For weeks, Helen Robertson’s husband has driven back and forth multiple times a day between the two funeral homes the couple owns in St. Johnsbury and Lyndonville.
Because he is the only licensed funeral director on staff, there are some tasks that only he can perform, Robertson said, like making arrangements with families and being present at a graveside.
“If you’ve only got one funeral director, you can’t even do two services at a time,” Robertson, of Guibford-Pearsons Funeral Home and Sayles Funeral Home, said.
But Robertson will soon be qualified to take on most of those responsibilities herself. She’s poised to be among the first people in Vermont to become a licensed funeral director under a new set of professional regulations, set to take effect next month, that create a streamlined path into the career.
The new rules, finalized on Thursday by the Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules, came as the state’s funeral directors sought to welcome younger and midcareer people into the profession’s aging ranks.
Previous regulations required that funeral directors complete a two-year associate degree program, which can come with a price tag of more than $60,000. There are no funeral director schools anywhere in Vermont, so people needed to go out of state to complete it.
The new professional rules will allow people to become funeral directors through a combination of a certificate program and apprenticeship-style work experience. Community College of Vermont’s recently established 29-credit certificate program could be completed in just two semesters, at a cost of approximately $8,000 for an in-state student.
“This allows us to educate, employ and mentor all at the same time,” Chris Palermo, president of the Vermont Association of Funeral Directors, said Friday.
In Vermont, there have been concerns for the future of the profession as interest has diminished and as the workforce has aged. Meanwhile, it is expensive to complete the qualifications, and the job comes with considerable levels of emotional stress, according to people in the field.
Palermo, who described himself as an “architect” of the new professional standards, said that the changes came out of an effort to try to make it more accessible for people to become funeral directors.
“We need to make it more user friendly and educationally friendly to pursue this,” Palermo said.
There are some differences between the traditional school path and the new certificate program option. Completing the two-year funeral school qualifies people both as funeral directors and as embalmers. The new requirements finalized this week only qualify people to serve as funeral directors — they won’t be licensed to do embalming.
That was by design. Embalming in Vermont has become much less common than it once was, according to Palermo.
When Palermo was starting in the industry 40 years ago, the vast majority of funerals were more traditional — involving embalming, a viewing, calling hours and a church service. Now, more than 70% of Vermonters are cremated after they die, according to the Cremation Association of North America.
“It’s sort of a complete flip flop in the types of services you provide,” he said. However, he said he hopes that the state will create a similar qualification program for embalming.
Gabriel Gilman, of the Office of Professional Regulation in the Secretary of State’s Office, said the changing realities of the state’s funeral needs were part of what prompted his office to work with the industry and Community College of Vermont to set up a new way to enter the career.
“In funeral service the issue was really acute because practitioners could see and feel that newcomers were made to go through a training model that many of them don’t really do anymore,” he said.
There are currently 104 licensed funeral directors in Vermont. The Office of Professional Regulation hopes that the new qualification standards will help allow people already working in the industry to advance in their career, without having to go away to attend school, Gilman said.
Consumer protection concerns fueled the adoption of federal regulations related to funeral services. Journalist Jessica Mitford’s 1963 book investigating undertakers, part of which was published in the magazine the Atlantic, helped stir momentum for more oversight of the industry. The state level regulations also ensure that state funeral policies are followed, according to Gilman.
The designers of the new course are hopeful that the lower barriers into the field will both attract young people, who perhaps are just out of high school, as well as people who are midcareer and looking to switch into the field. According to Gilman, many midcareer people with interests in the field come from a background in law enforcement or the military.
There are currently 15 people enrolled in CCV’s new program, according to associate academic dean Candace Lewis.
All of the courses required for the certification, which include business law, psychology, religion and others, were already offered by CCV. That means that there aren’t concerns if enrollment in the program fluctuates, she said.
Lewis said that she was pleased with how the new course came out of collaboration between the college, the Vermont Funeral Director Association and the Office of Professional Regulation, and is hopeful that a similar process can be used to make other adjustments to address Vermont’s workforce.
“It’s representative of some of the creative thinking we need in this state as we work to meet the needs in the workforce,” she said.
Palermo said that there has been some trepidation from some members of the association. Some feel that they put in their dues to get the full qualifications, he said.
Some in the profession said in interviews they were reserving judgment until the new professional regulations went into place. A funeral director in northern Vermont said in a phone interview that he would wait to see how they play out. “I just need to see what comes out of it and go from there,” he said.
However, Palermo said he believes Vermont is taking an innovative approach to addressing a shortage of funeral directors — a problem across the country. More than 1,400 funeral homes closed nationwide over the last decade, according to the National Funeral Directors Association — a 7% decrease.
“I honestly think Vermont is cutting edge in terms of how we’re approaching the problem,” Palermo said.
As a funeral director, Palermo said, one can support people through a difficult and tragic time.
“If your goal is to help people — both the living and the dead — get where they need to go and get where they need to be, this is really a unique way to help people on many levels,” he said.
For Robertson in St. Johnsbury, the opportunity for her to become a licensed funeral director through the new program — she’s just about done with the qualifications — means that her family’s business will be better able to serve the community.
“You can assist people through something that most people don’t even want to think about,” she said.
By Elizabeth Hewitt
