Finance committee reviews how governor’s foundation formula would shift school funding

A Vermont legislative finance committee on March 27 reviewed a Joint Fiscal Office analysis comparing school districts’ fiscal year 2025 education spending with foundation amounts in the administration’s proposed foundation formula, and discussed how proposed supervisory-district maps would change those results.

Julie Richter, an analyst with the Joint Fiscal Office, told the committee the office compared FY25 education spending with the administration’s publicly shared foundation amounts using the Agency of Education’s streamlined model. “We’re nonpartisan, unbiased fiscal analysis, not in policy recommendations,” Richter said, adding she was presenting numbers the Agency of Education had already calculated for the administration’s proposal.

The nut graf: the analysis shows most current-law districts would receive less under the administration’s foundation amounts than they spent in FY25, but the arithmetic changes once districts are reconfigured. How many districts or students win or lose depends heavily on which map of supervisory unions and supervisory districts is used alongside the new foundation math.

Key findings and context

Richter summarized several headline figures the committee discussed. Vermont’s FY25 statewide education spending (school budgets less offsetting revenues) is roughly between $1.8 billion and $1.9 billion, and the state’s long-term average daily membership (ADM) used for the analysis is about 83,400. The administration’s foundation proposal uses a base amount of $13,200 adjusted by district size, long-term ADM and pupil weights, Richter said. The Joint Fiscal Office used the Agency of Education’s final foundation amounts by current-law district for the comparison.

Under current-law districts (119 school districts, 52 supervisory unions/districts), Richter said about one-quarter of districts would have an estimated increase in funding under the administration’s foundation amount compared with FY25 education spending, while about three-quarters would see a relative decrease. When weighted by students rather than by number of districts, roughly 20% of students would be in districts seeing increases and roughly 80% in districts seeing decreases, according to Richter’s slide-based summary. She emphasized that those shares are sensitive to which district map is used in the model.

Map math and the Bongard configurations

Committee members pressed Richter to run the analysis against the supervisory-union and supervisory-district maps that Senator Libby Bongard’s office has proposed. Richter said she had run a set of scenarios using what the Agency of Education and the Joint Fiscal Office had available and that the committee had asked for additional analysis using the Bongard configurations. “If we look at only one set of maps, then we are only looking at one way of analyzing impacts,” she said.

Richter and committee members agreed the map choice matters because the foundation formula’s per-district calculation interacts with district size and pupil composition. Richter said the Bongard maps include supervisory unions that contain multiple school districts in some places; for the purpose of her analysis she focused on the supervisory-union/district level.

Open questions raised by the committee

Members asked several technical follow-ups that Richter said she would confirm. Those included whether the administration’s foundation numbers in the Agency of Education model include the proposed Career and Technical Education (CTE) payment that the administration lists at $17,000 per FTE CTE student, and whether proposed changes to transportation funding (committee members asked whether the administration intended to cover 100% of transportation costs versus the current 50%) were reflected in the numbers Richter used. Richter said she had relied on the Agency of Education’s streamlined model for the final foundation amounts and would follow up to confirm those line-item treatments.

Committee members also asked about which components of district budgets were being compared. Richter clarified that the analysis compares overall FY25 education spending (school budgets minus offsetting revenues) to the administration’s foundation amounts; she did not convert both sides to per-weighted-pupil metrics because the administration’s proposal changes pupil weights, which would make a direct apples-to-apples per-weighted-pupil comparison misleading without additional normalization.

Process and next steps

Richter said the administration’s foundation formula bill may come as an omnibus bill from the House and that Senator Bongard’s office expected to present its map and “the math” to the committee in the coming week. The chair suggested the Joint Fiscal Office proceed to run the Bongard-configurations analysis; Richter and committee staff agreed to follow up with clarifications on whether items such as the CTE payment and transportation were included in the Agency of Education-derived foundation amounts.

No formal votes or policy decisions were recorded during the discussion. The committee recessed as Richter left the room to attend the House floor, and members planned to reconvene with updated materials once the Bongard configurations and the administration’s bill were available.

Ending

The committee’s next analytical steps are to re-run the comparisons using the Bongard supervisory-district maps and to confirm the underlying line-item treatments (for example, CTE and transportation) in the Agency of Education’s streamlined model. Committee members said they expect a fuller foundation-formula bill and supporting materials from the administration and from Senator Bongard’s office in the coming week.