The targeted date for the
Legislature to adjourn is May 7; activity inside the Statehouse indicates the
Legislature is likely to meet that goal.
Major bills that typically are debated until the final days and hours of
the session, including the State’s appropriations bill, capital bill, and
miscellaneous tax bill, have each gone to conference committee. However, nothing should be considered a complete
surprise at the end of a session, two examples being last-minute provisions in
bills and the date of final adjournment.
S.95
includes a section that would allow any
school district employee to elect to have his or her wages paid over the course
of a twelve-month period beginning on the first day of school. Our Associations have raised several concerns
with this section including the administrative complexity of adjusting payments
to match hours actually worked, complexities regarding federal minimum wage
requirements, potential for overpayment of employees, and accounting and
auditing concerns regarding payment of wages across two fiscal years for a
single year of work.
As of this writing, it
is unclear what will happen with this section of law. S.95 was approved by the Senate yesterday,
but no House committee has held any hearings on the bill. There is a realistic possibility that the
twelve-month pay provision will be attached to another bill that will
pass. In anticipation of last-minute
action on the provision, we have informed a number of House and Senate members
regarding our concerns with the language; the outcome remains to be seen.
H.430,
a bill that would require school districts to provide mentoring services for
new principals and technical center directors, has been approved by the Legislature;
it now awaits final approval from the Governor.
H.430 would also direct a study to be completed on mentoring services
for new teachers. The House concurred
with amendments to the original language made by the Senate so no conference
committee was necessary. Here is a link
to the text of the bill as approved:
http://www.leg.state.vt.us/docs/2012/bills/Senate/H-430.pdf
S.53,
a bill that would repeal the current-law cap on the number of prekindergarten
children that school districts can count in their average daily membership, has
been approved by the Legislature. Governor
Shumlin has long called for a repeal of the caps and
will sign S.53, making it law effective for the FY 2012 school year. This change does not require districts to
provide pre-K services, but ends the need to sort out which children receive
services to stay beneath an arbitrary cap.
As we reported as our
lead article in the Education Legislative Report Issue #8,
Act 157 of 2010 included extensive, prescriptive administrative procedures
related to background checks for prospective employees who may have
unsupervised contact with children or vulnerable adults (including all school district employees). The implementation date for those
requirements in Act 157 is currently July 1, 2011. The House and Senate have taken different
approaches to modifying this requirement.
The Senate Judiciary
Committee amended H.264, a bill that primarily concerns illegal operation of
motor vehicles. It now includes a simple
section that delays the implementation date for those Act 157 provisions one
additional year, to July 1, 2012.
The House Judiciary
Committee, addressing the same issue earlier in the session, took a different
approach, encapsulated in a bill the Committee introduced several weeks ago (H.450). We described the House Committee’s approach
in Issue #8.
At this time, it is
uncertain what approach the Legislature will ultimately take, although it
appears that the Senate Committee’s delay provision has a better chance of
enactment than the House Committee’s bill.
If the delay provision is enacted, we expect some long-term solution
would be developed in 2012, possibly incorporating some or all of H.450.
H.440, the bill designed
to restructure the state level governance of education in Vermont, has been
returned to the House Education Committee for further work between now and
January. In its most current draft, the
bill would have transformed the position of Commissioner of Education to a
Secretary of Education appointed directly by the Governor. H.440 would have also reconfigured the
composition of the State Board of Education.
The bill acknowledged that these transitions would have necessitated
changes to the duties of both the education chief and the state board, but it
did not delineate these changes in detail; instead, the bill left some of that
work for the consideration of the 2012 Legislature.
It is our understanding
that H.440 is not “dead.” The
Legislature appears likely to continue to work on developing and considering a
more comprehensive bill that would clearly defines the duties of a new board
and secretary. We expect that the issue
will continue to be debated in 2012.
Our Associations are supportive
of the decision to delay action. The
most recent draft of the bill raised concerns, chief among them that H.440 would
significantly weaken the duties and responsibilities of the State Board. We support the decision to take more time to
sort out the complexities of this very important matter.
H.299,
a bill that would repeal the requirement that some school district budget
proposals be divided and presented to the voters in a two-article format, was
approved by the House earlier this year but the bill has not been taken up in
the Senate.
