If Only: We Could Reshape Our School System Without Losing Vermont's Vermontiness
Spoiler: we can. Also, non-Vermonters should read this; it may apply to your state's education system before you can say "DonElon Trusk".
Right now, the Vermont legislature and Gov. Phil Scott are busy exploring ways to restructure our public schools and mechanisms for school funding. (And if you’re not a Vermonter, don’t stop reading just yet - this issue may well apply to you soon since Trump plans to shutter the Department of Education.)
As you might imagine, I have plenty of thoughts on this - not all of them positive, but not all of them negative. I’m a former educator, a current working-class Vermont taxpayer, and my special interests are Vermont and utopias. If you know me, you know that I don’t complain without offering constructive, solutions-based support along with that complaint. So, with these things in mind, let’s explore the issue at hand through the lens of my worst fear - school consolidation eroding Vermont's Vermontiness. And of course, let’s talk solutions. I’ll share mine, and I’d love it if you share yours, too, via the comments section.
Here in our Brave Little State, lawmakers are wrestling with rising property taxes (a primary funding mechanism for our schools), soaring health insurance premiums (a primary driver of increased school expenses), and the skyrocketing cost of living (a primary pain in my working-class ass). All of these increases are resulting in decreased economic power for Vermont’s education system - and it’s squeezing taxpayer wallets, cherished communities, and beloved schools bone dry. Someone is profiting from this squeeze…and we know it isn’t Vermont schools, Vermont communities, or Vermont taxpayers. So, then, why is it that proposals for how to address school funding feel like punishment for our schools and communities rather than solutions that strike at the heart of why things have gotten so damned expensive? Our schools are an essential aspect of our unique community culture, and that community culture is a key component - perhaps THE key component - of our state culture.
The legislature’s stated goal is to make our education system more cost-efficient (i.e., more financially sustainable without further tax increases). This is incredibly important in a time when every dollar counts and an even bleaker economic picture is steadily coming into focus for 90+% of Americans. Who wouldn’t want better cost efficiency for our schools and more money in taxpayers’ pockets…right? No arguments there…or at least, not many.
So, we want it, and we need it…but how do we get it? Proposals range from consolidating schools (no doubt closing many in the process) to revamping funding models, as seen in recent insights reported by some of our most beloved local media institutions: VTDigger, Seven Days VT, and Vermont Public Radio.
But as we undertake the daunting task of a potential total redesign of our entire state educational system - funding, school infrastructure, curriculum, all of it - we must ask: at what cost to our students, to our teachers, and to the very essence of what makes Vermont…Vermont?
When we fundamentally change public education systems, we’re not simply altering buildings or curricula or where the money comes from—we’re reshaping the future of Vermont’s culture. Any culture is the combination of three things: its people, its environment, and its methods of sustaining knowledge and tradition. We need to take this reality seriously as we redesign our educational system—one of our methods for sustaining knowledge and tradition. Why? Because whether we like it or not, we will in effect also be redesigning our environment and our people - the other two components of our culture - even if we don’t see the effects for a generation or two.
My greatest fears regarding Vermont’s education reform are the negative effects of mass-scale consolidation, as seen in the five-district model proposed by Gov. Phil Scott. Consolidation - especially at serious scale - almost always results in standardization. There are benefits to standardization, sure. However, in my humble but correct opinion, there are many scenarios where the benefits of standardization do not outweigh the costs. To understand my thinking here - and to remove the emotional element of Vermont’s children, teachers, and schools - let’s use an analogous model that Vermont is well-known for: the manufacturing of craftsman goods - specifically, craftsman-made goods versus factory-made goods.
Imagine that Vermont’s 287 public schools are independent craftsman guilds—each one a living repository of knowledge, experience, community, mutual aid, connection, passion, skill, and tradition. They each serve their communities in ways that expand well beyond the bounds of craft goods production. Generations of master craftsmen have loyally, lovingly cycled through those guild halls and in their respective eras, they have produced fine, heirloom-quality goods that are very useful and beautiful in our world, and cherished by all who have used them.
