Vermont lawmakers have spent months considering legislation to strengthen state anti-harassment protections for workers.

The bill, S.103, would relax the standard for worker harassment claims and ban pay discrimination based on race, national origin or disability status, as well as implement other employee protections.

But one question has drawn opposition from education officials and appears to have divided lawmakers: Should anti-harassment protections apply to students in Vermont’s schools?

In order to be illegal, harassment must meet a certain legal standard, one aspect of which is that the harassment must be found to be “severe or pervasive.” S.103, however, would change that definition. Under the proposed legislation, “harassing conduct need not be severe or pervasive to be unlawful.”

Whether or not actions could be classified as harassment would depend “on the basis of the record as a whole, according to the totality of the circumstances, and a single incident may constitute unlawful harassment,” according to the legislation.

Advocates say that language will offer greater protection to victims.

The current standard “creates an exceptionally high barrier for individuals to bring forth meritorious claims of sexual or gender-based harassment,” Jessica Barquist, the policy director of the Vermont Network Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, said in testimony submitted to the House General and Housing Committee.

“Victims and survivors who have experienced long-range discrimination or singular severe instances of harassment have been prevented from bringing forth claims, due to this standard,” Barquist said.

A version of the bill — one that explicitly excluded students from the expanded protections — passed the Senate last month. But on Thursday, lawmakers on the House general committee voted to advance an amended version that would extend that language to students.

“This is an important bill, and it provides very important pieces to a larger puzzle that I hope no one has to really deal with,” said the committee’s chair, Rep. Tom Stevens, D-Waterbury.

The amendment was backed by a slate of equity advocates and officials, including the Vermont Human Rights Commission and the state Office of Racial Equity, along with the Vermont Network.

“Bullying disproportionately affects students of color, students who are LGBTQ+, students with disabilities and students with intersectional identities that encompass multiple protected classes,” the Office of Racial Equity said in testimony submitted to the House committee this week.

“The serious mental health impacts of bullying affect students’ access to education,” the office added in its testimony.

Advocates argued that changing the definition would not necessarily lead to more prosecution or discipline of offending students. Instead, they argued, it would simply push school administrators to take allegations of harassment seriously — and to work to prevent it.

The severe and pervasive standard is “a really difficult bar to meet,” Bor Yang, the executive director of the Vermont Human Rights Commission, said in an interview.

“The issue, then, is why are we not also bringing kids along?” Yang said. “There’s absolutely no reason not to.”

But school officials — including the Agency of Education and education administrators’ organizations — are asking lawmakers to hold off.

That’s because, they argued, the federal Department of Education is expected to release new Title IX rules next month — ones that are also expected to require updates to school anti-harassment policies and procedures.

“It would be our preference to first receive the federal government’s regulations, since they have the most authority out of all of us on this question,” Emily Simmons, general counsel for the Agency of Education, told the Senate Education Committee last week. “Then next session, take up any necessary amendments — if there are any — and also take up this proposed amendment to our harassment definition.”

Sue Ceglowski, executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association, told members of the House general committee Wednesday that the proposal “would make major changes to legal requirements for Vermont schools before the impact is known of the changes to the federal Title IX regulations.”

Ceglowski noted that she was also speaking on behalf of the state’s associations of principals and superintendents, as well as its teachers union.

The amendment has also drawn concerns that it could create more liabilities for schools. The proposed legislation would create “significant additional liability for schools under the First Amendment,” Jonathan Steiner, president of the Vermont School Boards Insurance Trust — which provides insurance to the state’s school districts — said in written testimony this week.

On Wednesday, members on the Senate Education Committee also seemed skeptical. Lawmakers were considering an identical amendment to a larger miscellaneous education bill.

Sen. Martine Gulick, D-Chittenden Central, the committee’s vice chair, voiced concern that the bill could burden school staff with more harassment investigations and proceedings — at a time when schools are already “on the verge of crisis.”

The bill, she said, could amount to “putting yet another workload, another issue, another burden on our schools that are already stressed out to the max — to help kids, but are we not undermining the very institution that is there to lift them up?”

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