Fiscal office: H.454 scenario B2.1 keeps statewide payment at $1.88B but shifts funding across counties

The Senate Education Committee on April 29 heard the Joint Fiscal Office present scenario B2.1, a modeling run for H.454 that applies proposed weights to the state's current-law school districts while constraining total education payments to the fiscal 2025 level of $1,880,000,000.

Ezra Holden of the Joint Fiscal Office told the committee the modeling honored a firm constraint: "for this modeling, one of the requirements was that I constrained total spending to that $1,880,000,000.00." The scenario adds grade-level weights for grades 6–8 and 9–12 and narrows some sparsity and small-school categories compared with earlier drafts.

Why this matters: H.454 would change how state education dollars are allocated. The committee's modeling shows that shifting the district construct and applying the bill's weights changes which communities gain or lose money even when total statewide spending is held constant.

The model's key assumptions and outputs: it applies grade weights of 0.08 for grades 6–8 and 0.12 for grades 9–12; an economic-disadvantage (FPL) weight of 1.02; an English-learner (EL) weight modeled as 1.39 in these runs; a small-school weight of 0.21; and a sparsity weight of 0.13 that is limited to districts with fewer than 36 persons per square mile. Under B2.1 the model produced a long-term weighted ADM near 29,000 (previously about 28,000 under an alternate construct), which reduced the base amount by roughly $90 per pupil compared with the earlier VSBA-based scenario; the presentation aligned the B2.1 base to $14,650 per pupil for the scenario presented to the committee.

The county-level snapshot from the JFO showed uneven effects: Bennington County would see a relative increase (about +23.8%), while Addison County would see one of the largest relative decreases (about −13.7%). Holden told the committee that those county numbers are produced by sorting districts to counties using Agency of Education data and that individual districts within a county could experience changes opposite to their county's aggregated direction.

On data and modeling limits: Holden and committee members repeatedly noted data constraints that affect the modeling. The Joint Fiscal Office used a flat EL weight of 1.39 because proficiency‑level EL counts are suppressed in publicly shared data; someone from the Joint Fiscal Office pointed out that applying tiered EL weights would require non‑suppressed AOE data. Esther Holborn, Joint Fiscal Office, stated that when the VSBA region construct was used only one VSBA region (Kingdom North) met the sub‑36 sparsity threshold; expanding to current‑law districts increased sparsity counts and changed the base.

Committee members and staff also referenced Dr. Colby's work and JFO materials. Holden noted Dr. Colby's recommendation would have raised total spending (he cited $1,914,000,000 and a higher base in Colby's recommendation), but the B2.1 runs intentionally kept total payments at the FY25 level so members could see distributional impacts without changing the statewide total.

Next steps: Committee members requested Agency of Education staff be present for future sessions to answer data and methodology questions and asked JFO for additional runs testing alternate sparsity and small‑school definitions. No formal committee vote was recorded during the session.