The Senate and House passed legislation Friday that promises to reshape how schools are funded and governed in Vermont. The bill include provisions to encourage voluntary mergers of school districts as well as regional resource-sharing — measures that lawmakers hope will ease pressure on property taxpayers. Passing the hotly debated bills on Friday cleared the way for an orderly adjournment. Conference committees worked late into Thursday night to resolve differences between the House and Senate on H.955, the education transformation bill, and H.949, the yield bill. The bills will now go to Governor Phil Scott, who is expected to sign them both into law. The final version of H.955 retains the main elements of education transformation contained in the version of the bill approved by the Senate on Tuesday. Those include cooperative education service areas, or CESAs, regional entities which allow districts to share services; voluntary school-district mergers to be voted on in March 2028; and a new funding formula and a new property tax classification for second homes that will take effect on July 1, 2029 as long as multiple conditions are met. The conference committee tweaked recommended school-district groupings for merger-study committees. One notable change is that the legislation now suggests that Champlain Valley Union School District, the largest district in the state, and Mount Mansfield Unified Union School District discuss a possible merger. That leaves Essex Westford School District as the only one in the state that the legislature hasn’t recommended study merging with another district. The final bill also prevents both public and independent schools that are eligible to receive public dollars from charging tuition to families above the amount their school district has agreed to pay. However, it leaves to a study committee the question of whether those schools could charge additional fees to that student’s family once the new funding system goes into effect. The conference committee also made small changes to provisions related to reimbursing school districts for legacy debt and the timing in which class-size minimum requirements will go into effect. The yield bill, H.949, meanwhile uses $100 million from the state’s general fund to “buy down” education property taxes, which translates to an estimated average statewide property tax increase of around 3.5 percent. Next year, the state’s excess spending threshold — the maximum amount a school district can spend per pupil before triggering a tax penalty — will be 115.5 percent of the statewide average district per pupil, a higher amount than the 112 percent contemplated earlier in the legislative session. Under the bill, the excess spending threshold would ratchet down by 1 percent each year until the foundation formula goes into effect. The bill also excludes debt from school-construction bonds approved before July 1, 2026 in the calculation of per-pupil spending for the purpose of calculating excess spending. The prior version of the bill excluded only bonds approved before July 1, 2024. The new date is a big win for Mountain Views Supervisory District. That district passed a $112 million bond three months ago to build a new middle and high school in Woodstock, with the contingency that bond costs would be exempt from the excess-spending threshold. If the 2024 deadline had held, that project would likely have died on the vine. Mountain Views superintendent Sherry Sousa sent an urgent message to her community earlier this week imploring residents to contact legislators to change the date to include the school district’s bond. In an email Friday, Sousa called the outcome “a win” worthy of celebration. “We are one more step towards a new Middle and High School building,” Sousa wrote. Twenty-three House members voted against the yield bill. Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (D-Norwich), a former education secretary, blasted the legislation, saying she believed the excess spending penalty would harm Vermont’s most vulnerable school districts. “In these regions that are being impacted by this penalty, we are leveling down before we have understood the impact or built the system needed to level up … The result is going to be instability, school closure and harm to other people’s children,” Holcombe said. “And in a rural state, instability … falls hardest on communities with the fewest alternatives and the least capacity to absorb disruption.” The post Senate and House Approve Key Education Bills, Paving Way for Governor’s Signature appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less