In March, Governor Shumlin
stated his support for the repeal bill and the House approved H.299 on a
voice vote. Our Associations also gave
strong support to H.299, consistent with our position that the two-vote
provision is a confusing and arbitrary approach to cost containment that does
not reflect real school costs and unnecessarily complicates the process of
budget development and approval.
Since March, the bill
has not progressed in the legislative process.
At this point, it appears unlikely that the bill will be approved by the
Senate this year. The original two-vote
provision is set to expire following the FY 2014 budget approval process, so we
were hopeful that H.299 would have hurried the two-vote provision’s repeal by
two years.
S.100, a miscellaneous
education bill has been approved by a conference committee of Senate and House
members. The conference committee
agreement is very likely to be ratified by the Legislature.
A number of the bill’s
provisions make technical changes to Title 16 and others pertain solely to
higher education. What follows is a
description of the sections of the bill that substantively pertain to K-12
education.
Studies
Both the House and
Senate versions of S.100 includes three studies for
the Department of Education (DOE) to investigate, with reports due January 15,
2012, in time for next year’s legislative session.
The House has approved
its version of S.92,
a bill concerning use of environmentally preferable cleaning products in public
and approved independent schools. While
the intent of the Senate and House versions of the bill are substantially
similar in intent, the approach taken by the House differed from the Senate in
several ways. We described the Senate
version of the bill in our Education Legislative Report Issue #7.
Antimicrobial pesticides
(i.e., disinfectants and sanitizers) would not be regulated in the House
version of the bill, in accordance with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
regulations. The Senate version said
that disinfectants would be regulated only at some time in the future when the
EPA determined there to be an environmentally preferable disinfectant.
The House version of the
bill would prohibit distributors, manufacturers, and school cleaning
contractors from selling or distributing non-environmentally preferable
cleaning products. The Senate version
would prohibit schools from using non-environmentally preferable products. In both versions, “environmentally
preferable” is defined as an environmentally preferable product used by the
State’s Department of Buildings and General Services, or as a product certified
as environmentally preferable by an independent third-party organization.
Both versions of the
bill would allow schools to use non-environmentally preferable products that
were already purchased up to one year beyond the implementation date of the
proposed law (July 1, 2011). The House
version would allow approved independent schools with less than 50 students one
additional year to transition to environmentally preferable products.
The Senate version would
prohibit air fresheners in school. The
House version would allow air fresheners in schools only if they have been
certified as environmentally preferable by an independent third party.
Both versions would
direct the Health Department to include a workshop on green cleaning products
and practices in its annual training for school custodial personnel.
S.92 is likely to end up
in a committee of conference, and we will report on the outcome.
The House and Senate
have approved different versions of H.38,
a bill that would direct school districts to accommodate children of active
duty military personnel. A conference
committee has been appointed to resolve the different approaches to the
legislation.
H.38, as originally
introduced, is interstate compact language promoted by the Department of
Defense and the Council of State Governments.
Each state that enters the compact (by approving the bill in its state
legislature) agrees to accommodate active duty military personnel with regard
to the educational services provided to their children when personnel are
relocated or deployed. Those
accommodations include swiftly enrolling children in school and retrieving their
educational records, enrolling children in grade levels and courses comparable to
their sending district, providing comparable special services if applicable,
and emphasizing flexible pathways to on-time graduation. States that enter the compact also agree to
abide by administrative rules promulgated by an interstate commission that was
created to govern compact-related rules and disputes among participating
states.
The House chose not to
adopt H.38 as introduced, and instead approved substitute language that would
direct school districts to make many of the same accommodations for children of
active duty military personnel as prescribed by the compact. However, the House version would not have
Vermont join the interstate compact and would not make it subject to rules
promulgated by the interstate commission.
The Senate chose to
adopt much of the language of H.38 as originally introduced, including that Vermont
would join the interstate compact. The
Senate did modify the original language to ensure Vermont’s sovereignty was not
mitigated by the interstate commission’s rulemaking authority, and to limit its
financial and legal liability to the commission.
At this point, it is
unclear what approach the conference committee will favor in resolving the two
versions of the bill. In any event, both
versions would direct school districts to accommodate military children in a
mostly common sense manner.
END