Senate Finance hears national school‑funding expert on foundation/weighted student formulas; committee also approves two insurance bills and a gubernatorial app

Rebecca Sebelius, executive director of the nonprofit Ed Fund, told the Vermont Senate Finance Committee on Feb. 6 that a move to a “foundation” or more traditional weighted student funding formula would align Vermont with reforms other states have adopted and could improve equity and student outcomes.

Sebelius summarized decades of school‑finance litigation and reform and described research suggesting that how money is distributed matters as much as how much is spent. “There’s gotta be a better way to do this,” she said of existing school funding systems, and she urged lawmakers to use research that answers “for whom, under what circumstances, and from where school money should come.”

The expert framed the issue historically, citing U.S. Supreme Court and state court cases that shifted responsibility for public education funding to states and prompted state‑level litigation and reform: San Antonio v. Rodriguez, Milliken v. Bradley, Serrano v. Priest and Rose v. Council for a Better Education. She said those rulings helped produce the two persistent tensions policy makers now balance: equity (equalizing resources across districts) and adequacy (ensuring sufficient total resources statewide).

Sebelius described the model the administration and many states call a foundation formula — also known elsewhere as a weighted student formula — in which the state calculates a…