I moved to Vermont in 2002, a 25-year-old college freshman trading my Boston apartment for a rural village on the state’s western border. Within days, I met the woman who would become my wife, and a year later, I was a student representative on a task force designing a new program inspired by Vermont’s radically progressive Goddard College. After graduation, marriage, and settling in Vermont, I earned my MFA at Goddard, wrote an experimental novel about Vermont’s secession, and later helped lead a small independent school founded by another Goddard student. Meanwhile, my wife built a nearly twenty-year career as a public school teacher and union rep, and now our child is beginning middle school in the same local system.
For twenty-three years, education in Vermont has been a pillar of our family’s life. We’ve lived through Act 68’s tax reforms, Act 77’s proficiency mandates and flexible pathways, and Act 46’s consolidation of school districts. We’ve witnessed changes to the Education Quality Standards, special education rules, and a growing focus on equity and inclusion—including the ban on discrimination based on hair texture or style. Each shift introduced new challenges, and sometimes, as with the closing of the school I helped lead, real losses.
Through it all, we watched as the state’s legislators and its Agency of Education slowly chipped away at the very principles that made Vermont’s schools unique: local autonomy, educational experimentation, and a deep respect for community wisdom. Now, with the passage of H. 454 in June 2025, it feels less like steady erosion and more like a sledgehammer to the foundation. The Vermont education our state has known—rooted in local character and responsive to local needs—may finally be coming to an end.
The Roots of Vermont’s Educational Difference
In 1869, Vermont became the first state to let small, rural towns without their own high schools send their children at public expense to nonsectarian private schools, even outside Vermont. This “town tuitioning” system, still the oldest public-funded school choice program in the country, allowed independent schools to flourish and turned Vermont into an educational laboratory. You could find schools without walls, schools without grades, schools on ski mountains, storied academies, and one-room schoolhouses, all supported by public dollars.
Vermont’s education was also intensely local. With more school districts per capita than any other state, local voters made decisions at town meetings, not politicians under the golden dome of the capitol. This wasn’t just about educational philosophy; it was a practical response to Vermont’s scattered geography, where necessity bred creativity and small, community-based schools became a cherished part of local life.
The Battle for Fair School Funding
From 1869 to 1987, Vermont’s education system barely changed: local taxes funded local schools or paid tuition to independent ones, with only minor tweaks and new federal mandates. For example, in 1906, Vermont created Supervisory Unions (SUs) to allow some professional oversight (superintendents, teacher supervision) without gutting the power of local school boards. The state approved the appointment of local superintendents, but the school boards retained the real power. For most of the twentieth century, the SUs were administrative overlays that coordinated and cajoled, but they didn’t rule. Local school boards still called the shots.
But by the late ’80s, things shifted. Inflation, rising teacher salaries, and federal requirements had sent costs soaring, while student enrollment dropped by about 15% as the Baby Boomers aged out. Lawmakers faced shrinking student bodies, creaky buildings, and growing inequity between “property rich” and “property poor” towns.
In 1987, to address the nationwide call for educational equity, the legislature enacted the Foundation Aid Program, which tried to guarantee every child in Vermont with a basic education, no matter their ZIP code. But while the state helped poorer towns reach a baseline, wealthier towns could still spend more than the foundation amount. In other words, the gap between rich and poor still persisted.
In 1997, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled in Brigham v. State of Vermont that the state’s reliance on local property taxes to fund public education created unconstitutional disparities between school districts. The Court found that this system “deprives children of an equal educational opportunity in violation of the Vermont Constitution,” emphasizing that education is “a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.”
The case was brought by students, property owners, and school districts from property-poor towns who argued that the system denied students equal opportunities and forced higher tax rates on less wealthy communities. The Court noted that, despite the Foundation Aid formula’s intent to ensure a “minimally adequate education,” some districts spent more than twice as much per student as others, and property-rich towns could tax less while spending more.
Crucially, the Court addressed the state’s main defense: “The principal rationale offered by the State in support of the current financing system is the laudable goal of local control. Individual school districts may well be in the best position to decide whom to hire, how to structure their educational offerings, and how to resolve other issues of a local nature. The State has not explained, however, why the current funding system is necessary to foster local control. Regardless of how the State finances public education, it may still leave the basic decision-making power with the local districts.”
