By all appearances, the Senate’s confirmation vote on Zoie Saunders (scheduled for Tuesday) is going down to the wire. The Scott administration sure seems to think so, if chief of staff Jason Gibbs’ obsession with Krista Huling is any indication. I’ve also been told that Gov. Phil Scott is making calls to key senators on behalf of his — Only in Journalism Word alert — embattled nominee for education secretary. That’s a level of personal attention he seldom gives to any matter before the Legislature.

If the Senate does reject Saunders, it will be a seismic (another Only in Journalism word) event in our politics. It’s extremely rare for the Senate to reject a gubernatorial nominee. Certainly the administration took that step for granted. (As did Vermont Public.) Otherwise they wouldn’t have let Saunders disrupt her life and career to take the job. One has to wonder if she was fully informed about the risk involved.

If the Senate does reject Saunders due to her stunning lack of experience as (1) a public educator and (2) an administrator overseeing a sizable bureaucracy, it will be in spite of, not because of, the Senate Education Committee’s failure to carry out its responsibility to vet Saunders’ nomination.

Which leads me to the man pictured above, committee chair Sen. Brian Campion, and the rather curious composition of his committee.

Campion is no friend of the public schools. He is, rather, a friend of “public education” as people like Zoie Saunders define it: publicly-funded education, no matter how it’s governed. Back in 2014, Campion’s local school district of North Bennington* decided to convert its small elementary school into a privately-managed academy, for which property tax revenue pays the freight. Given the state’s method of funding schools, that includes a share of your tax dollars and mine.

Correction: Campion’s district mate Sen. Dick Sears has written to say that Campion does not, in fact, live in North Bennington. He works in North Bennington, hence the confusion. Sears is actually the one who resides in North Bennington. For what it’s worth, both Campion and Sears are supporters of independent schools, and are the only two Democrats on the record as of early Monday evening as supporting Saunders’ nomination.

I can’t say that Campion played an active role in the change, but it’s where he lives and it seems to reflect his approach to governance of private schools that receive public funds. At the time of the North Bennington decision, then-education secretary Armando Vilaseca expressed concern about oversight of such schools, actually proposed a legislative ban on such public-private conversions, and proposed that schools with publicly funded enrollments of 25 percent or more provide the same services, and meet the same guidelines, as public schools.

Ten years later this remains a sticking point, and Campion’s committee has served as a roadblock to legislation along the lines suggested by Vilaseca. Last year, the House easily approved H.483 (no roll calls were recorded), which would require Approved Independent Schools to follow the same rules as public schools. On April 4, 2023, the Senate assigned the bill to Campion’s committee.

Nothing has happened since. The bill is going to die at the end of the session.

Similarly with S.66, introduced early in the biennium and co-sponsored by 11 Senators. It was referred to Senate Education, and there it sat. No hearings, no witnesses.

Go back to 2016, and you see Campion proposing to limit the authority and powers of the state Board of Education after it proposed new rules, ahem, requiring that AIS’s abide by the same rules as public schools. At the time, he said “Rulemaking should be with the Agency of Education. That is where it belongs.” He said that in December 2016 when Phil Scott was about to become governor, so it’s not as though Campion was angling for Democratic control of the process.

Which brings me to the current makeup of the Education Committee. There are so few Republicans in the Senate that they are spread thinly among the chamber’s standing committees. Most have only one Republican, while there are no Republicans at all on Senate Natural Resources & Energy.

Senate Education is one of only four standing Senate committees that include two Republicans. With Campion, there seems to be 3-2 majority support for school choice in at least some of its many iterations, and 3-2 majority opposition to reforming the AIS system. This makes the committee’s kid-gloves handling of Saunders’ confirmation seem entirely predictable. It was baked into the membership of the committee. One can almost imagine Campion nodding his head when Saunders claimed that charter schools are public schools.

This is the panel responsible for education policy in the Senate. So why, at a time when public schools face serious challenges and a Supreme Court hearing has opened the door to public funding for all sorts of private schools, was the committee constituted with what seems to be an anti-public school majority?

Maybe that’s unfair. Let’s say the committee’s majority seems to have a bias toward the AIS system, even if maintaining the system as-is could further weaken public schools.

No one outside of the Senate’s Committee on Committees can say why Senate Education was constructed the way it was. But it sure looks like Senate leadership has its thumb on the scale for independent schools.

Speaking of Senate leadership, it so happens that Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth was chair of Senate Education before Campion. And under Baruth, Senate Education sought to throw out the AIS rules proposed by the Board of Education, limit its future rulemaking authority, and end its role in choosing the education secretary. Again, at a time when Republican Phil Scott was governor, and making those changes would have strengthened his hand in education policy.

In spite of the apparent scale-thumbing by Campion and (indirectly) by Senate leadership, it seems as though the body as a whole might overrule the Education Committee and reject Saunders’ nomination. That’s just one more way in which this would be a, cough, seismic political event. And one more indication of just how wrongheaded the Scott administration was in believing it could ram through an unqualified nominee for a post as crucial as education secretary.