A tenuous collaboration between Vermont’s Republican governor and Democratically controlled Legislature is veering toward an impasse that threatens to crumble their historic education reform framework.
Gov. Phil Scott and Democratic leaders in the House and Senate united last year to pass Act 73, an ambitious blueprint to transform the state’s public schools.
As the Legislature works to operationalize that plan, however, it’s chosen to abandon a key element — forced school district mergers. Many of the same Democratic lawmakers who embraced mandatory consolidation at the beginning of the 2026 legislative session now say it’s a bridge too far.
“The reality is there’s just not a lot of support in Vermont for forced mergers,” Bennington County Sen. Seth Bongartz, the Democratic chair of the Senate Education Committee, said this week.
That assessment, now shared by every key Democrat in the Statehouse, sets the stage for a late-session standoff with Scott, who says he won’t accept any education reform bill that doesn’t include forced mergers. He’s threatened to hold the state budget hostage until lawmakers fulfill his demand. And he said this week that he’s prepared to keep the part-time, citizen Legislature in Montpelier through summer if necessary.
“As long as it takes,” Scott said. “I’m here year-round, so it’s not a big lift for me.”
Act 73
Vermont spends more per-pupil to educate its students than any state in the nation. And its arcane school-financing system has led to deep inequities across district lines.
Act 73 seeks to curb costs and improve quality, first by reforming school governance, and then by giving the state control over spending levels.
The Legislature still wants to move forward with the so-called “foundation formula,” which, starting in fiscal year 2030, would send each school a grant based on the number and needs of its students.
The House and Senate also say Vermont needs to streamline a governance system that relies on 119 districts to educate 74,000 students in about 300 public schools. Instead of forcing districts to merge, however, they’ve opted for voluntary consolidation.
Legislation passed by the House last month, and embraced almost wholesale by the Senate in recent days, requires districts to participate in merger talks. It leaves final decisions about whether or how to consolidate to local communities.
'A bipartisan coalition'
Jason Maulucci, Scott’s director of policy development, said this week that reform won’t work as planned without forced mergers. The foundation formula will significantly reduce funding for certain schools. If those schools aren’t absorbed into larger districts that can pool resources, Maulucci said, they’ll have to “slash” academic offerings.
“Poor districts, oftentimes rural districts, will get left behind,” he said.
Maulucci said Scott has acknowledged that forced mergers may be politically unpopular. He also said it’s unlikely that Democratic leaders will find compromise language that satisfies both their rank-and-file members and the governor.
But Maulucci says most of the 55 Republicans in the House, and the 13 GOP lawmakers in the Senate, are prepared to support an education reform bill that meets the governor’s standards. Scott hopes his pressure will compel House Speaker Jill Krowinski and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth to move forward with legislation that relies on as many or more votes from Republican lawmakers as Democrats.
“If we’re going to do this, it will need to be a bipartisan coalition,” Maulucci said.
'Horrible way to govern'
Scott’s strategy worked last year. Tense negotiations over the bill that became Act 73 stretched well into June. Baruth finally made the decision to move forward with legislation that received more votes from Republicans than Democrats — a majority of his Democratic caucus voted against the legislation.
Baruth said he’s open to doing the same this year, though he remains hopeful Democratic leaders can negotiate a compromise with broader appeal before adjournment, which is tentatively scheduled for May 29.
House Majority Leader Lori Houghton said Thursday that her chamber is prepared to hold out for “something that a majority of our caucus can get behind.”
“We have that goal now,” she said.
That both the House and Senate have landed on an identical construct for governance reform, Houghton said, ought to signal something important to the governor about where Vermonters stand on the issue. That Scott is threatening to hold the state budget hostage until he gets his way, she said, “is a horrible way to govern.”
