Act No. 129 (H.771). Education; miscellaneous amendments; bullying; public high school choice

An act relating to making technical corrections and other miscellaneous changes to education law

This act makes miscellaneous technical and other minor amendments to education law, including:

· Deleting outdated references and definitions and correcting the incorrect definition or usage of defined terms (Secs. 1, 5, 6-8, and 32)

· Amending a supervisory union's responsibility to hire someone to perform financial and student data management duties for the supervisory union (SU) by adding the requirement that this person performs the duties for the member districts as well, in order to conform with the Act 153 (2010) requirement that SUs assume these duties on behalf of the districts (Sec. 2). Similarly, the act updates language concerning auditing of school district and supervisory union accounts so that the auditing takes place at the SU level (Secs. 18-31)

· Clarifying that the authority of a school district and town to lend each other money without interest is permissible, notwithstanding the provision of law that forbids using town money for education purposes; requiring the school board to report the loans to the department of education (Sec. 3)

· Stating that two of the gubernatorial appointments to the special education advisory council will now be at-large members (Secs. 14-15)

· Adding an additional member to the Prekindergarten-16 Council who will represent the interest of after-school, summer, and expanded learning programs (Sec. 16)

· Clarifying that residents of an unorganized town, grant, and gore that is a member of a technical center school district may vote for the district board members and be elected or appointed to serve on the board (Sec. 17)

In addition, under current law, 16 V.S.A. § 821(c) authorizes a school district that maintains an elementary school to pay tuition to another public elementary school if it would be more convenient for the child due to geographic reasons. When the legislature required public schools to offer kindergarten in 1985, it added the kindergarten provision as a separate subsection (b) within section 821. The result is that although "elementary education" is elsewhere defined as including "kindergarten," it has been unclear to some districts whether the authority to pay tuition for geographic reasons applies to kindergarten. This act deletes the separate subsection (b) dealing with kindergarten and makes it clear that kindergarten is within the definition of elementary school for purposes of 16 V.S.A. § 821 as it is in other sections of Title 16 (Sec. 4).

When a school district intends to begin or expand a prekindergarten program, it is required to go through a public needs process to identify existing private providers with which it could contract. This act provides a very limited exception to that general rule: School districts are federally required to maintain a certain ratio of nonspecial needs children to special needs students for whom they must provide services. If there is an influx of special needs students and if any existing private provider with which the district already contracts is unable to absorb the extra students, then a district is permitted to begin or expand a program without the public needs assessment to satisfy the federally required ratio (Secs. 9-10).

This act repeals 16 V.S.A. § 565, which currently requires public school districts and approved and recognized independent schools to adopt hazing and harassment prevention policies, and replaces it with a new chapter 9, subchapter 5, §§ 570-570c. Although most of the changes are reorganizational and stylistic, the primary substantive change is that schools are required to adopt bullying prevention policies as well, which must be implemented by January 1, 2013. A school that does not adopt a harassment, hazing, or bullying prevention policy will be presumed to have adopted the model policy published by the department of education. The act also adds a student member to the statewide harassment, hazing, and bullying prevention advisory council (Secs. 11-13).

This act repeals regional public school choice after the 2012-2013 academic year and replaces it with statewide public high school choice. In both the existing regional and the new statewide programs, "high school" is defined as grades 9 through 12 (Secs. 33-37).

Multiple effective dates, beginning May 11, 2012