The newly created Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont has a big job: studying the state’s education system in order to chart a future that’s equitable, high-achieving and affordable. 

To do so, its members must learn from the most significant education legislation of recent years, which amended special education guidelines, school funding and, perhaps most meaningfully, spurred school district mergers. 

Act 46, signed into law nearly a decade ago, first incentivized districts to merge using tax breaks and later resulted in mandated mergers. Lawmakers hoped that districts, by merging, could provide more expansive and consistent opportunities for students regardless of geography, finding economic efficiencies in the process. 

Long a lightning rod, the law drew ire, criticized by some for diminishing local control over public education and facilitating school closures. To this day, some continue to chastise the state for failing to adequately study the impacts of Act 46, especially as conversations reignite over closing small schools to save money and provide better academic opportunities. 

As part of Act 46, the Vermont Agency of Education was required to submit annual reports on the progress of the legislation through 2021. The final two reports, in 2020 and 2021, didn’t arrive when due. 

This week, however, the 2020 one unexpectedly materialized, more than four years tardy. The 2021 report has yet to be released. 

But more meaningfully, in one of her first significant undertakings since assuming the role, Interim Education Secretary Zoie Saunders late last month released a wide-ranging and illuminating data report analyzing the state’s public education system. In it, the agency compiled figures on demographics, student achievement and the economics of large and small school districts — suggesting the potential effects district size has on key outcomes. 

Smaller districts, the agency found, are spending more and paying teachers less. 

‘It’s important that Vermont gets this right’

Some of Act 46’s most vocal skeptics fear failure to learn from the school mergers of the past could set the state down a dangerous road. 

Margaret MacLean, a former teacher and principal, is one of those critics. She’s made her case to the public education commission that Vermont doesn’t know the impact of Act 46 and has called out the Agency of Education for failing to deliver long overdue and legally-mandated reports. 

“There has been no outside evaluation of any sort that would give us comprehensive information about what has worked, what hasn’t worked, what can we learn,” she said in an interview in August, before the agency released its 2020 report. “There shouldn’t be recommendations from this commission to implement changes that aren’t based on factual information.”

The commission is directed to produce short-term cost containment recommendations this December, with its final, more comprehensive recommendations due in December 2025. 

Even after the belated 2020 report was released this week, MacLean called it “hardly a comprehensive analysis” due to its small scope and reliance on anecdotal evidence.  

MacLean said that the commission should use money set aside for consultants to independently study Act 46, rather than rely on the state agency. Not learning from the past, she argued, could have significant consequences.

“There is this commission that has a huge task,” she said. “It’s important that Vermont gets this right.”

Her argument resonates with John Castle, a member of the public education commission and the leader of the Vermont Rural Education Collaborative. 

“In my mind, if we’re going to do this work, we have to look at (Act 46),” he said in an interview, calling a comprehensive analysis “long overdue.”

Castle, who was a vocal critic of Act 46 during his years as a superintendent, also pointed to data compiled by Lincoln School Board Chair Jeanne Albert that showed this year 83% of initial budgets passed in independent school districts, while only 38% passed on the first round in unified districts. Perhaps, he argued, budgets went down in unified districts because voters struggled to make sense of bigger, merged-district budgets.  

This week, the Agency of Education’s 2020 Act 46 report finally came to light, the same day VTDigger inquired about its whereabouts. 

“While this report is significantly delayed, it provides valuable insights that remain relevant to ongoing discussions about the future of our education system,” Lindsey Hedges, an agency spokesperson, wrote in an email. 

Acknowledging aspects of the report were “out of date,” Hedges said that, nonetheless, “Many of the challenges outlined in the report persist today, alongside our shared goal of sustaining and expanding high-quality educational opportunities for all students.”

For the most part, the report focused on only seven unified districts and included primarily anecdotal evidence as opposed to system-wide data. 

All seven districts reported adding or expanding after-school programming after merging, according to the report, with some reporting additional access to academic or behavioral interventionists. Consolidation also allowed part-time positions in specific schools to be merged into full-time roles in six of seven districts, boosting “cohesion, continuity, and staff morale,” according to the report. 

“Most of the (unified union districts) stated that centralization had not been possible until the unified board, and the community at large, began to think of the multi-town district as a single unit,” the report said. “In many cases financial savings realized from centralization were invested back in the unified district, usually to ensure that the deficiencies of the smallest or least-maintained facilities were addressed.”

The seven mergers, it appeared, had not led to widespread changes to classrooms and school configurations. Three said they were discussing closing a small school, and one reported already combining a classroom. 

Understanding potential savings proved a difficult task.

“The Agency was unable to determine a reliable, uniform metric by which it could determine if the cost of centralized services … have increased or decreased,” the report read. In many anecdotal examples, the agency noted, merging saved money on specific costs, such as food services, and those savings were used to expand opportunities district-wide that would have cost more money if the district hadn’t merged. 

Smaller districts cost more, agency says

While the state’s Act 46 reports relied on anecdotal evidence, the newly released “education profile,” a product of the interim secretary’s recent listening tour, provides a system-wide look at Vermont’s public schools. 

Saunders wrote that the report “foster(s) a data-driven dialogue about the future of public education … ranging from student enrollment and academic performance to staffing levels and expenditures.”

The data, some of the most comprehensive and accessible public-facing analysis from the agency in recent years, is nonetheless qualified with caveats cautioning readers not to rely entirely on the report’s findings. Metrics have changed over time, and so too has the agency’s ability to track information. (Jeanne Albert, the Lincoln School Board chair, pointed out, for example, that the report mischaracterized Lincoln’s status as an independent district and used an incorrect enrollment number.)

Still, the report functions as a snapshot of public education in Vermont, a system rising in cost amid a decrease in student population.

Vermont’s K-12 enrollment dropped 14.2% from the 2003-2004 school year to the 2022-2023 school year, according to the agency.

Academic achievement has dropped, too. The agency reported proficiency rates declined by about 10 percentage points post-pandemic, noting, though, that that trend may be reversing. Looking nationally, the agency said that Vermont’s students “demonstrate high performance in reading and more average performance in math.”

Vermont has the lowest staff-to-student and teacher-to-student ratios in the country, according to the report, spending the fifth-most per student. Districts employed more teachers per student after the pandemic than they did before, the agency said. 

The report also broke down economic data by district size. 

“Total expenditures per pupil appears to be largely related to size, with smaller (districts) spending more per pupil,” according to the report. 

The agency also found that large districts — categorized as having 2,000 students or more — paid higher salaries to teachers and district leaders than those with fewer than 1,000 students. 

From fiscal year 2020 to 2023, the statewide expenditure per pupil increased from about $22,800 to $27,500, though the agency attributed about $1,700 of that uptick to an increase in federal funding. 

Across the same period, the report noted that small districts spent more per pupil than large districts. In fiscal year 2023, small districts (fewer than 1,000 students) spent about $39,400 per pupil compared to about $25,900 in large districts (2,000 students or more).

According to the report, higher spending, lower achieving districts tended to have more economically disadvantaged students, while low-spending, high-achieving districts had fewer students in poverty. 

Saunders, introducing the data, wrote that the agency plans to release additional reports exploring “trends by region and among ‘like’ schools to examine variations across the state including geography, student needs, and tuitioning patterns.”