MONTPELIER — The Vermont Senate voted Thursday to scrap its version of this year’s landmark education bill, H.454, and replace it with the version of the legislation the House passed last month. 

Following an afternoon of committee hearings on a proposed amendment to the bill, senators were planning to consider changes to it on the floor Thursday evening — though it wasn’t clear when they’d arrive at a final version.

In effect, the decision backtracked on weeks of work by the chamber’s education and tax-writing committees. It came less than 48 hours after Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, conceded to his colleagues in the Democratic majority that the Senate-crafted proposal had lost substantial support. 

“This idea that we will take the House legislation — and we will amend it, make it stronger, make it better — that will require a lot of work on the floor, a lot of work from our committees,” Baruth said on the floor Thursday morning before making the procedural moves that allowed the chamber to tee up the House’s proposed bill, rather than the Senate’s proposal. 

Even after all that work, Baruth then acknowledged, the legislation still “may not” get enough votes to pass.

The Senate only took up H.454 briefly Thursday morning. During an afternoon session of voting on other bills, Baruth said he hoped to dive into substantial debate on a potential amendment to the House language on the Senate floor that evening.

Gov. Phil Scott has all but demanded that legislators pass an education bill before they adjourn for the year. Both the House and Senate, and Scott, have made education reform the year’s key issue in response to last year’s double-digit average property tax increases — and all three have drafted different versions of wide-ranging reforms. 

Both chambers of the Legislature, and the administration, have broadly agreed the state should transition to a new education funding formula and move toward consolidating school districts. But disagreement has developed over the details and the timeline. 

The Senate changes being considered Thursday in committee hearings — included in an amendment offered by Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison — would stick with the House’s longer four-year timeframe for the transition. The new funding scheme, a foundation formula, would not go into effect until July 1, 2029, and would be contingent on new districts being formed. 

A foundation formula is the most common type of education funding system across the country. The approach provides districts money based on the number of students in each district and how expensive those students are to teach. 

Hardy’s amendment would also require a comprehensive study on how those students — such as English learners, special education students and those pursuing career and technical education — should be factored to the funding formula before it could go into effect.

Meanwhile, a committee to develop new school district boundary options for consideration by the Legislature next year would largely mirror the group of public education representatives and experts assembled in the House version, though both the House and Senate would also be able to appoint two people, not just one.

While the original Senate version contained no class size minimums, the amendment maintains the minimums proposed in the House version, though it adjusts them downward. Calculation of the average class sizes would be based on student populations over three years rather than two, and the state secretary of education would have discretion about whether there would be certain mandates for schools that do not meet those minimums. The House version would have required the department to take those actions.

The proposed changes to the House version would increase the number of currently operating independent schools in Vermont that would remain eligible to receive public tuition once new districts are operating. The Hardy amendment would limit eligibility to schools where tuitioned public students made up 40% of the student body during the 2024-25 school year. The House version uses a 51% threshold and a different comparison year, while the earlier Senate version set the boundary at 25%.

Hardy presented her amendment to the Senate’s education and finance committees simultaneously Thursday afternoon.

“We’re back to starting with the House version of the bill, so it’sdeja vu all over again,” she told her colleagues.

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