Burlington in 2023, claimed without evidence during a court hearing on Friday that he had been acting under the instruction of the Central Intelligence Agency and Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency.

He said during the hearing that the three victims were associated with Hamas, and suggested he would pursue a public authority defense in his case because of his claimed ties to the CIA.

Eaton’s comments came during a court hearing to review motions he filed to gain access to the victims’ cellphone data, which Burlington police collected from them with their consent in the hours after their shooting. His motion also sought access to a Homeland Security document compiled after the incident.

Reviewing the victims’ cellphone data, he said, could help bolster his defense. He later asked Superior Court Judge John Pacht for permission to hire the head of defense at Palantir Technologies to review the data and brief the court on their findings.

Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George suggested during the court hearing that Eaton’s comments in court provide some evidence for a hate crime enhancement.

“I do not believe this has any credibility at all,” George said of Eaton’s comments. “In fact, I think it is providing greater context than we’ve had for a possible hate crime enhancement.”

Eaton was deemed competent to stand trial in the fall. But on Friday, his defense attorney, Peggy Jansch, of the Chittenden County Public Defender’s Office, asked the court to order an updated competency hearing, citing his comments in court.

Eaton’s comments offer some insight into his defense strategy, and shed some light into his state of mind when he allegedly shot Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Aliahmad on Nov. 25, 2023.

The three students, all 20 years old at the time, were in town visiting one of their families for Thanksgiving. They were walking on North Prospect Street, speaking a mix of Arabic and English and wearing kaffiyehs, a traditional scarf that is a symbol of Palestinian identity, when Eaton approached them from a nearby porch and allegedly shot all three.

He has pleaded not guilty to three counts of attempted second-degree murder charges, and has been held without bail at the Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans since his arrest soon after the shooting.

His comments Friday prompted backlash from the victims’ attorney, William Clark, who said his clients were moving forward with a protective order to prevent access to their data.

“I’m not letting my victims be harassed under a completely frivolous theory of defense that does not even have an ethical ground to be able to be raised in court, regardless of its legal infirmity,” Clark said. “It’s pure harassment if they go forward with a deposition that’s asking about some of the allegations you’ve heard today.”

George has said previously that a hate crime enhancement against Eaton was unlikely, and that she did not have enough evidence to support such a charge.

She did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether she would pursue a hate crime enhancement.

Eaton’s court case has lagged over the last year. He has repeatedly clashed with his attorneys over their defense strategy and has asked the court twice to fire them.

He claimed in a handwritten motion filed in April that his counsel insisted on an insanity defense “to which I do not consent.”

He claimed that they “refuse to investigate and prepare a defense based on the facts which I have disclosed for them” and claimed they would “prepare no other defense on ethical grounds.”

“They have failed at their paramount obligation to be loyal to their client — going so far as to undermine my credibility on the record by stating that they are exploring an insanity defense,” he wrote.

Jansch has supported Eaton’s motions for access to the victims’ cell phone data and other records throughout the case’s development.

“I have an obligation to see if there’s any factual support for Mr. Eaton’s defense,” she said on Friday.

But she appeared hesitant to push for his public authority defense. “If you want to raise it with the court, that’s up to you,” she said to Eaton in an aside on Friday. “I’m not going to.”

Pacht entertained Eaton’s theories during the hearing Friday, but questioned whether it was “an expression of a disorder that hasn’t been reviewed yet which Mr. Eaton suffers from.”

Regardless, Pacht noted the proposed line of defense had little to no factual basis to bring forward.

“I know of no law that would suggest that if a state police officer said, ‘This guy is a bad guy, he’s done lots of things, he’s really hurting the community, and it doesn’t seem like anybody’s doing anything about it, I’m authorizing you to do it yourself’ — that would clearly be a violation of law, as far as I can see,” Pacht said.

Pacht denied Eaton’s bid for new defense attorneys. He did not rule on his motions for cellphone data or federal government records — saying he would issue a written decision — but noted later that he was “not hearing why the cellphone data” would be material to the case.

The court extended the timeline for discovery in the case. Pacht said Friday that the case would not be ready for trial until at least the fall.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Defense attorneys ask for new competency hearing for man accused of shooting Palestinian students after troubling court hearing commentary.

An Essex Junction man was struck and killed by a train Tuesday night near the city’s Five Corners, according to police.

A police press release said they found Shiloh Malzac, 44, dead on the tracks near Railroad Street early Wednesday morning.

According to police, Malzac was struck by a southbound New England Central Railroad freight train that passed through the area just before midnight Tuesday.

“The train engineer was unaware of the incident and the train continued to its destination without stopping,” Essex police said in the release, adding that the train operator had been notified and was cooperating with the investigation.

Police shut down Railroad Street in Essex Junction for nearly four hours while investigators worked at the scene. Malzac’s body was taken to the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office for an autopsy.

The investigation remains open, and Essex police are asking anyone who was in the area or may have witnessed the incident to contact police.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described Essex Junction.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Essex Junction man killed by train Tuesday night, police say.