Now imagine that the guild halls and all the tools within them had fallen into disrepair over the years as increasing maintenance costs prevented the guild halls from being well-maintained. The craftsmen themselves have become less healthy as physicians have become few and far between and more expensive than ever to see - a reality owed to a trend of highway robbers taking vast sums of money earmarked for the physicians’ treatment of the craftsmen. Additionally, a dwindling workforce was gutting the guild halls’ ability to provide the quality of goods it once did; demand for the goods continued to rise and demand must be met! - but there were fewer craftsmen who were skilled enough to produce these fine goods with each passing year. Knowing that they had to churn out a greater quantity of lower-quality goods stole the essential spirit and identity of the profession from these craftsmen, and ensured they would never actually be able to exercise their craft to its highest end - and so they grew to feel (understandably) disconnected from their work. This and stagnant wages were driving people away from the once-noble professions of craftsmanship. The master craftsmen who were still there were subject to ever more rules and regulations that didn’t actually support the goal of creating the best possible goods - they only ensured a high volume of mostly-not-awful goods would be made each year. Many master craftsmen were even being harassed by foresters, stonecutters, and sheep farmers - the people from whom they sourced their raw materials. On what grounds? That these providers - not the master craftsmen - knew best how to shape wood, stone, and wool into the finished forms of fine goods. Ha! These folks had been sending progressively more temperamental raw goods to the craftsmen for years: knotty wood; stone that fractured at the slightest stray tap; wool full of burdock burrs that they swore weren’t there upon delivery. Though the craftsmen never once actually believed these material providers (as well they shouldn’t), they were nonetheless held responsible for quality of the final craft goods produced - knots, fractures, and burrs notwithstanding. Worse yet, in the midst of all of this, many non-craftsmen citizens had come to resent and distrust craftsmen and their guilds. Many neighbors who once broke bread together no longer shared kind words - much less a table - because the state’s mechanism for funding guild hall upkeep, craftsmen’s salaries, physician visits, and the purchase of raw materials was to tax the farms and homes of their neighbors…sometimes so much so that people had to sell their farms and leave their ancestral homes, or at least let them lapse into the same heartbreaking disrepair as the guild halls themselves.
Everyone was hurting; no one - no one - was able to grasp the quality of life they ought to have. The craftsmen understandably began to lose sight of why they had become master craftsmen in the first place.
In the midst of this expensive, expansive malaise, the state’s Agency of Craftsmen worked with elected officials to put together a plan for addressing the issue as they saw it. This isn’t to say they were wrong about the crux of the issue: how the ever-rising guild care costs and the understandably diminished quality of craftsmen’s quota-driven output was sustainable for no one: not the craftsmen, the guild halls, the state’s citizens, the craft goods, nor even the profession of craftsmanship itself. This was a reality that nearly everyone agreed on. Which root causes of the issue to fight against, though, was where the Agency of Craftsmen, the communities surrounding the guild halls, the elected officials, and the craftsmen themselves diverged.
In an effort at solving this manifold problem, the the Agency of Craftsmen could have worked with other Agencies to end the reign of highway bandits stealing coin meant to pay for craftsmen’s medical care. They could have found a way to fund the guilds without draining the already-modest coffers of neighbors, perhaps instead by levying taxes on the summer castles of the gentry and the vast fallow treasuries that they kept stored within. They could have kept more money in the guild coffers by consolidating not guild halls or craftsmen, but the large number non-craftsman workers that supported every guild hall. Heck, perhaps the craftsman guild halls could even once again become vibrant resources for their communities by sharing underutilized workshop space with other types of guilds that shared common interests with them, and thereby gain partners in guild hall upkeep.
