This week’s media roundup focuses on a single subject, which was almost inescapable as I made may weekly tour of Vermont news outlets. That subject is education reform, specifically the process outlined in Act 73, the wide-ranging measure railroaded through the Legislature by Gov. Phil Scott with the active connivance of Senate Democratic leadership. It’s now in the early stages of implementation, and wouldn’t you know, everybody seems to hate the thing.

But first. I took a brief trip to Cornwall, Ontario last week. It’s a smallish (by any standard other than Vermont’s; its population is bigger than Burlington’s) city known to Americans, if it’s known at all, as the Canadian side of an international bridge over the St. Lawrence River. While I was there, I did a little reading about Cornwall and came across the story of the Lost Villages.

I’d been through Cornwall many times while driving to and from my home state of Michigan, but I’d never heard of the Lost Villages. They were ten communities in the Cornwall area that were evacuated and deliberately submerged in the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1958. Roughly 6,500 people were displaced.

When I was back home and scanning Vermont media for this column, I found a common theme: stories across the state about local reaction to the rollout of Act 73. Reactions that include confusion, budding outrage, school officials trying to forestall the worst effects of the process, and universal dismay from those who work in public education. The closest thing to a positive view was, “Oh well, I guess we have to learn to live with this.”

Which made me realize, this is very much a large-scale, top-down, St. Lawrence Seaway approach to education reform. You know, the kind of thing Phil Scott spent his nonpolitical life doing — big, mechanized projects that might do a great deal of good in the aggregate while doing damage at the granular level. But it’s one thing when you conduct such a project for a large-scale benefit like improving long-haul travel. It’s a whole different thing when you deploy the heavy equipment to try to improve the educational experience of public school students.

Which is the goal of Act 73, right? Right?????

Well, I’m seven paragraphs deep into this piece, so I’d better get to the actual subject, don’t you think?

Our first stop in this tour of the education reform front is in South Hero. In last week’s edition of the “There’s No ‘A’ in Creemee” podcast, cohost and former state senator Andy Julow recounted his attendance at a public meeting of the ill-fated Commission on the Future of Public Education, created by the Legislature in 2024 and submarined by the Legislature in 2025. Julow heard “lots of concern and questions that are, in my view, not being answered, and in their view, too.”

It reminded Julow of Act 46, the last big education reform bill approved in 2015. It pushed the schools toward consolidation as a way to cut costs. But, Julow said, “It didn’t save any money, and it didn’t improve outcomes, and here we are repeating the same process.” He’s right about the money, according to a 2024 study of Act 46’s impact on school spending. You could say the same thing about the much-ballyhooed (Only in Journalism word) move to negotiate health care benefits for school personnel on a statewide basis. It promised cost savings, but it hasn’t delivered. Remind me of the definition of insanity again?

On this week’s podcast, Julow and cohost Joanna Grossman interviewed Jay Nichols, chair of the Vermont Commission of the Future of Public Education. He took over following the resignations of multiple Commission members after the passage of Act 73. He made it clear that he would have resigned as well, but he saw that somebody had to carry on the Commission’s work even though it had been stripped of its original mandate. And his view of the next steps in education reform was downright bleak.

The Commission will issue its report in December, and Nichols expects it will be largely ignored by the Legislature in the implementation of Act 73. “I think it’s very likely that it will be, if not 100%, 99% political,” he said. “And I think the political battle that we saw last [session] at the end, which was pretty crazy, I think we’re going to see a lot more of that in the coming year. I think it’s going to be full of politics… I’m not optimistic that we’ll end up in the best place.”

You can read “full of politics” as “little to no concern for education.” Clearly, leaders and foot soldiers in public education feel sidelined by the process. Their experience and expertise is likely to be used as window dressing for whatever the politicians come up with. And some Vermont schools will become Lost Villages.

Other precincts heard from. Virginia Ray of The Commons reports on local school officials in Windham County wrestling with uncertainty over their futures. Somewhat buried in the story were disturbing remarks from the Rural School Community Alliance, which, to be fair, is not exactly an impartial observer. But still, when RSCA says large consolidations like those called for in Act 73 are “not sustainable,” and adds “there is substantial research showing the negative effects of mandated consolidation on all communities, particularly rural communities, including a lack of cost-savings,” maybe the folks under the Golden Dome ought to be paying attention.

The News & Citizen and The Hardwick Gazette each have stories about local school officials proposing mergers they really don’t like because if they don’t, they fear they’ll be shut out of the process and wind up with even worse situations. The Gazette’s Pual Fixx: “…the recommendation from the Rural Schools Alliance is that some preference should be shared so that the schools have had some voice in the process.”

And then we have The N&C’s Aaron Calvin telling us that these undesirable preferences are unlikely to carry any weight:

“The looming threat of the redistricting task force’s map drawing currently underway in Waterbury has districts in the mood to reconsider marriages their communities once found unpalatable. The Stowe and Elmore-Morristown school districts recently sent their own resolutions to willfully re-merge after voting for a mutual break-up in 2021… These resolutions, even though freely offered, may not fit the bill, however, as the task force is considering maps centered on whole counties or technology and career center catchment areas.”

Finally, a story from late August by The Montpelier Bridge’s Katie Lyford quotes Libby Bonesteel, superintendent of the Montpelier Roxbury Public Schools, as casting significant doubt on the state’s ability to pull off this Act 73 magic act:

“The legislature put forward the impression this would be easy work, but those of us in the field knowing school districts well can testify it’s not. We already attempted multiple ways to merge. I’m anxious to see how they plan to address complex issues likely to arise, such as Vermont’s geography lines.”

Well, according to Jay Nichols, they will address those complex issues in a process that “will be, if not 100%, 99% political.”

I hear the sound of bulldozers in the distance.