Ken Fredette - The Fox Is Guarding the Hen House

Published in the Rutland Herald 8/20/2025

As many are aware, the Vermont Legislature passed an education “transformation” bill at the end of the most recent session, tailoring some aspects of it to ensure Gov. Scott’s signature. While there is little doubt that efforts for reform were initially driven by a message from voters that tax burdens had reached critical mass, there is no doubt at all we must seize this opportunity to continue to provide and improve educational opportunities for all Vermont children, regardless of individual needs.

It is said a crisis will bring out the best and worst in people. The former may show in those who step up to help neighbors less fortunate than themselves after an event like a flood, and the latter in those who see opportunities for personal gain, like jacking up prices on N95 masks during COVID.

As more and more children are coming into our schools with complex emotional and physical needs, specialty schools to attend to those needs outside traditional classroom settings have stood up in Vermont, most with honorable intentions, I’m sure. Unfortunately, there have been a handful of outliers more focused on financial gain than student well-being, and resources to properly oversee them are lacking — not in quality, but in quantity, in the case of personnel at the Agency of Education.

But there is another entity — the Council of Independent Schools (CIS) — that also monitors private and independent schools in Vermont. This is closely akin to a fox monitoring a henhouse, and one does not have to look far to find glaring evidence in support of that assessment.

Vermont Public reporter Lola Duffort has chronicled the saga of a southern Vermont therapeutic school for autistic children for quite some time. The school had come under scrutiny as far back as October 2018 (see Ms. Duffort’s VTDigger story of July 24, 2019) for failure to comply with requirements to report financial data, and more recently, for not having a curriculum designed to help students improve their quality of life. Pledging to come into compliance under new leadership, they cycled through five executive directors in as many years.

On April 1, 2025, Vermont Public published a story by Ms. Duffort in which the school’s business manager, when asked by VT AOE investigators to explain the school’s enrollment contracting and billing practices, was quoted as saying he kept that information in his head. This school was allowed to charge up to $99,840 a year per student — paid for by Vermont taxpayers — and had no books to show. Admittedly, I am far from qualified to determine what is needed to properly provide to students with special needs, but took note that the school had to return nearly $136,000 in overcharges to school districts.

On May 20, 2025, the Vermont Secretary of Education issued a summary of a formal investigation of the school, and recommended that approval for it to receive public monies be rescinded until such time as they come into compliance. Note this was not a directive to close the school, only that they would be ineligible to receive tax dollars absent complying with laws overseeing that.

On May 28, the CIS voted 6-0-1 to support the Secretary of Education’s recommendation. Subsequently, having been called on for not properly warning that meeting, the Council reconvened on June 25 to “… review the motion discussed at the unofficial meeting of May 28 …” and also to acknowledge they need to abide by Vermont’s Open Meeting law. Simple enough: Confirm the previous vote and go on record they know they are a public body.

But it was not so simple. I testified briefly at the outset of that meeting, then watched with abject astonishment while the chair allowed the school’s executive director du jour and their legal counsel to rail against pretty much anybody seeking to impose the law upon the school.

The lawyer had submitted a 75-page document the day before the meeting, and Council members obligingly decided to kick the can down the road by keeping the school on probation until the end of this year, given this new “evidence,” which unsurprisingly consisted of more distraction than relevancy. Further, it contained libelous and unsubstantiated statements about four former school employees who had blown the whistle on abuses of students, and were subsequently fired.

I was somewhat charitable in thinking the CIS chair was inexperienced in how to conduct a public meeting, until I learned he is headmaster at one of our historic private academies, whereupon my charitability evaporated.

Ms. Duffort reported on Aug. 12 that, with a State Board of Education public hearing looming, the school abruptly closed, similar to what a couple of others had done previously.

As we watch the work of the Redistricting Task Force and the forthcoming legislative session, I encourage everybody to pay close attention. And if you’ve been wondering how widely reported abuses of our most vulnerable students can go on unchecked for so long, you now know part of the story: A fox has been watching the henhouse, and erecting barriers to the AOE, Secretary of Education, and the SBE from doing their jobs.

Ken Fredette