But instead, the Agency of Craftsmen proposed something they felt was a much simpler and less risky solution, albeit still very complicated for all involved: they would merge all of the guild halls and their craftsmen into just five vast factory clusters for the whole state, with a small number (TBD) of factories in each. No more guild halls serving each community and able to provide responsive, connected, quality attention to their craft - now, the majority of these craftsmen would travel well outside of their communities to go work in a factory, where they suspected they’d be spending long days making plastic facsimiles of the fine goods they used to make. The highway bandits would still be at large, their greed going unpunished; the gentry would still hold their vast estates & treasuries while everyday citizens’ houses and coffers deteriorated; the expensive non-craftsman workers responsible for monitoring guilds would still get their fat purses delivered on schedule…but the guild halls would be drastically consolidated as a means of working around those issues rather than through them. This would almost certainly result in the number of craftsmen being reduced, too - even though that smaller number of them would still be expected to produce the same amount of goods each year, and at the same level of quality.
What could possibly go wrong?
End scene. Now, back to the not dystopian-Medieval-era allegories.
In those cherished guild halls mentioned above, every craftsman could infuse their work with pride, quality, and the utmost care for the materials given to them. They could be nimble, responding to unique material properties as needed. What they produced had the capability of being the definition of excellence - if the craftsman was truly a master craftsman, and wasn’t harried by too-high quotas, crumbling guild halls, empty personal coffers, and intractable raw materials. And when a guild hall flourished and saw itself as truly part of the community, the whole community around it flourished as well. This quality of community and craft output comes at a cost, yes, but the outcome produces something enduring, unmatched, and deeply beloved - both in terms of the craft goods produced and in terms of the community value.
In a factory setting, however, quality of craft and community connection aren’t the goal; standardization, economic margins, and efficiency are. Personalized craftsmanship is replaced by uniformity; creativity is stifled by rigidity; and the unique character of every product dissolves into mass-produced sameness. If someone needs a wooden ladle, too bad - they’re getting a plastic one.
Standardization also brings undeniable benefits—streamlined processes, repeatable quality, cost savings, and the convenience of replacing any semi-qualified worker with another one when turnover occurs. Yet, these advantages come at a steep cost. When we design an education system like a consolidated factory, we are not merely optimizing production; we run the risk of treating our beloved institutions like assembly lines and our students like mass-produced products. No Vermonter is naïve enough to believe that consolidating 287 vibrant guilds into a few handfuls of factory units will preserve the artisanal soul that defines our state.
Applied to our schools, this guild hall vs. factory metaphor makes the stakes painfully clear. Overhauling our education system into a depersonalized, standardized model risks transforming our schools into vast production lines that churn out students measured solely by test scores and performance metrics. In such a system, students are even more likely to be lost in a haze of disconnection, discontent, and surface-level learning. I do not say this lightly: that kind of environment is a breeding ground for school violence and extremist ideology (more on this later). In addition to factory-esque systems failing our students, our teachers could likely be even further reduced to feeling like underpaid cogs in a lackluster machine—stripped of the intellectual, professional, and creative autonomy that once defined the profession and produced generations of students who grew up to be economists that could grow a tomato and plumbers who could write poetry.
But all is not lost for Vermont’s education system. I believe there is a middle ground—or rather, several collaborative solutions that could get us to a middle ground. And that middle ground could even be beneficial to Vermont’s small communities - and the students (and rest of us) who inhabit them.
Viable Solutions…Perhaps.
Cluster Schools with Local Autonomy:
Instead of shuttering schools through blanket consolidation into five geographically-massive districts, consider forming less-vast regional clusters that share higher-cost resources while retaining local-ish governance and connected community identity. This model would deliver cost savings without sacrificing the personal, community-driven spirit of Vermont education. It could also save on some transportation costs - and precious student & teacher hours spent commuting - that would be inherent to larger districts with fewer schools.
(For more on proposals in this vein, see discussions on Vermont Public News and the Vermont Department of Education report.)Flexible Curriculum with Emphasis on Trust-Based Teacher Autonomy:
Rather than trying to impose a one-size-fits-all curriculum within one-size-fits-all schools (two things that don’t exist), grant individual schools the flexibility to fulfill agreed-upon macro-standards through teacher-customized curriculum. This would empower teachers to design classes and lessons that resonate with hyper-local culture, their areas of excellence & focus, and their students’ interests and needs. This would foster both genuine academic engagement from students and enhanced faculty wellbeing.
