I was surprised to receive an email recently from the Task Force on the Implementation of the Pupil Weighting Factors Report announcing a delay in releasing their proposal and data to back it up.
This came as a surprise because, for the better part of two years, it was known that the simulator provided to the Agency of Education as part of the report would need to be updated with the final Act 46 merged districts and FY2019–2021 data.
No one would have thought a task force that runs from June 2021 to Dec. 15, 2021 would still need to do that work as we approach the beginning of November, when that data would be necessary to make informed decisions while creating their proposal.
Yet here we find ourselves. Oct. 29 was the second and final scheduled public hearing, but we had no updated simulator, no updated results from the report, and only one piece of a much larger, and apparently ground-shifting, proposal.
Education finance in Vermont is an often-hard-to-understand-and-quite-complex system. Act 59 of 2021 created the “Task Force on the Implementation of the Pupil Weighting Factors Report” and a group of eight Vermont legislators who will spend time this summer determining, as the name implies, the best path forward to implementing...