Education leaders tell Senate Finance to sequence reforms, address health care and mental‑health costs first

MONTPELIER, Vt. — Superintendents, principals and school finance officials told the Vermont Senate Finance Committee on Jan. 31 that they broadly support changing how the state funds public education but warned the legislature must sequence reforms carefully and address major cost drivers — especially health insurance and school‑based mental‑health services — before implementing a foundation formula or large governance consolidations.

"Any meaningful effort to reform Vermont's education system must include a strategy to manage health care costs effectively," said Chelsea Myers, Executive Director, Vermont Superintendents Association, during testimony to the committee. Myers and other witnesses said the governor’s proposal contains many unanswered implementation questions and that committees need more time and data before making final decisions.

The committee heard layered concerns in four broad areas: what costs the new formula would cover, how to account for health‑care and special‑education spending, how to transition governance and district size without disrupting students, and whether the state has comparable, uniform data on staffing and services.

Libby Blonsdale, Superintendent for Montpelier, told senators the staffing model the administration presented in preliminary modeling "seemed to superintendents pretty arbitrary," specifically calling out the way interventionists and instructional coaches were modeled for schools of particular sizes. "My school here at Union Elementary School has 400 kids. So you'd start, you know, doing the ratios with those numbers," she said, describing a model that would leave some schools with less than one full‑time…