Senate advances broad education package, including cell‑phone limits and school cardiac plans

Senate reporters advanced H.480, a miscellaneous education bill that packages dozens of technical and policy changes spanning school safety, virtual learning, literacy, career and technical education and other K‑12 issues. The Senate education committee recommended proposing the committee’s amendments to the House and the Senate later ordered third reading of the bill.

The bill bundles changes to last year’s school‑safety statute (Act 29), updates virtual‑learning oversight, modifies BOCES startup grant eligibility, expands the Vermont National Guard tuition benefit, requires cardiac‑emergency response plans and AED access for school athletics, lengthens the allowable term for school energy performance contracts from 10 to 20 years without voter approval, and adds a new subchapter limiting student cell‑phone use during the school day.

Senator Weeks (Rutland), reporting for the education committee, said, “This section amends Act 29, last year’s school safety act, to recognize lessons learned over the past year,” describing adjustments that push some implementation deadlines and postpone data collection for behavioral threat assessment teams to give schools more time to gather experience. The committee’s report also includes housekeeping updates to listings of approved post‑secondary institutions, procurement thresholds for nonprofit school food service accounts, and modest changes to flexible‑pathways definitions and virtual‑learning oversight.

The bill would explicitly assign responsibility for behavioral threat‑assessment policy to school boards and procedure to superintendents and would delay certain implementation dates: for example, the start of comprehensive behavioral threat assessment…