…of course, this relies on being able to unequivocally trust your teachers - which means recruiting top-notch educators…which means being able to pay your educators a living wage. According to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, a Vermont teacher with two children would need to make $43.99/hour - the equivalent of $91,499/year - to make an actual living wage for Vermont (unless they have a spouse with a full-time job). I’ve said many times that I’ll return to teaching when pigs fly, but I take it back - I’ll return to teaching when pigs fly OR when a Vermont school offers me $90k/year (and yes, I’m worth it). Pigs will fly first, I’m sure. The only position I’ve seriously explored since moving here offered me half of that.Reining in Health Insurance Costs via a Revived, Revised Act 48:
A significant part of managing education system and taxpayer expenses is addressing the rising cost of providing healthcare. Let’s not mince words here: even “not-for-profit” health insurance companies pay their C-suite and V-suite robber-baron salaries, and they do so at the cost of Vermont’s teachers, students, and taxpayers. Reviving a modernized, sustainable version of Act 48 - essentially a state healthcare model that hoped to integrate physical health, mental health, & social services - could reduce health insurance costs for both school districts and Vermont taxpayers.
Bonus: a sustainable, state-run healthcare model that incorporates physical, mental, and social health could assuage some of the issues that schools are expected to be a panacea for (mental health, homelessness, hunger, etc.) And hell, if I have more money in my pocket because I’m not paying BCBSVT over $12K/year in premiums, I honestly don’t mind giving some more of that money to schools.
For context on local discussions, see WCAX News.Robust Partnerships with Local Businesses, Nonprofits, & Community Mutual Aid Orgs:
Guide schools in building long-term partnerships with local businesses and community organizations. Think of each school as the center of a public-private Innovation District. This could take the form of direct funding, in-kind donations, and/or sharing physical infrastructure. Such alliances can create mentorship programs and internships that can make education feel more personalized and more directly meaningful for students - a dire need if more factory-esque vibes become part of Vermont school culture. Sharing physical infrastructure with nonprofits, co-working spaces, other small non-storefront businesses, and/or mutual aid orgs could enrich educational experiences while providing supplemental funding for school physical maintenance or related extracurricular programs. This collaborative model would also keep schools deeply embedded in the community’s cultural fabric. If every current school building has the capacity to become a sort of community center or multi-use hub - especially for towns that don’t have a proper one - then that shared infrastructure also becomes a point of shared cost and increased revenue.Targeted Revenue Through Specific Earmarked Taxes or Fees:
Rather than raising property taxes, Vermont might consider implementing targeted taxes that directly support education. For instance, a small surcharge on luxury goods or a one-cent-per-transaction tax - specifically earmarked for schools and distributed from a statewide pot - could provide a steady, not-insignificant revenue stream. This measure could ensure that people who profit from our well-educated, vibrant communities contribute directly to sustaining them, but in a less painful way than we do now.Enhanced Digital Infrastructure for Shared Services:
Even as we strive to preserve small-scale, in-person interactions, we can still leverage digital tools and shared digital services to cut costs where they don’t compromise individualized school cultures and direct instruction. Imagine a state-wide digital platform that enables individual teachers and their schools to share curricula, administrative tools, and professional development resources across the state. We could also consolidate IT support, network management, and tech-based facilities services into more efficient, less redundant macro-district models. By centralizing these non-instructional functions, we could reduce redundant costs while allowing each school to retain its individuality in the classroom and the community. This “back office” efficiency—managed collectively rather than individually—could significantly lower overhead without turning our schools into the impersonal factories that occupy so many states across America.Centralized Procurement and Supply Chain Management:
