House Education is working on a school construction bill.

The first part of the bill will be to create incentives for district-wide planning grants to assess all buildings and programs, study enrollment, promote collaborations and explore and identify cost saving measures.

The second part will be to create a working group that will make recommendations to next year’s new legislature for the creation of a new state supported school construction aid program.

The task force this year was not as effective as it could be due to the July flooding. The new program will be quite different from what we had before and careful consideration is needed. The new working group will have to address the details of governance, prioritization criteria, bonding capacity, funding streams and more.

To obtain future state aid, a project will have to meet numerous criteria such as a district-wide plan, proper project planning, architecture and design work and the choosing of a vetted construction company to manage and complete the project.

The state is also aware that many projects cannot wait for the creation of the program. The current recommendation for how long the state will look back to cover qualified portions of projects that began prior to the launch of the program is five years.

Here is the link to the full Task Force Recommendations:
https://legislature.vermont.gov/Documents/2024/WorkGroups/House%20Education/School%20Construction/2024/W~Jill%20Briggs%20Campbell~The%20School%20Construction%20Aid%20Taskforce%20Report~2-1-2024.pdf

Here is the link to a shorter slide deck:
https://legislature.vermont.gov/Documents/2024/WorkGroups/House%20Education/School%20Construction/2024/W~Jill%20Briggs%20Campbell~School%20Construction%20Aid%20Taskforce%20Report~2-1-2024.pdf

The bill is still in committee and will come to the floor of the house prior to March 15. You can follow the work of the legislature here: https://legislature.vermont.gov/

You can view reports on education from the Joint Fiscal Office here: https://ljfo.vermont.gov/subjects/education

Tesha Buss
State Representative, Windsor – 5
Plymouth, Reading, Woodstock