Ultimately, the Court concluded that Vermont cannot permit a system where “educational opportunity is necessarily a function of district wealth.” The remedy was left to the legislature, but the constitutional requirement was clear: Vermont must ensure “substantial equality of educational opportunity throughout” the state.
Gold Towns: Redistributing the Wealth
In response to the Court’s decision in Brigham v. State of Vermont, the legislature passed Act 60. This was the pivot point for Vermont’s move away from hundreds of hyper-local schools into one shared system. While the Foundation Aid Program recognized the state’s responsibility to ensure a minimally-adequate education for every child, Brigham v. State of Vermont and its consequence, Act 60, forced Vermonters to face an uncomfortable truth: local wealth could not dictate educational opportunity.
The formula Act 60 used was complex, but it worked like this. Vermont’s education funding went into a single, giant pot (“the sharing pool”). Each town collected its property taxes, but all the money went into the pot. The money came from “homestead” properties (i.e., where people live) and “non-homestead” properties (second homes, businesses, etc.). Next, each local school district set and voted on its budget. The legislature set a base amount per pupil that districts had to meet, but a district could spend more per student if they wanted to. If a district voted to spend more than the base amount, they paid a higher tax rate on their homesteads for the privilege (non-homestead tax rates were uniform statewide, but the money still ended up in the sharing pool).
This was the key: the state used a complex formula to ensure that towns who voted to spend the same amount per student paid the same homestead tax rate, no matter how rich or poor their property base was. The state then calculated how much each district needed to cover its voter-approved budget on an “equalized-pupil count.” The equalized-pupil concept was another formula to address the reality that not every student costs the same to educate; as a result, the “equalized pupil” count was often higher than a school’s actual headcount, a measure of need, not noses.
For all its bureaucratic nightmares, the system was a radical act of collective responsibility. It was Vermont’s way of saying, “We’re all in this together, and your kid’s education matters as much as mine, even if you live in a trailer deep in the woods on the other side of the mountain.” At the same time, the state said to each school district, “Hey, you asked for this, you voted for it, and your representatives designed the system to make sure you get it—no matter how rich or poor your town is. And if you want to spend more than the state’s base amount, your tax rate goes up accordingly.”
To the gold towns, however, it felt like a mugging a broad daylight. The ski resort havens and property-rich havens along Lake Champlain or within comfortable driving distance from New York City and New Jersey saw their money siphoned away from their communities to fund schools in places their kids would never set foot. Property owners in Stowe, Killington, and Manchester were now writing checks not just for their own kids, but for every kid in the state.
In other words, the state mined the gold towns to finance their scheme for an equitable education.
But to many Vermonters, the lawsuits, the angry town meetings, the threats of gold-town secessions, it all just meant the system was working. The rich were learning that “community” means more than gossiping at the farmer’s market down the dirt road from their five-bedroom, seven-acre estate with views of the Green Mountains and the babble of a brook. It also meant supporting the notion found in the Vermont constitution that says, “Your zip code doesn’t get to decide your destiny.”
Money is Gonna Power
Regardless of how many Vermonters felt, the gold towns didn’t go away quietly, so in 2003, the legislature attempted to give them a political sedative with Act 68. With Act 68, the money a town received from the state stayed the same, but now a town could raise extra money without sending all of it into the sharing pool. If a gold town wanted to spend more, it could, and it would pay a higher tax rate, but it could also keep more of that money in their home district.
However, Act 68 also slapped a penalty on districts that spent more than 25% above the statewide average per pupil. For every dollar a district spent above that threshold, the district had to send an extra dollar to the state. This was Vermont saying to the gold town, “Hey, you can be extravagant if you want, but you’ll pay dearly for it.”
Act 68 also expanded its income sensitivity to protect lower- and middle-income homeowners from crushing property taxes. The gold towns still bitched, but they stopped calling for votes on secession and there were fewer pitchforks at town meetings.
Later, Act 130 smoothed out some of the rules and cleared some of the lines, but it didn’t adjust the basic concept.
Local Control Isn’t Real Anyway, Right?
In 2010, Vermont continued to struggle with declining enrollments, rising costs, and administrative overload. Some of the school districts were teeny tiny, and yet they all had their own school boards, budgets, and administrators. While Vermont’s system had always allowed this patchwork of fiercely independent districts, many legislators saw it as a logistical and financial nightmare.