Consolidating purchasing, distribution, and inventory management for educational materials, supplies, maintenance equipment, and food for schools could drive down costs through bulk purchasing and resource-sharing. With a coordinated approach, schools could avoid the inefficiencies and higher prices that come with handling procurement individually or by supervisory union (for any non-Vermonters, this is essentially a school district). I’ve read stories of individual schools purchasing organic milk in bulk from a local farm. That’s great - I love supporting our small farms - but what if we created consolidated macro-districts specifically in terms of procurement and supply chain management (rather than instruction)? A more stable macro-district budget could offer more reliable recurring revenue to local farmers and in turn, the bulk-ier purchasing managed by the macro-district could enjoy more favorable prices per unit for farm-produced goods. This could be a win-win for our communities and our school budget in a time of skyrocketing food prices (especially for actually-healthy food) and perennially tight farm margins.District-Level Student Services and Extracurricular Coordination:
This is a double-edged sword and it certainly wouldn’t work for all student services and extracurriculars, but it could work for some of them. Functions such as counseling, extracurricular coordination, and mayyyybe intensive English language instruction for ESL students could be managed centrally by a district that serves multiple schools - more than they do now, but not so many that the folks filling these roles feel ineffective or spread thin. This approach could allow for more specialized staff who can focus on developing and following best practices and ensuring that students receive high-quality support when they need it—without each school having to bear the full cost of these services when they’re not necessarily using those services full time. This could potentially work well for extracurricular activities like sports as well. In this same breath, though, I’d like to note that just because a given role might only be part-time at a given school or district does not mean that that role should be offered in a part-time-only capacity (i.e., 0.5 FTE and sans benefits) - nor should the person in that role be expected to shoulder the financial and existential cost of a massive commute between schools or districts. If you’re going to fracture a role between schools, you cannot expect the person filling that role to further fracture their professional life by finding other work AND being the dedicated, high-quality provider that all students deserve. Do not ask someone who is an ESL teacher for half of their weekdays to also work the fryer at McDonald’s.Centralized, Streamlined Administrative Offices.
Instead of maintaining separate administrative teams at every small school, newly-enlarged (but not TOO-enlarged) districts could establish a centralized office for functions like HR, payroll, data reporting - and yes, those very expensive admin roles like superintendents. Around this time last year, there was a superintendent-salary-related kerfuffle down in Hartford, VT. Reporting on the issue shows that Hartford’s fiscal year ’25 school budget included $218,000 in salary and benefits for the new superintendent. That’s almost 3.5x the salary of the average Vermont teacher, according to the most recent official data I can find. Fewer superintendents and similarly budget-bloating personnel = lower costs for taxpayers and more money for actually-living-wage teacher salaries.
Additionally, research from the RAND Corporation has shown that streamlined administrative structures can reduce overhead while preserving—or even enhancing—school performance as long as classroom instruction itself remains as individualized as possible.
As you can see, our challenge here in Vermont is not simply one of balancing budgets, chopping costs, or enhancing efficiency—it’s also about preserving the unique, community-centric, craftsman-quality culture that makes Vermont so extraordinary. This is not just a way of organizing schools - it is a way of life. As property taxes, health insurance premiums, and other living costs continue to rise, we must innovate in ways that safeguard our students, our educators, and the soul of our communities while also safeguarding our ability to afford living in Vermont. The solutions outlined above represent what I think are viable strategies that address both the symptoms and the root causes of our education system’s challenges. I hope that Vermont’s legislators will consider some of these approaches - especially the ones that don't punish Vermont’s schools, educators, & communities for the effects of greedy people who don’t give a damn always getting their way.
In the end, reimagining our education system isn’t simply about shifting budgets or rearranging buildings—whether we like it or not, it’s about reconfiguring a key thread in the fabric of Vermont’s culture. As we’ve explored, our schools are not isolated institutions; they are integral to sustaining our people, our environment, and the unique ways we pass down knowledge and tradition. When we change public education systems, we are, in effect, redesigning our culture, our future, our communities, and the legacy we leave for generations to come—even if the full impact of this redesign isn’t visible for a generation or two.
Thank you for reading this edition of To Be a Good Vermonter. If you share these values, consider subscribing, sharing, and joining the conversation.
Warmly,
Jack