For almost 170 years, Vermont has had a State Board of Education that operates independently from the state’s Agency of Education.
The board has been responsible for writing rules that govern public education in Vermont. That includes establishing standards for education quality, defining requirements for special education services and dictating the criteria that independent schools must meet to receive taxpayer dollars. The education agency, a branch of state government, is responsible for enforcing those rules.
But the administration of Gov. Phil Scott has proposed an overhaul of Vermont’s education system that includes stripping the board of its rulemaking authority and giving that power to the agency, which works for him.
The intent is to improve efficiency, Education Secretary Zoie Saunders told board members last week, and is “simply a practical consideration.” Because the agency is already responsible for implementing the rules, she added, it makes sense for it to craft them, too.
The shift is among a suite of policy changes the Scott administration has unveiled to overhaul education in Vermont.
Educational leaders and members of the state board disagree. They argue that the change is antithetical to the democratic process and would concentrate too much power within the agency, where rules would be written outside public view. Opponents also question whether the agency has enough staff and expertise to take on the additional task. Currently, board members work in committees to make or revise rules, in consultation with legal counsel. They are guided in their work by input from the public and experts in the field.
“If we consolidate rulemaking and implementation under a single entity, we remove an important layer of oversight that helps ensure well-rounded decision making,” Vermont Superintendents Association executive director Chelsea Myers said at a special state board meeting held last week to discuss the proposal.
The shift is among a suite of policy changes the Scott administration has unveiled to overhaul education in Vermont. Others include a new way to pay for K-12 schools, consolidation of 119 school districts into just five and expanded eligibility for school choice.
Ultimately, it will be up to the legislature to decide whether to turn Scott and Saunders’ plan into law. If the administration gets it way on the rulemaking proposal, it would further erode the state board’s power and influence, which has been diminished in recent years.
The State Board of Education was created in 1856 to serve as a bridge between local schools and the legislature. Superintendents were required to provide reports about their schools to the board, which could then provide guidance to legislators as they wrote education-related laws, according to documents in the Vermont Historical Society’s archives.
The board has evolved since those early days and now includes 10 members of the public — including two students — appointed by the governor to six-year terms. In statute, the board is still tasked with engaging with local school boards and the broader education community, establishing a strategic vision for education in the state, advising the legislature and administration on educational matters, and making rules.
For many years, Vermont’s education commissioner was chosen by and reported directly to the State Board of Education. A 2012 law gave the governor the power to appoint a secretary who would answer to him or her, not the board.
At the time, some educational leaders, including state board members, raised concerns that the move would risk making education decisions susceptible to political pressure.
The move weakened the state board, according to Armando Vilaseca, who served as Vermont’s last commissioner, and first secretary, of education from 2009 to 2013. Before 2012, the board had stronger connections to communities and more support from the Agency of Education, Vilaseca said. Agency lawyers, for example, stood ready to help the board if needed.
“That support dropped dramatically” in 2012, Vilaseca told lawmakers in testimony last month. But the board still retained its rulemaking authority, which “balanced out some of the political … obstacles that could occur.”
In the years since, politics have at times hampered the board’s ability to do its job. In 2016, for instance, it crafted rules that would have required independent, or private, schools to offer special education services and provide more documentation about their finances. After the Vermont Independent Schools Association and its members objected vociferously, then-governor Peter Shumlin’s administration blocked the rules from taking effect.
Two years later, the Scott administration denied the board’s request for help from an agency attorney to draft a report related to Act 46, a law that merged school districts, according to Krista Huling, a former board chair. Huling said she subsequently appealed to the office of then-attorney general T.J. Donovan, who connected the board to outside legal counsel so it could complete its work.
The governor has always appointed state board members, and Scott has been chief executive for so long that all current members are people of his choosing. Still, the board prides itself on being an independent and politically neutral body that can raise concerns publicly when it believes the Agency of Education is off track.
In several instances over the past year, the tension between the two bodies has bubbled to the surface, primarily around oversight of independent schools.
When those institutions need state approval to receive public tuition dollars, the Agency of Education must first complete a site visit and do an initial review of their applications. The state board makes the final decision.
But recently, 63 independent schools have missed their renewal dates because the agency is behind on its part of the process. Secretary Saunders told board members in November that the agency had a plan to address the backlog. That didn’t appease some board members, who noted with frustration that the delay impeded their work.
The sides have also been at loggerheads over a form designed by the agency that independent schools are required to fill out to prove they are able to provide special education services — a new rule the state board put in place several years ago.
The conflict came to a head at a November meeting, when board members Kimberly Gleason and Tammy Kolbe sparred with the agency’s general counsel, Emily Simmons.
Gleason and Kolbe told Simmons that one of the questions on the form was written in a way that allowed independent schools to skirt the rule.
“This form is not OK,” Kolbe said. “It has to change.” (The agency did not respond to a question about whether it has changed the form to address board members’ concerns.)
Should rulemaking be transferred to the agency, some worry it would become an opaque process that would allow the administration to make rules without accountability.
“If you take away the rulemaking authority from the board and hand it to the agency, there may not be that same level of transparency.” Jennifer Samuelson
Because of open meeting laws, rulemaking currently happens in front of the public, and “they really get to see how the sausage is made,” board chair Jennifer Samuelson told legislators last week. There is also time reserved for public comment at every state board meeting. The Agency of Education, by contrast, is not bound by such requirements.
“I think the concern is that if you take away the rulemaking authority from the board and hand it to the agency, there may not be that same level of transparency,” Samuelson said.
Gleason, whose six-year term ends next month, put it more bluntly.
She said such a change would be “a travesty” because it would centralize control of K-12 education under the governor.
Jess DeCarolis, a longtime Agency of Education higher-up who left last August, also objected to the change. She told board members at last week’s meeting that she had seen “an increasing move to a politicized perspective and away from the agency being able to play a core and critical role” of providing “objective and factual information from nonpartisan individuals.”
“I do have significant concerns about our move away from a constitutionally protected and democratic process of checks and balances,” she said.
Others worry the agency does not have the capacity for additional work, given that educators in the field have said it has been unable to adequately support them in recent years.
In response to those concerns, Saunders acknowledged that she “inherited an agency with many issues” when she took office in April 2024. She told board members that she had been “very transparent and very methodical in reviewing those challenges … and coming up with solutions to address those challenges so that we can have a stronger public education system.”
Those solutions, it appears, are part of the governor’s education transformation plan. That proposal says the state board’s primary function would be to support school boards in each of the five newly formed districts by giving them feedback on their policies.
That’s a far cry from the leadership responsibilities the board has previously had.
In testimony to the House Education Committee on February 5, board chair Samuelson and vice chair Kolbe acknowledged that the body has lost power, and clarity about its role, since 2012. But both believe the board — because of its neutrality and independence — still has a critical role to play. They want to help figure out what, exactly, that is.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Power Move | The governor’s education overhaul would strip authority from the independent State Board of Education”
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