Rural areas were running schools built over a century ago, and though they had fewer students, they had the same number of buildings, boards, and staff. Superintendents had to attend dozens of board meetings a month and manage multiple contracts; they had too many bosses and not enough time for actual educational leadership.
The Feds weren’t helping. With special education mandates, accountability mandates, food service mandates, transportation mandates, etc., local boards were already losing real control anyway. The existing system merely pacified voters with the illusion of autonomy.
Meanwhile, property taxes were climbing and taxpayers were getting restless. It started looking like Vermont was running hundreds of boutique educational systems when 21st century economics demanded big-box efficiency.
Enter Act 153, the state’s bureaucratic nudge to local voters that Montpelier was growing impatient with the messiness of local control. The logic was simple: the state would “encourage” small districts to merge into larger, more rationally sized units, which would help them same money, streamline governance, and hey!, maybe even improve outcomes. As encouragement, the state offered tax incentives and grants for any districted that voluntarily consolidated.
If Act 153 was a gentle nudge, Act 156 was a slightly firmer nudge. Passed two years later, it tweaked Act 153 to make easier for districts to merge even if not all of the towns in a supervisory union wanted to join, and it created new merger models so even partial mergers could still get incentives. Acts 153 and 156 were the carrots.
Act 46 was the stick. Passed in 2015, it made consolidation all but mandatory. Either districts merged voluntarily (with incentives) or the state would do it for them (without incentives).
Prior to these three acts (FY 2013), there were 276 school districts in Vermont. By the time the state fully implemented the consolidations laws (FY 2020), there were 120. Today, there are 119.
Each step — Act 153, Act 156, and Act 46 — took Vermont education further away from the wild, fractal democracy of the state’s roots and closer to the efficient, rational, bureaucratically managed future.
The Fall Out From Consolidation
These three acts didn’t just result in school governance reform. They created slow-motion heartbreaks for what made Vermont unique. From the founding of the Republic of Vermont, the state valued local, direct democracy: communities coming together to determine for themselves how their society would run. But when these acts consolidated hundreds of local school boards into a handful of regional ones, they removed the most accessible rung of Vermont’s civic ladder. For generations, school boards had served as the training ground for ordinary people to step into public life, but now there was a 56% reduction in the number of school board seats.
Representation also shrank. My neighbor used to be my local school board member. She’d be out weeding her front garden and I’d be walking by with my dog, and we’d chat about how our town might implement some new mandate from the Feds. But once consolidation happened, most Vermonters can’t even tell you who sits on their boards. Their “representatives” might live 40 miles away and their school’s fate could be decided by people who wouldn’t recognize a single one of its students. Smaller schools, especially in rural areas, are outnumbered and outvoted, their unique needs and desires diluted into the regional stew.
And then there’s Town Meeting Day. Consolidation can’t take the sole blame for the loss of town meeting day’s civic energy, but school budgets often sat at the center of this ritual. With decisions now made at the regional level, the annual debates became quieter, less urgent, and less meaningful. Government became more of a “them” thing and less of an “us” thing.
Consolidation also reduced the educational experimentation that the localized system allowed. The number of tuitioning towns dwindled thanks to the mergers, which destroyed the wild ecology of independent schools; additionally, weirdos in one town now had to deal with the Squares in the rest of the district, preventing them from trying something different.
And of course, the promised cost savings didn’t show up. Merged districts that saved on administrative costs reinvested those savings in new programs or staff, making the tax relief elusive. Plus, the real drivers of educational cost—healthcare, special education, and declining enrollment—remained unsolved.
Which Brings Us To This Week
On June 16, the Vermont legislature, in collaboration with the state’s governor, passed H.454: An act relating to transforming Vermont’s education governance, quality, and finance systems (which, I should note, was introduced into the House by my own state representative and the House minority leader, Rep. Patricia McKoy (Rep)). It’s over 150 pages and touches on everything from school district boundaries and funding formulas to property tax exemptions and regional assessment districts.
Nearly 30 years after Brigham vs. State of Vermont, it is the legislature’s latest attempt to create a stable, predictable system “where a student’s address does not dictate the quality of education they receive.”
What The New Bill Does (Sans My Editorial)
It includes a massive reorganization that shrinks the 119 school districts into much larger ones, limiting them in size from a minimum of 4,000 and a maximum of 8,000 students (PreK through 12th grade). The final number will be designed by a task force and voted on by the legislature in the near future.
