The Vermont House of Representatives passed two bills crucial to future education funding late last week. H.955 and H.949 both await signatures from Governor Scott, and local school district leaders are bracing for the impacts.
The Valley Reporter reached out to Harwood Unified Union School District Superintendent Mike Leichliter and school district financial director Lisa Estler to help readers understand the impact of these two bills.
H.955 creates Cooperative Educational Service Areas, or CESAs: regional educational task forces to pool resources such as special education services. All of Washington County’s state senators voted for the bill, and so did state representative Candice White, D-Waitsfield. Rep. Dara Torre, D-Moretown, Moretown was absent and did not vote. Both of Waterbury’s state representatives, Theresa Wood and Tom Stevens, voted for the bill.
The bill does not mandate which services CESAs must provide, so each task force (Harwood has been grouped with other Washington County school districts, along with Lamoille North and Lamoille South schools and the White River Valley Supervisory Union) will determine which services they pool, also determining the immediate effects on students.
DISTRICT SIZE
“With regional service agencies, the size of the district doesn’t matter,” said Leichliter. “If you can purchase regional services, and it’s a group purchase, you can take advantage of them.”
When it comes to special education, for example, it would ease budget costs on school districts to borrow special educators from another district rather than hiring one for their own, he explained.
Leichliter, who arrived four years ago from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, has experience with regional educational task forces: Pennsylvania has Intermediate Units (IUs) that pool services such as curricular services--something Leichliter said Vermont is lacking. However, these IUs function by county, and Lancaster County has the same population as the entire state of Vermont. CESAs here won’t function the same way that IUs do in Pennsylvania due to differences in school sizes, population, and geographical features. “I don’t think that the implementation [of H.955] was as well thought through in the legislature as it could have been,” said Leichliter, “and I don’t think it will work as well as it’s written.”
SIZE, CAPACITY, DISTANCE
H.955 aims to create “voluntary, incentivized” mergers between school districts. The bill claims that larger supervisory unions “reduce per-pupil costs” and “maintain or improve student performance,” yet Leichliter said that he “has not seen strong hard evidence” to bolster those claims. The effects also may not be “by virtue of [school districts] being larger.”
The bill lays out suggestions for potential mergers, grouping districts based on size, capacity, and distance. HUUSD’s suggested merger group also contains the Barre Unified School District, the Twinfield Unified School District, and the Washington Central School District--pairing Harwood with high schools such as Spaulding, Twinfield, and U-32.
If school district mergers are determined to be necessary, they will occur within the next few years. The Weighted Student Funding Formula, encoded by Act 73, takes effect on July 1, 2029. Any merger decided upon by its CESA would require voter approval in March 2028.
FIRST STEP
The first steps for the Harwood School Board, assuming that H.955 is signed into law by Gov. Scott, is to appoint a representative to the CESA, and Leichliter will ask to be appointed. Each CESA will need to consider the types of services that they can share, and will need some administrators present.
The other bill passed by the House, H.949, aims to reduce the amount that districts may spend at or above the excess spending threshold, which is currently at 118%. Sens. Ann Cummings and Andrew Perchlik voted for the bill, but Sen. Anne Watson voted against it. Reps. White, Wood, and Stevens voted for it; Rep. Torre was absent.
In the past few years, Harwood “has hovered just a few hundred dollars below that threshold,” and in order to bring spending down to the threshold, the district will need to cut approximately $625,000 from the school budget over three years--which doesn’t factor in mandated and contractual increases like the cost of healthcare. These mandatory increases have not yet been determined, but the district Director of Finance, Lisa Estler, is creating rough estimates to present to the Board.
SIX TEACHERS
Steve Rosenberg, who represents Moretown on the HUUSD School Board, wrote in a social media post that the estimated $625,000 “is roughly equivalent to salaries and benefits for six teachers--not that we will lay off teachers, but we have to cut these funds from academics and extracurriculars that form the core of our kids' education.”
The board’s first meeting of the 2026-2027 school year will be late August, and the biggest question, according to Leichliter, will be “Do we want to be below the excess spending threshold?” He noted that the district “has done so much reductions over three years that there’s not much to hit without looking at structural changes.” Reductions in the budget are “going to have to come out of programming,” such as the former elementary foreign language program, which was cut from the budget in 2024. “For a district like ours, we’ve talked about mergers for a long time. With our numbers, there’s no way to make reductions without capital investment.”
CHALLENGES
Leichliter explained that HUUSD also faces challenges from its geography: it is a very “long, skinny district” made up of six towns and “bordered by the Green Mountains.” It faces significant transportation costs that more condensed districts do not, and it needs to factor those into its budget considerations.
Gov. Scott has been a vocal proponent of education reform. H.955 does not force school mergers, and Scott has said he would veto any bill lacking that, according to VTDigger.
“The savings aren’t in mergers of districts, they’re in increased efficiency,” said Leichliter.
“They [proponents of consolidation] keep talking about this ‘future state,’ but the efficiencies they're envisioning are several years out, and in the meantime, we need to provide ample education for students.”
