House Education reviews Ways and Means changes to H.955, flags data and implementation tasks
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Summary
The House Education committee on April 14 reviewed Ways and Means’ eight-part amendment to H.955, clarifying funding sources, adding pre-K reporting and monitoring requirements, restricting tuition/fee charges above the foundation formula, and assigning new rulemaking and reporting duties to AOE and the State Board; no formal votes were taken.
Beth St. James of the Office of Legislative Council walked the House Education committee through the Ways and Means amendment to H.955 at a meeting on Tuesday, April 14, outlining eight instances where the amendment alters or adds statutory language and identifying implementation tasks for the Agency of Education (AOE), the Joint Fiscal Office (JFO) and other entities.
The amendment clarifies funding sources and routing, tightens contingency and effective-date language for the foundation formula, requires new reporting and monitoring for prekindergarten, and limits schools’ ability to charge tuition or fees beyond the foundation-model base and weights. St. James said the CSO startup grant increase previously adopted by the committee (from $10,000 to $15,000 per grant) is unchanged in amount but is explicitly sourced to the Act 73 Education Transformation appropriation.
Why it matters: the changes reassign implementation tasks and add data-collection requirements that AOE, JFO and Building Bright Futures will have to deliver before the foundation model can be fully implemented. Those tasks — including new forms for tuition students, a pre-K hours reporting requirement, and multiple rulemaking deadlines — affect how districts will compute weights, how funds flow, and what information state agencies must publish and monitor.
St. James said the first amendment clarifies that the extra CSO startup grant funds come from the Act 73 Education Transformation appropriation and that Ways and Means did not change grant amounts or allowable uses. She summarized two linked changes in the study-committee sections: facilitators must account for "grantless values" (including the homestead/property tax exemption and current education spending) and must monitor General Assembly fiscal work so committees see up-to-date fiscal modeling.
On facilitator and appropriations routing, Ways and Means left appropriation amounts intact but altered bill language so that AOE receives facilitator funds and is required within 45 days of the act’s passage to provide the money to the Vermont Learning Collaborative rather than directing funds to the Collaborative in the bill text.
The amendment replaces the committee’s Section 21 with a package that retains legislative intent for pre-K funding but adds monitoring and reporting duties. AOE, DCF and Building Bright Futures are required to establish a joint monitoring system, and Building Bright Futures must report to the General Assembly on or before Dec. 1, 2026, with initial findings, data gaps, and any legislative recommendations. St. James noted that the JFO contractor budget tied to the pre-K study was increased from $50,000 to $75,000 and that those funds are not part of the education transformation appropriation.
The amendment also adds a new statutory requirement that districts report annually to AOE the number of hours of pre-K education received by each pre-K child for whom the district provides or pays tuition; Building Bright Futures is added to the entities required to participate in monitoring. St. James said the change aims to ensure the data needed for any future weight calculations under the foundation model are being collected.
On tuition and fees, the amendment restricts receiving schools from requiring tuition or fees above what a tuition student brings under the foundation formula (base plus weights). The change removes or limits the previous ability for an electorate to vote to assess additional tuition in many cases; an exception in the amendment would allow receiving schools to charge up to 5% of base for some high school contexts, but any such charge must be applied uniformly. Committee members pressed St. James on whether eliminating higher incoming-student tuition would harm districts that use those funds for transportation or extracurriculars; she and others said JFO modeling will be needed and that transportation transfers remain an outstanding policy choice for the committee.
The amendment raises additional implementation tasks: Section 25 increases the voter-approval threshold for study-committee budgets from $50,000 to $500,000 (citing special election costs), Section 26 requires the State Board to adopt rules by March 31, 2027 to identify "small by necessity" or "sparse by necessity" schools, and Section 27 requires AOE to update district-quality standards, produce a transportation report to the committee by Dec. 1, and adopt length-of-day rules by March 31, 2027. Section 29 moves determinations about "small/sparse" from the State Board to AOE and Section 29a expands statutory definitions (average class size, full-time-equivalent, school day, teacher of record) to support implementation.
Committee members asked for clarifications about the term "terminal" used in several exceptions; St. James recommended asking AOE for a formal definition. There were no formal motions or recorded votes during the session; the committee planned to reconvene the following day at 9:15 a.m. for an update on community schools and to continue questions on the Ways and Means amendment.
"All this amendment does is make it clear that the source of this money is the Act 73 Education Transformation money," Beth St. James told the committee, summarizing several of the appropriation clarifications.
The committee did not take final action; next steps are JFO modeling where requested and agency rulemaking and reports as specified in the amendment.