It imposes minimum class sizes per grade band: Kindergarten and first grade must have a minimum of 10 students; second through fifth grade must have 12 students; sixth through eight must have 15 students; and ninth through twelfth must have 18. This includes required content area for middle and high-school students (i.e., a seventh-grade English class must have a minimum of 15 students in it; for comparison, my local school’s seventh-grade English class had a maximum of seven students this year). Schools with multi-age classrooms must limit it to two grades per classroom.
It forbids towns from closing a public school just to send their kids to an independent school with public dollars.
It gives the State Board and Agency of Education far more authority, including the ability close schools, redraw boundaries, and even take over budgets if local districts don’t comply with the state’s interpretation of “quality standards.”
It centralizes school construction by establishing a new program, new advisory boards, and special funds for modernization.
It commissions new reports on special education and special-education delivery, including oversight of independent of therapeutic schools.
And, of course, it compels a deep re-examination and overhaul of education finance, including spending caps, tax structure, and new rules for independent school tuition.
Most of these changes phase in over several years, with the full force of the bill coming only by July 2029.
The New Foundation Formula
And then, of course, there’s the reconfigured method to pay for all this cost-saving centralization.
It starts with a base amount per student: $15,033 (to be adjusted for inflation).
Next, it adds in some weights for students who are:
- From low-income families
- English-language learners
- Diagnosed with a disability (different weights for different disabilities)
- In a small school
- At a certain grade level (high-school students may get a higher weight than a kindergartner, for example)
It multiplies the weighted student count by the base amount to get the “Educational Opportunity Payment” that the district will receive from the state.
If a district wants to spend more than that, it can, but the spending is capped and subject to a higher, local rate (now called the “supplemental district spending tax”).
The New Funding Source
Prior to H. 454, the old town-by-town property tax rate is replaced by a single, statewide education property tax. The state sets a uniform property tax rate for all homestead and non-homestead properties. This rate will cover the cost of the “educational opportunity payments” made to every district. Towns will no longer set their own rates based on their school budgets; the state will do it based on the total costs dictated by the foundation formula.
The supplemental district spending tax mentioned above is separate, higher, and applies only to the extra spending (e.g., it’s not related to property). There’s also a hard cap on this supplemental spending, and if a district goes over, the state captures the excess and distributes it across the state.
It also includes protections for lower- and middle-income families, a slide-scale reduction in their taxable property value, helping to keep the taxes progressive.
There are a few other sources as well to help keep property taxes down: state sales tax, rooms & meal tax, the state lottery, etc.
In short, H. 454 moves Vermont from a patchwork of local tax rates to a single, statewide act of unity.
Time for the Editorial
I don’t have an issue with the new foundation formula or the new statewide funding source.
However, I do have a problem with nearly every lever of educational control being transferred to political technocrats and their appointed advisory committees. The introduction to the bill harkens back to the need for equity, but what Representative McCoy and others have done is translated “equity” into standardization.
Minimum class sizes, for example, ignore local conditions or unique educational philosophies (not to mention best practices), forcing rural and experimental schools, which have historically been small and nimble, to merge, close, or fundamentally change. The minimum class-size mandate is really a small school death warrant.
The bill also standardizes governance, finance, and data collection and reporting, backed up by tri-annual reviews and potential state intervention. School districts that don’t satisfy the state’s standards could face mandatory restructuring or even closure by the Agency of Education. Local residents voting at town meeting used control these features, but now state-appointed commissions hold the final say.
Those commissions, by the way, are loaded with state officials and institutional players. They don’t include teachers, parents, students, or grassroots community members. They include current and former politicians, governor-appointed bureaucrats, and interest-group lawyers.
The winners in this bill are state agencies, large districts, technocratic commissioners, and big contractors who will profit from new, centrally controlled construction and merger projects. The losers are small towns, rural communities, unique school programs, and anyone who thinks education should be democratically controlled and locally responsive.
The legislators can couch their bullying with progressive language about equity, but the system designed by this bill is cold, technocratic, and obsessed with scale and efficiency. It will result in closed schools, fired teachers, and rural kids getting on 90 minute bus rides that take them far from their neighborhoods and homes.
This is the point at which “Vermont” education ends.