On Friday afternoon, Representative Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee) provided the Senate Education Committee with an overview of their committee bill, H.461.

On Thursday, the Committee took up H.409 with Representative Taylor, who had served six years as the behavior interventionist at Milton Elementary School and is currently the Behavior Services Coordinator there.”

The bill (H.492) that sets the statewide property tax yields which determines local property tax rates reached the House Floor on Wednesday. The average rate would decrease in FY2024, but much of that decrease will be “masked” by the Common Level of Appraisal (the leveling mechanism to account for disparities between when towns last did an appraisal) and school district spending.

Representative Conlon spoke for H.483 on behalf of the House Education Committee. He called it a “long and thoughtful bill drafting process” that focused on “core values that should be attached to every dollar spent on public education.” He voiced concern that the town tuitioning program had “strayed” from its original purpose and that it was hard to imagine that the founders of the system intended their dollars to go across oceans. This was the justification for the 25-mile radius in his mind.

On Wednesday in the House Education Committee, Chairman Conlon asked Legislative Counsel to review if H.483 conflicted with the 2200 series rules. Legislative Counsel did not believe that there were any conflicts, however there are some provisions in the rules that are not in statute and vice versa.

The House Education Committee met briefly on Tuesday to review two changes to the committee amendment being offered on H.483. The first change was to remove the Vermont School Boards Association (VSBA) model policy for admissions for publicly tuitioned students to public schools (the language was maintained for independent schools). Concerns had been raised about the model policy, and VSBA is currently re-evaluating it. However, the rationale for removal of this requirement was the that title of the bill only referenced independent schools.

The Senate Education Committee reviewed the home study provisions of H.461 on Tuesday. Chairman Campion asked Retta Dunlap (Home School Advocate, Vermont Home Education Network) to share some basic background information for newer members of the Committee. She shared a presentation showing some historical trends on home study students. The data was provided by the Vermont Home Education Network because the Agency of Education (AOE) only recently started tracking some of these metrics.

Brad James (Finance Manager, Agency of Education) joined the House Ways & Means Committee on Tuesday. He informed them that all but three districts have reported their budgets so far and the remaining ones were very small. He noted that if they assumed the remaining districts came in at the statewide average, the overall average spending increase would come out just under 8%.

Chairman Conlon shared with the House Education Committee on Tuesday that over the weekend some technical changes relating to H.483 came to light.

Chairwoman Kitchel requested on Wednesday that Legislative Counsel walk through the provisions of S.133 that are relevant to the Senate Appropriations Committee.