BURLINGTON (House Commerce & Economic Development Committee) — Leaders representing Vermont school boards and one of the state's largest career and technical education centers told the House committee on March 20 that a draft bill to form a single statewide CTE district needs more clarity, funding and time before the state moves ahead.

Sue Zaglowski, executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association, told the committee the draft bill lacks a findings section explaining its purpose and raised several governance concerns, including a provision she quoted that “the board of the statewide CTE school district shall be composed of 15 voting members concurrently serving as members of the member supervisory union boards appointed by the superintendents of each service region.” Zaglowski added that the draft makes the superintendent of the statewide district a nonvoting member and allows other nonvoting appointees, including students.

The VSBA executive director said her group worries that shifting rulemaking authority to the Agency of Education and moving away from elected local boards would weaken democratic accountability, and that the Agency must demonstrate capacity to meet current statutory obligations before taking on an expanded rulemaking role. She also noted the bill’s proposed timeline as aggressive: with the current July 2028 date, districts would effectively have about two fiscal years to complete a multiyear consolidation process, and the draft contains no dedicated funding to support the work.

“The transfer of rulemaking to the Agency of Education poses significant concerns to the VSBA,” Zaglowski said. She urged the committee to consider restructuring and adequately resourcing the State Board of Education so it can meet its statutory responsibilities, including rulemaking, rather than shifting that work immediately to the Agency.

Zaglowski referenced a VSBA task force report submitted to the governor, the Agency of Education and the State Board in September 2024 and told committee members that representatives who served on that task force, including Claire Wool (Burlington School Board chair) and VSBA president Flor Diaz Smith, could provide additional testimony.

Bob Travers, principal/director of the Center for Technology Essex (which he said is the largest CTE center in the state), also urged caution and argued many of the bill’s stated goals — improving equity, access, industry alignment and secondary-to-postsecondary pathways — are achievable without creating a single statewide district.

“I do not believe that a single district will help to achieve these goals or benefits. In fact, I believe that collapsing the local management centers into a statewide system will possibly lead to more inequity,” Travers said. He described his center as an all‑day program offering 22 programs, serving about “almost 400 students” next year, employing roughly 85 staff and having processed “700 applications” for admission. He told the committee that physical plant limits — not governance alone — limit access to programs that are already oversubscribed.

Travers also questioned a clause in the draft that he read as permitting the Secretary of Education broad authority “to take any action required for the sound administration of the district … The Secretary's decision shall be final.” He said that language, which a committee member noted is lifted from current statute, would mark a “departure from Vermont's history of local governance and local control” if exercised unilaterally in the new structure.

Both witnesses raised governance design questions: Zaglowski questioned selecting board members by appointment of multiple superintendents (some regions have many superintendents) rather than by election and flagged the proposed 15-member board as larger than the typical U.S. school board (commonly five to 13 members, with seven typical in 2018 surveys). Travers described how some regional models use weighted votes and said the proposed uniform 15-member composition would not reflect local differences in size and service area.

The witnesses also discussed alternatives and implementation details the committee should consider. Zaglowski recommended more data and modeling to show long-term district impacts and asked the committee to hear from the Vermont Association of School Business Officials (VASBO) about business-management and cost implications of consolidation. Travers encouraged exploring regional CTE governance models that preserve host-district relationships and shared services, and he described the program-advisory-committee structure CTE centers already use to engage employers.

Neither witness proposed that the committee stop redesign work, but both urged more time, clearer findings language in the bill, explicit funding for consolidation work and additional testimony on business and administrative costs before advancing final governance language. No formal committee action or vote on the draft bill was recorded during the portion of the hearing in this transcript.

Ending: Committee members thanked both witnesses and indicated the CTE governance language would be discussed further with House Education and Ways & Means members; the hearing record shows committee staff planned a brief break to take up a Representative Stevens amendment to H.398 later in the session.