Vermont could spend $400 to $460 million less on its schools and get better outcomes for students — if schools and districts were configured in radically different ways. That's according to a new report, released Tuesday, commissioned by the Vermont Legislature.
The study, conducted by Picus Odden & Associates, is largely a theoretical exercise. But it is likely to strengthen the case for some measure of consolidation as decision-makers in Montpelier contemplate overhauls to bend the cost curve in Vermont’s pre-K-12 system.
“It is a policy choice to maintain a certain number of school districts and buildings, and this decision influences overall costs,” the third-party consultants wrote in the report’s conclusion. “Vermont’s current structure with many small schools and school districts likely results in higher costs that are not fully addressed in this analysis.”
Vermont’s schools are grappling with dwindling enrollments and a slew of inflationary pressures, including the rapidly rising cost of health care, aging and neglected facilities, and special education. Debates over double-digit spikes in property taxes dominated the most recent legislative session, and lawmakers have made clear they have a mandate for change.
A Commission on the Future of Public Education was created by the Legislature to explore potential reforms, and it is expected to deliver one set of short-term recommendations as soon as this December. Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, a Democrat who sits on the panel, emphasized that this latest study was not a blueprint for action — but she said it would inform the work ahead.
“This report is not a policy proposal. It is not a bill,” Kornheiser said. “It is further information that we have available to do the really difficult and collaborative work of understanding what kind of education system we want in Vermont.”
The modeling presented by researchers in the 133-page report is grounded in academic literature and departs, in dramatic ways, from the present landscape in Vermont.
Ideally, according to the report, every school district would oversee 3,900 students apiece. According to a state education profile compiled by the Agency of Education in Vermont, only four school districts in the entire state had at least 3,000 students in 2023. The report also recommends class sizes of 15 students in pre-K through 3rd grade, and 25 students per class in the upper grades — far more than is typical in Vermont, which has one of the lowest staff-to-student ratios in the nation.
“Each piece of this study contains certain assumptions. That's what academic studies do, and each of those assumptions is a policy decision. And so having assumptions laid out like this in a report sometimes brings clarity to what policy decisions might need to be made or not made going forward,” Kornheiser said.
The study is sure to draw pushback. Don Tinney, the president of the Vermont-NEA, the state’s teachers union, called the conclusions of the study “absurd,” and a “distraction from that real conversation that needs to happen around how we fund education.”
And he argued, as he has before, that he did not believe Vermont was spending too much on schools. Lawmakers, he said, need to focus on transitioning to an entirely income, and not property-based, system for funding schools.
“If you're going to talk about consolidation, you really have to get into the weeds of it. And I'm not sure that that can be done with this type of report,” he said.
Read what Vermont candidates are saying about education property taxes this year in Vermont Public's guide:
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