Senate Leader Says School Choice Expansion Is Off the Table

Sen. Phil Baruth Credit: File: JEB WALLACE-BRODEUR

Updated at 1:47 p.m.

Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth (D/P–Chittenden-Central) said on Tuesday that he won’t support a proposal to make all Vermont students eligible for school choice through a lottery system, a key part of Gov. Phil Scott’s plan to overhaul the state’s education system.

Broadening school choice in the state is not something Vermonters have asked for and “has the potential to sink education transformation efforts,” Baruth wrote. “Allowing that to happen would be an unforced error, and would set our reform efforts back substantially.”

Baruth’s statement is the first formal opposition from lawmakers to at least one aspect of the Scott administration’s sweeping education proposal, which is intended to reduce costs, improve quality and rein in property taxes.
Under Vermont’s current system, only students who live in districts without a public school are allowed to use tax dollars to send their children to a public or approved independent school of their choice. Around 3,500 pupils use those funds to attend independent, or private, schools.

But a proposal outlined last Thursday by Education Secretary Zoie Saunders calls for five newly formed regional school districts to designate an unlimited number of “school-choice schools.” Those institutions would be required to meet specific education quality and financial criteria set by the Vermont Agency of Education.

Any student in the state would be eligible to attend a “school-choice school,” but they’d have to enter a lottery to do so. Those schools would not be held to the same “academic and operational requirements” as other schools, “although school safety requirements, nondiscrimination requirements and school climate requirements would remain,” according to a memo outlining the plan.
Last week, the Vermont-NEA teachers’ union called the school-choice proposal a “non starter.” And the Vermont School Boards Association issued a press release characterizing the idea as part of “a playbook to expanding school vouchers and defunding our public schools” that wouldn’t rein in the cost of education. In its release, the association linked to a statement from Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political advocacy group founded by the Koch brothers, lauding Scott’s plan.
The governor, meanwhile, doubled down on the plan, saying in a press release on Friday that the expansion is “misleadingly” being referred to as a “voucher system.”
Scott said the plan would eliminate public dollars from flowing to private schools outside the state and country. Currently, a small number of students in towns without a high school use the money to subsidize tuition to elite, out-of-state boarding schools.

The plan would also create “more accountability standards for independent and public schools,” Scott said. The release also noted that there is currently a moratorium on new independent schools, imposed by the legislature, that his administration would not seek to lift.

House Democrats released a statement of their own on Saturday, saying “expanded school choice and voucher policies are an attack on the strength and quality of our public education system.” They vowed to “continue working together as a caucus in a way that puts the future of our kids front and center” despite the “hard decisions ahead.”

Baruth, in his statement, urged the Scott administration to work with lawmakers on an overhaul of school governance and funding “in service of the larger goals we share.”

“Vermonters are counting on all of us to work toward greater affordability, efficiency, and equity within the system,” he wrote, “and that will be more than enough for our Senate committees to shoulder.”